I’ll bet the Labour Party is really annoyed about this.

The Gurkhas, after fighting their way through insane and dishonourable legislation have won the right to settle in the land for which they have fought and died for over 200 years. Their military history is one of sacrifice, bravery and honour in spite of the attitudes that were so prevalent among many of the officer class.

Only a Labour government, you know, the one that says anybody can go to Britain and sponge off the state Social Security system, could ever have decided that loyal servants of the Crown should not be  granted that most civil of all rights, the right to live in the land they served.

It is a great shame that these loyal warriors should have been so badly treated and I only hope that when they do settle, they will not find cause to regret their decision – after all, we know how spiteful governments can be. (If you are British and have lived outside the islands for more than six months, try going back there and getting assistance of any sort.)

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Tags: dishonourable governements, gurkhas, Stupidity

Where did Time Share go so wrong?

The Time Share industry in Europe seems to have gone hopelessly wrong over the years because of the greed of promoters.

The basic idea of Time Share is very sound and an attractive proposition – giving people the benefit of holidays in 5 star, usually self catering, accommodation.

To start with, the accommodation was at a single resort for a particular week of accupancy – a fixed week. In effect, the Time Share owner bought the right to occupy a particular apartment in a particular week (or multiple weeks) and was safe in the knowledge that he would never, under normal circumstances, find that his apartment was not available to him.

It did not take long before Time Share owners started informally exchanging the weeks that they owned so that they could visit other resorts. Eventually RCI and II came about to make the exchanges much easier to do. They published a catalogue of weeks that were available and carried out the exchanges, at a small fee, for the owners.

This situation lasted for quite a few years but then the Time Share organisations started to run out of weeks to sell. Each unit of accommodation can only be sold, on a fixed week basis, 50 or 51 times in a year, allowing for a week or two for maintenance, and once this had been achieved the very efficient sales organisations started to work out ways to be able to sell units more times than there were weeks available.

The solution was very simple and, in its way, elegant. They decided that since not every unit was occupied every week of the year, there was some slack in the system so why not remove the restriction on when and what unit to occupy. Why not give the owner a ‘floating’ week?

On the face of it this seems a good deal for the owner since he is not strictly limited as to his time for his holiday but there is a price to pay for this flexibility. The Time Share owner actually no longer owns any exclusive rights to ‘his’ unit – not only that, he foregoes the benefit of the guarantee that a unit will be available for him when he wants it.

The benefit for the sales organisations was immedite – they no longer had any restrictions upon how many times they could sell the same unit. With no guarantee, the owners would have to take whatever was available at the time they chose to go on holiday. Not only did the sales organisations make a killing selling weeks that did not, really, exist, they also charged owners a fat fee to convert their guaranteed, fixed weeks into ‘floating’ weeks.

This system was eventually further revised so that there was no mention of ownership at all. Time Share became a points system. Units of accommodation were not sold, instead, the sales organisations started selling ‘points’ which, effectively, are an artificial currency for use within the Time Share orbit to buy the accommodation that was wanted.

With the points system there are absolutely no restrictions upon how much Time Share ‘ownership’ can be sold and there are absolutely no guarantees that an ‘owner’ can have a unit of accommodation when he wants it.

Not only that, anybody who owns a fixed or floating week is now faced with another sales presentation that will extract even more money from him to convert what he already owns into something that is less efficient, has less guarantees and is more difficult to understand while the sales organisation recovers ownership of his units.

Where did Time Share go so wrong?

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Tags: fixed weeks, floating weeks, Time Share

I suppose you reap what you sow.

I have been advertising for someone to help with my online/offline business and have made two rather sad discoveries.

1 – Nobody trusts anybody any more if they are British and are advertising in the Situations Vacant columns. Everybody who actually telephoned me about the work on offer was convinced that there was a scam involved and that they should not get involved. The strange thing is that these same people would happily go to work as a telemarketer (well, that’s what they call themselves) ripping off Timer Share owners on any of the infamous resale decks here on the Costas – no questions asked.

2 – Everybody wants a job but nobody wants to work. I have paid people a weekly wage in the past and found that I was being used as a financier for as long as I was stupid enough to pay them for turning up. By going the self employed route, I have just as many applicants for work but a lot less who are prepared to attend for an interview. Those who do decide to work for themselves soon learn that they can either do it or that they can’t – most of them can’t. Mind you, they put up a good showing at the interview, being able to sell steak to vegans – but it is all in their well rehearsed responses and first person stories.

UK television is always looking for sad, failure stories among British imigrants to Spain and with these attitudes to work, they will never run out of them.

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Tags: employment, failure stories, rip-offs, situations vacant

Well, it looks like that was the rain.

We have been enjoying a few days of very welcome rain but, if the forecasters are right, that has now come to an end.

One of the things that the recent rain has high-lighted for me is the destruction there has been of the established routes that were used by our native wild life.

Last night, on my home from walking the dogs, I came across a very large toad that had managed to survive crossing a main road from the campo only to find its way blocked by a wall that was built within the last nine months.

Rather than see the poor animal get more distressed as it failed to find a way past the wall, I picked it up and took it to an area where there was plenty of water and access to the part of the campo it had, presumably, been trying to reach. Nothing particularly remarkable in that, you might say BUT . . .

carrying that toad made me aware that I had not heard any of the usual frog/toad choruses that were normal for this area. Last year it was a great pleasure to listen to the variety of squeaks and croaks but this year I haven’t heard any at all.

What a pity we are not only destroying our own environment by concreting over huge swathes of open land, we are also destroying the flora and fauna that makes Spain such a rich and varied biosphere by ignoring both their existence and their needs.

We are building a very grey future for coming generations.

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Tags: destruction, environmen, rain, wildlife

You can spend a fortune on information!

Isn’t it wonderful how, in the world of internet marketing, they can keep re-inventing the wheel?

Not only that, they can find more people to buy the newly re-invented wheels even though the wheels that they already have are perfectly serviceable!

I am in the process of building another web site http://www.artssoftwaresolutions.com to provide cheaper alternatives to the massively over-priced latest, greatest re-inventions. The products are not new but, like everything in the world of commerce, nor are they out of date.

Once you succumb to the latest high pressure sales fest and sit back with your latest acquisition, how many times have you realised that you already had all the information in a slightly different package?

One of the biggest areas of re-hashed ‘information’ is in the region of SEO (search engine optimisation). I would dearly love to know how the huge fees for this service can be justified and how clients keep paying out of ever diminishing returns.

If you want to be number one (sorry No. 1) in a search engine, all you need do is have the most obscure keyword that you can think of and put it in your site list. If, for example, you had ‘yellow and brown striped paint’ as one of your key words, what is the betting that you would be top of the Google results? Odds on, I would think. It’s a pity that only you would actually use that particular keyword in a search, though, isn’t it?

Considering the number of people searching Google at any one time for any reasonable search term (key word), do you really think that you can displace those sites at the top positions? Sites that have devoted years and loads of money to get there! Don’t you think that they have just a slight edge in the battle for retaining that position?

I look forward to any explanations of SEO and its’ effectiveness – meanwhile, content is king. Google is looking after its customers and is setting itself up, all the time, to ensure that their customers get what they want – not what some SEO expert has paid for them to get.

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Tags: alternative products, cheap products, search engine optimisation, SEO