Is it me or has rail travel become mercinary in pricing ?

STANDARD OPEN SINGLE from finsbury park in london to Falmouth : £128.00

The prices have been creeping up for years, but now its got to the point where you can fly almost anywhere in europe for less, than local train cost, beyond the 200 mile barrier. Fuel costs to falmouth in an effiecient car ? much less than £128 each way im sure, these train companys are mad. Theyre transporting large numbers of people in a purpose built vehicle and they cant do it cheaper than it costs to drive yourself there ? where has the efficiency saving gone in running a train ? Im sure if i were to buy £128 pounds worth of coal wholesale I could probably steam train my way to falmouth for the same money, these prices do not make sense.

many thing have led to the closure of public toilets :
but i’d say these four factors are mainly to blame :

Cottaging
Drug taking
Vandalism
Cost

It would be nice if they gay community took their share of responsibility, and stood up against cottaging in attempt to protect public toilets from closure, as theyre diminishing the civility of our culture, with their past time of getting their jollys in public toilets, hetrosexual or gay, this behaviour is unacceptable in public toilets. Online sites like “squirt” arent helping this issue with electronically promoting toilets as places for sex. Though cash strapped organisations I reckon are often using cottaging as an excuse for closure, none the less cottaging allows them this opportunity to close. Or as often found also, closing public toilets beyond 10:30 at night, very irritating on train platforms that is.

How we stop the drug taking and vandalism I dont know but CCTV at the entrance to toilets could at least identify drug users and vandals for evidence purposes who were habitually using toilets as a place to get their fix, hang out and damage, for criminal prosecution purposes.

Once these three factors have been dealt with then hopefully the fourth, cost … will be the only arguable reason for closing and that at least means we can argue sensibly over the closure and fight the organisations concerned without having to contend with the three other points.

Public toilets are a sign of a civilised society and we should fight to protect and preserve them, considering how many we have lost already.

here are some links about toilet closure

cottaging causes closure :

paper on toilet provision with societys

norfolk public toilets

gay perspective on the issue:

Ok lets get this straight, on under items that sell for under £10 ebay and paypal make way to high a percentage benefit, on an item that sells for say
£5.98 inc £1.99 postage such as a dvd i sold recently :
The packaging and postage cost not being loaded is £1.99
that leaves £3.99
————————————-
final value fee will be 8.75%, and arent calculated inc postage cost
so that leaves £3.64p
————————————-
the listing fee for a dvd is 10p
so that leaves £3.54
————————————-
the paypal charge to receive the total £5.98 payment is 40p
so that leaves £3.14
————————————-
so for selling a dvd on ebay for £5.98 inc postage
————————————-
I make £3.14 or 53% of the price
post office make £1.99 or 33% of the price
ebay make £0.85p or 14% of the price
————————————-
if you discount the postage part of the equation and view ebays share as costs subtracted from the actual sale price not including postage it works out as ebay receiving 21% commission on this sale of £3.99.

so really ebay for items around the fiver value is receiving 21% commission, now they may claim that paypal is a seperate entity blah blah etc and cant be lumped together with ebay, but really its all part of the process. I cant understand the post offices costs to some extent although they have risen over the years pushing small sales on ebay further away again from selling small items on ebay. The post office at least have to physically deliver something to someones door. All of ebays costs are mainly electronic ? and therefore the high percentage they take along the chain seems unnecessary, surely there is an opportunity here for someone to do the job cheaper than this the final value itself seems an exorbitant percentage on small items. and from my purchasers view postage is just another part of the total price, so I cant really not include that in my costs.

overall the costs involved in selling small items means, that you cant really justify selling items under a tenner not including your own costs listing and under £20.00-£30.00 including your own time costs of listing packaging and posting the item.

Which basically means the second hand selling on ebay which one of the best ways of green recycling for many items is not viable unless >

1. you dont count your own time costs in the equation.
2. the items your selling are at least over £20.00 in value

if postage and ebay/paypal costs were lower it would make this kind of selling more viable for the average person. As it is the average person is financially better off working an extra hour and throwing the item away or giving it to a charity shop.

see what your looking to get at ? way too many bright points drawing and confusing the eye, who could not tell that, when they were testing this, that it was way to busy ? Mixing in radio confuses the issue especially by giving radio tag pictures that make it look like video content apart fom an icon which doesnt draw the eye, preferences about tv / radio should quite obviously be remembered between session visits, Whichever way, it now takes me about three times longer to find and watch what i want with this interface. And the way the structural titles are dimmer than everything else ? greyed out just wrong, By why give advice when your not paid to consult, and some other egit is probably making a good living out of ballsing it up.

Clothesaid in london appears not collect from my area, I phoned them to find this out, and then it dawned on me these charities are so marketing led, that they probably only collect clothes from posh neighbourhoods, a bit of me really wrankled at that thought, especially the dumb receptionist they appear to employ who has an extreme soft patronising telephone tone/demeanour (that im speaking to you like a child routine), shes obviously not allowed to say the reason why they dont collect in your area, ie :

They cant make enough money off poor peoples clothes, peddling them back to charity shops in central london at near retail prices.
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Some of the changes in the upgrade from WordPress 2.2 to 2 .51, seem to have been damaging to the interface experience when editing, the save and publish buttons are no longer as clear in this version nor as easy to locate on-screen By being placed on the right-hand side, rather than under the post as before, also the tabs at the top of the screen and their subheadings are a bit wishy-washy, the interface seems to suffer generally from a busy vagueness. I personally think post category was much better on the right-hand side of the write post interface, and save should be directly below the post that you are writing.

I will get used to these changes, but most of them smelt of unnecessary fiddling.