What will you live on when you're old?

Millions of people in the UK are facing a miserable retirement.The Pensions Commission report says there is a £57 billion shortfall in the amount people are saving for retirement.

They are talking about raising taxes or raising the retirment age (to 70).

Should people have to work until they're 70?

 

We shouldn't even have to work more than a few days a week!

This sucks!

 

a bottle of ketamin...


haha

 

Yeh my contracted hours are average 41 a week, with travel and an unpaid yet compulsary lunchbreak it works out at 49 a week... + over time (which I hate doing)

In France they only work 35

I'd love to just work 4 days a week... even if I had to squeeze my hours up.

 

I feel ill, I think I could do with some now!

 

Surely job share is the way forward.....that and seizing control of the world!!!

 

Hell yeh Brain... *plots*

But yeh, job share is something I'm gonna push for when I get a permanent contract... I need more time for campaigning and getting drunk with friends

I think employers should be forced to make more contriobutions to company penshion schemes...

The older people in my company are under an old penshions contract where by they get 2/3rds of their end salary per year on retirement.

My pension is shit however as they changed the terms 10 years ago... It's hardly worth having. Yet they made me opt out of the state pension to have it, which means I'll get minimum payments from the government.

So say my companies pension scheme goes bust, I could be stuck living on peanuts even though I contribute a percentage of my wage a month to a scheme.

 

the thing is, at our age i dont tend to worry about it too much, coz if and when we get to 70 everything is going to have changed by then anyway.

i had this discussion with my dad last night, who pointed out that i dont have a pension, i dont work regularly unless i have to and havent made any contributions to anything, so if i get old i'm gonna be fucked.

isn't it nice to know we have so much to look forward to in old age?

peace and love
stardust
xxx

 

Are they allowed to do that?

My granded gets a pension from the government and one from his old firm, so he's not too badly off ... but he is 93 so I guess times have changed

 

Yup the part of my tax / ni conts / whatever, that would have gone to the government pension scheme now goes into my company one... it was the only way i was allowed on the company scheme.

The thing is though, that the company scheme dosnt even give me a guarenteed income at retirement. It's a lottery.... I have to sell whatever is in it to a pension company when I take retirement.... I could end up on £2 a week! Fuck knows... its all very worrying

 

Ah well, you've still got more than 30 years yet

 

We also have to think that the economy may have utterly collapsed by the the total expenditure of our natural resources. It's not a pretty picture. I think we're going to have to find new ways of organising and relating to one another if we're going to maintain society on such a large scale. Other than that an increasingly aging western population can really only be countered by more multi cultural integration....

 

Hmmm, thanks for that

 

So the Uk economy will die because we use up all our wood and fuel?

So the fact we have people living longer and draining the pension budget could be solved different cultures mixing together more to even it out?.... right yeh (?)

People will always live longer in countries that have better health care etc... so it really wouldnt solve anything.

 

soma...


~

 

Yeh but 65 isnt old at all... I want to have money to travel and carry on my protesting and go to festivals and stuff I do now, just without the work bit!

I should be allowed god damn them!!!!

 

You could always try knitting for peace

 

That wasn't my argument at all. With natural resources I'm referring to fossil fuels. Oil and gas supplies are predicted to be exhausted within our lifetime. Given the degree to which our economy revolves around these resources, there will have to be massive progression in finding alternative energy sources, or we can expect some sort of economic collapse.

People will always live longer in countries that have better health care. This is a good thing by all means, but since we are having fewer children than ever before, this means there is a smaller active working population to support the growing sections of the population not in work. In contrast to this, the majority of migrants to this country are young men of working age who come here to look for work. With more sustainable and ethical policies on immigration, people of working age from other countries could make up for our shrinking workforce. And no, i don't just mean the shitty jobs that no one wants, I mean across all sections of society. These are two seperate issues which I think are interlinked, and represent destructive flaws in the way we organise our economy....

 

im gonna make an effort not to get to 70 i reckon.. that seems the easiest way.. i may stop aging now.. and move to never never land.. and join in peter pans crusade against the pirates, now thats much more fun than retirement.

 

A common myth, but factually incorrect. Oil production is likely to peak within our lifetime. It is highly unlikely that supplies will be exhausted.

It's an important distinction, because while still fairly catastrophic, this scenario allows more time for us to adapt and develop alternatives.

However, the other crunch time is when demand outstrips supply. Even if oil production continues to increase, we'll reach a point where supply can no longer keep up with the oil consumption of emerging economies in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. And as any economist will tell you, when demand outstrips supply, Very Nasty Things start to happen.

I've heard many hippies advocate the end of the petroleum age as A Good Thing. In the grand scheme of things..... well, it doesn't really matter. We can't kill the planet, we can only make it inhospitable to humans. So who really cares? The question then is whether the end of the petroleum age will be A Good Thing for us, as humans.

In the long run, it has to be. Our future is either sustainable or very, very short. The sooner we wake up to that and start looking ahead to the way the world will need to be, the better.

However, looking forward to the end of the petroleum age as A Good Thing in the short term, is hopelessly naive and foolish. As oil supplies decline, barring the discovery of a new miracle source of energy, there's going to be one hell of a lot of suffering. Think it's going to be possible to return to some idyllic lifestyle in harmony with nature, growing your own organic veg with a few mates in a field in Wales? Think again. With the collapse of society comes lawlessness. You'll be competing for that patch of land with the guys with the biggest sticks. Idyllic it will not be.

Of course, if oil supplies don't peak for some time, and if the decline is carefully managed, then there's a chance that the transition can be painless. But for that to happen, we'd best start looking at alternatives really, really soon. It's not just fuel that we depend on oil for, but may other things that we take for granted such as rubber and plastic.

The earliest estimate that I've seen for a production peak is 2008. The latest estimate is the latter quarter of the century. All these estimates depend on no new large reserves being discovered. The discovery of better (more economical) extraction techniques will also put this date back. In fact, in reality, oil will never run out. What will actually happen is that the oil that remains in the ground will not be cost-effective to extract. So if we suddenly invent the super-drill, we open up more oil reserves.

Whatever happens, we need to start looking to the future. Not just in terms of our source of energy, but also in the way we lead our lives. Disposable culture has no future. Sustainability is not some fluffy hippy ideal, it's essential to our survival. If our lifestyle is unsustainable, it follows that at some point our lifestyle can no longer be sustained. We'd better hope that we've addressed this problem as a society before it's too late.