Fun Online Polls: Price Comparison Websites & Flat Chested Celebrities

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll, results as follows:

Which is your favourite financial price comparison website?

Money Supermarket - 31%
Confused - 20%
U Switch - 14%
Compare The Market - 11%
Go Compare - 0%
Other, please specify - 23%

Suggestions for 'Other' included Google shopping, bookbrain and DVD Price Check.

I'm mildly relieved to see those results. The only two I've ever used for real are Money Supermarket (for car insurance) and U Switch (for changing gas and electric, about ten years ago) and I was perfectly happy with the outcome.
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Thanks to everybody who nominated somebody for this week's Fun Online Poll: "Who is your favourite flat chested celebrity?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Flat-chested celebrities: your nominations please.

It's time to start a new Fun Online Poll. I was thinking of doing the next one on who our favourite flat chested celebrity is.

Those that spring to mind are Keira Knightley, Natalie Portman (who are probably the same person) and Paris Hilton, i.e. those who are hot precisely because of, rather than despite, their all round flat-chestedness. Kate McCann would qualify but her claim to fame is murky, to say the least, and 'Kate Moss ten years ago' or 'Grace Jones twenty years ago' don't count.

I'll wait for a few nominations to roll in and then set it up.

Fluffed headline of the day

From The Metro:

"Peta slams Hilton's pig purchase"

*sigh*

If you're going to do alliteration, shouldn't that read "Peta pillories Paris' pig purchase"?

*/sigh*

Self-made million-heiress

Shabbat shalom

Friday Evening Thought Number One:

Anon left the following comment in response to these poll results:

I am now approaching the end of my productive career, but that's OK, because I own the house outright, nobody can turn me out of it, and I can look forward - if that's the right phrase - to ending my days living here in peace. My modest pension will do OK for living expenses.

And now you want me to hand over to the state every year an arbitrary, unpredictable, but probably increasing percentage of an arbitrary "value" (which can only be some official's guess, since the house is unique and I'm not selling - until I'm forced to, to pay the tax)? A value over which I have no control and which will probably increase in numerical terms as the state debauches the currency. My modest pension, of course, will not rise in line with that debauchment, since I didn't used to work for said State. I'm screwed, aren't I?

OK, let's take a step back here. None but the most rabid faux-libertarians object to businesses and workers paying pensions towards those no longer able to work. Anon doesn't appear to be complaining about businesses or workers having to "hand over to the state every year an arbitrary, unpredictable, but probably increasing percentage of [turnover, incomes and profits]" to fund, inter alia, those pensions. But in turn, many people in the UK aged forty or under can't afford to buy; or could only afford to buy a home that is nowhere near big to raise a family; or may now be saddled with negative equity and thus prevented from 'trading up' to a larger property once prices have bottomed out.

Is it really morally unacceptable for such redistribution to go in both directions? Firstly from businesses and workers to those no longer able to work; but also by levying a modest charge - say one per cent of current market values per annum* - from those who own land and property (standing at a huge gain if owned for more than two decades because of artificial scarcity of building land) to those who have been priced out?
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If that's too deep, here's Friday Evening Thought Number Two. Does this count as evidence of Global Cooling?


* Remembering that I have always said that a progressive property tax or land value tax could and should replace all existing property or wealth related taxes, such as Council Tax, Stamp Duty Land Tax, Inheritance Tax etc on an approximately fiscally neutral basis such that there would be few winners or losers; and further that pensioners would be allowed to 'roll up' the tax to be repaid out of their estates and, in case Sobers is reading, that farmland would be exempted as a quid pro quo for scrapping agricultural land subsidies.