No doubt if you were to ask consumers if they would be pleased to see offers that save them money they will say yes. If you ask them if they want to get piles of junk mail they will almost always say no. How you word the question is the deciding factor on answering the question of whether consumers like getting junk mail or not.

The problem doesn’t end when you put it in the bin, or the paper recycling box. Your local council has to deal with all that waste. We are paying the cost of disposal and we are also paying the cost in damage all this wasteful use of the planets resources causes.

Stop Junk Mail

It is not easy to avoid all this junk mail. You can register on several lists to say you do not wish to receive all this rubbish but that will only prevent some of the mailshots. There is a very interesting and useful website about the subject of junkmail at www.stopjunkmail.org.uk where you can find out where to register on some of the stop spam mail lists as well as sign a petition to make opting in to receive marketing material a requirement rather than having to opt-out as at present.

The marketing men don’t want us to stop receiving their rubbish because they find it does work and some people do respond to the offers received. It is a shame that they do as without those buyers we would soon see the trade stop overnight.

I have wondered if there is not a case for invoicing the marketing people who send their waste through my letterbox. It should be considered illegal dumping but so far no one seems to have pursued that line of thought.

You could try marking the envelope as ‘JUNK MAIL – RETURN TO SENDER’ and popping it back in a post box. I have no idea what the position is there for the post office. Whether they feel required to return it to the sender and maybe charge them for returning the mail I have no idea. Neither would I be surprised to discover that doing such a thing might be illegal as it always seems that the law is against the individual consumer and in favour of businesses who wish to take advantage of our ignorance and gullibility but it seems to me to be worth a try.

Are We Doomed To Receive Junk Mail Forever?

So we can winge all we like but for now it seems junk mail can fill up our mailboxes as well as the recycling plants. There seems to be little we can do about it. I do recommend the website mentioned above if you want to find out more about the problems of junk mail and what you can do to try to reduce the quantity you receive but there seems little sign of anything changing much soon. Maybe putting the junk mail of your open fire or log burner is the only way to gain some benefit from all the rubbish we get thanks to the efforts of the spam merchants, sorry, I meant direct marketers, of course.

I do not buy things over the phone from people who phone me up out of the blue. You could offer me a box of money for free over the phone and I still wouldn’t buy from you so why do telemarketing companies keep phoning me?

I registered my number on the donotcall website and that cuts out some of the calls but I still get too many. A lot of them appear to originate abroad and offers of a free holiday in Florida in an American accent are common.

We live in a crazy world when it is possible and financially viable for telemarketers to make calls across the world to promote their product or service.

If you want to stop telemarketing calls you can register at the telephone preference service website and that should stop the more genuine and established companies from calling you. Other than that owning an answer phone and letting that take all your calls seems the best solution.

About time, I would say. Companies use this data and spend money making use of it yet it is our data and they take that for free. They pay their staff, they pay postal and phone costs to contact us and they sell our information yet we get nothing for it at all. All we get is the pain of phone calls and marketing junk mail through the post.

It is our data. It belongs to us and anyone who wants to use it should pay for the privelidge. If yu want me to dig a hole for you, you expect to have to pay me. If you want the benefit of my knowledge you expect to pay for that advice yet my personal details and data about me is expected to be free and is stolen at will.

We should get paid for our personal data and we should get something everytime it is used. You could argue that it is a human right to choose or not, to release information about ourselves and if we choose to release it to anyone they should be paying us for access to that info.

BBC News – Personal data could become commodity.

I have one tiny little question about this.

How many heads of foreign governments have you seen visiting the UK and then holding religious services? I cannot recall President George Bush holding religious services. When the French premier visits he doesn’t hold church services and nor does any other visiting head of state.

How much of the Pope’s visit was about a state visit and how much was about holding religeous ceremonies to marketing and promotion of the Roman Catholic Church?

I suspect we Taxpayers have been mugged by the Vatican.

The damage abuse of alcohol does to society is probably far greater than smoking ever did. Smoking may damage or even kill the smoker and it may affect others to some extent but alcohol will kill you if you abuse it and the effects of alcohol cause many other people to suffer either as family members or innocent bystanders when drunks are on the loose.

So, it comes as no great surprise that the British Medical Association has come out against advertising for alcohol. In a report available here…CLICK HERE they suggest that

“Governments move away from partnership with the alcohol industry and look at
effective alternatives to self-regulation. Specifically, as a part of a comprehensive alcohol
control strategy, the UK Governments should:
1. Implement and rigorously enforce a comprehensive ban on all alcohol marketing
communications
2. Establish minimum price levels for the sale of alcoholic products
3. Increase the level of excise duty paid on alcohol above the rate of inflation and rationalise the
current taxation system so that it is accurately linked to alcoholic strength for all products
4. Regulate the availability of alcoholic products through a reduction in licensing hours for onand
off-licensed premises
5. Commission further independent research and evaluation of sales practices, covering all
aspects of industry marketing (including that of producers, distributors and supermarkets). This
should be used to inform, and where appropriate, strengthen the current regulatory system
6. Ensure that the density of alcohol outlets is taken into account in planning or licence
applications, and where necessary, introduce legislative changes to ensure these factors are
considered
7. Assess the impact on public health of the changes to licensing legislation in the UK, and in
particular the emergence of pubcos
8. Undertake a full audit of the market, and consider ways to prohibit any products that either
appeal to young people more than adults, or are particularly associated with problematic
drinking
9. Introduce a compulsory levy on the alcohol industry with which to fund an independent public
health body to oversee alcohol-related research, health promotion and policy advice. The levy
should be set as a proportion of current expenditure on alcohol marketing, index linked in
future years.”

I was against the smoking ban because it was such a large hammer to crack a small nut. A better system would have been to require that air quality in public places should meet certain standards. That would presumably have caused problems because the air quality in many areas is affected by traffic fumes and the smoke from fieplaces in pubs has certainly left me coughing on more than one occasion. Good ventilation was the solution but the government chose the simple big stick option.
I would be just as opposed to a ban on drinking in public buildings but something surely needs to be done before society is damaged even more by the few who either don’t care or simply can’t stop excessive drinking. There is a huge cost to society from alcohol consumption and at the moment that cost is paid for by everyone whatever their drinking habits and that is clearly not fair.
Of course the alcohol industry does not see things the same way and would hate to see an advertising ban but, they would say that wouldn’t they. Reducing alcohol consumption might be good for society but it would damage the profits of the drinks companies.

Incidentally I remember hearing that up in Scotland you can catch a plane from one Island to another where the plane barely gets in the air before it starts preparing to land on the next Island.

So there we are in Oxford wanting to fly to London so we go to the ticket desk and ask for a flight and the result is?…..

The ticket clerk tells you that you have arrived. Yes you are at Oxford airport. Yes Oxford airport is sixty miles away from London but they have recently renamed it to London-Oxford airport. Can you believe the audacity of the people who came up with this idea?

Are they stupid to think they can get away with this or are we  so stupid that the idea of getting people to fly to Oxford when they want to get to London, might actually work.

I guess they are only pushing the boundaries back a bit. After all we have stansted airport as an official London airport and that is about 34 miles from London which is a fair distance but sixty miles seems a lot to me. I guess the parking might be cheaper at Oxford since parking at stansted airport is expensive.

Maybe the best solution is to park at Oxford airport and hitch a ride to London. I remember they had a very good park and ride scheme when I was last there a few years ago. Maybe they will do one to central London.

I can see a trend starting to develop here and it is only a matter of time before we hear that Liverpool airport has been renamed Sydney-Liverpool airport. After all, it’s only a 24 hour flight away and that is almost next door.

Oxford is a local airport for Oxford. They should be proud of that. Oxford is a fascinating city well worth visiting for what it offers. They don’t need to pretend they are part of London. Many would say that they are better than London anyway so why do it? No doubt it all comes down to money and profits. The money-men are once again doing what they do best and destroying something good. A local airport for the benefit of local people and the local city.

Here is a spoof video that makes fun of this idea but it is amusing because we can see the truth behind it. We are constantly being told what we need rather than us discovering a genuine need and then finding the products that fill that need.

We all need a huge expensive computer just to say hello to our friends don’t we?