Football Club finances

[oafc0000]

I don't think they are unsightly at all. Infact I quite like them, mostly due to what they represent. Maybe that's just the hippy in me....

 

+1

[leeslover]

But doesn't buying from the market put us at the mercy of the market, and it's vagries.

We are at the vagaries of the market with oil and always have done, despite us and the USA having had a constant military presence in the Middle East and elsewhere at a total cost that must run into the trillions and god knows how many lives. It doesn’t make the oil any cheaper, any more than the failed attempts by OPEC make it any more expensive.

[singe]

We are at the vagaries of the market with oil and always have done, despite us and the USA having had a constant military presence in the Middle East and elsewhere at a total cost that must run into the trillions and god knows how many lives. It doesn’t make the oil any cheaper, any more than the failed attempts by OPEC make it any more expensive.

Truew, I am trying to make the case for moving as self sufficient as possible. Brazil and France being good case because they are far more self sufficent comapred to us.

Edited January 14, 2010 by singe

[outoftheblue]

Truew, I am trying to make the case for moving as self sufficient as possible. Brazil and France being good case because they are far more self sufficent comapred to us.

Quite.

They are in control of their resources, rather than being at the mercy of oil vendors in countries where political and religious unrest could see an immediate and costly shortage of essential fuels.

Fingers of investment pushed into many pies containing next generation fuels has to be the way forward.

[singe]

Quite.

They are in control of their resources, rather than being at the mercy of oil vendors in countries where political and religious unrest could see an immediate and costly shortage of essential fuels.

Fingers of investment pushed into many pies containing next generation fuels has to be the way forward.

I do agree with that.

Further, if we are not at the mercy of those countries, we are far less likely to get involved politically with them, and that should avoid us pumping millions in flawed economies (that are now probably in better shape than ours) or at worst going to war to protect our interests.

[Corporal_Jones]

Back on topic...

 

 

 

"Nearly all"

Doesnt mean we can't be the exception to the rule does it?

 

 

 

Sadly yes.

 

[Corporal_Jones]

Back on topic...

 

 

 

 

The new stadium will have cinemas, bowling, etc which brings in revenue, which will go into the club (wages etc)

add on top of that gate income to go to wages.

 

In the future when TTA walk, an investor such as Sullivan, would more likely invest in us as we have no major debts to pay off that have been taken against our ground etc.

 

As for the stadium, you have to walk before you run so why build a massive seater stadium when its not going to get filled? All you'll get is clutches of fans and empty seats needing stewarding. Start at an attainable size and over time, some success brings people back and we can then expand the stadium. (I think we'll get 12000 and end up 16/18000)

 

I like to be an optimist 'cause misery loves company, some people wont be happy until everyones miserable, but then they realise they're not meant to be happy so will find something else to be miserable about.

 

 

 

More seriously, your last sentence explains why you have conjured up an implausible vision of the club's future.

 

As explained many times before, you have to start by asking yourself why the club is intent on building a stadium with only 12000 seats (some claim 10000; others less still.) After all, even though we've been in the doldrums for fifteen or so years, we've nonethelss managed to attract well over 12000 (let alone 10000) on numerous occasions. It is obviously because the club has downscaled its ambitions. The projected size of the stadium suggests that, at best, we can expect no more than attempts at brief Scunthorpe or Colchester type forays into the Championship. These forays (I say these but it almost certainly would only happen once, although most likely not at all) would necessitate no stadium expansion, as a near certain immediate drop, back into the third-tier, possibly followed by free-fall, rules it out. Once the stadium is built it will never be expanded.

 

Once again, nobody has suggested that the club builds a massive stadium. Most people have merely asked why, if 16000 seats were said to be required for a redeveloped BP, was a full quarter (possibly significantly more than a quarter) of the projected capacity shed overnight with no prior discussion?

Stadium capacity is, and always has, reflected ambition. It's about how many important games against big clubs a club expects to eventually stage. A capacity of 12000 (or is it 10000?) suggests that Latics do not expect to stage many, if any, in future.

 

As we're continually reminded, nobody has seen the stadium plans yet, so where you get your assumptions regarding the facilities it will house is a mystery, and the idea that these, alone will bring enough money to the club to compete at a higher level (particularly when we will have moved to within little more than a stone's throw from where an abundance of similar or identical facilities already exists) nothing other than fantasy. And why would any serious investor look twice at a club that seems comfortable with the idea of never again playing, let alone thriving, at a level where crowds of over 12000 (or is it 10000?) are regular occurrences (as we saw last time we did it.)

 

Quite simply, we are being conned.

Edited January 14, 2010 by Corporal_Jones

[Stitch_KTF]

I like the theory of wind farms, it's just they are big ugly things.

Imagine putting them in such area, it is not right, but there must be another way.

 

 

I liek this photo though!

 

What's wrong with them?

 

Is this better?

 

 

 

 

 

Truew, I am trying to make the case for moving as self sufficient as possible. Brazil and France being good case because they are far more self sufficent comapred to us.

 

Or, why not abolish the peculiar and selfish notion of countries and try to all prosper together as a species?

Edited January 14, 2010 by Stitch_KTF

[beag_teeets]

Or, why not abolish the perculiar and selfish notion of countries and try to all prosper together as a species?

 

Hallelujah brother!

 

 

[Diego_Sideburns]

We have to a certain extent with wind power, but the damn thing sare so unsightly and need to be in areas of beauty. Adn wave is difficult to maintain.

 

Is this location OK?

I took the picture from the air off the Lancashire coast.

Edited January 14, 2010 by Diego_Sideburns

[leeslover]

What's wrong with them?

 

Is this better?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or, why not abolish the peculiar and selfish notion of countries and try to all prosper together as a species?

I many ways that is precisely what we are doing, in spite of national and pan-national governments best attempts to get in the way. We all use and rely on the goods and services produced by millions of people around the world in ways that we will never know about or understand, talk of national self-reliance is really a bit of a myth. Britain is not self sufficient in food, yet we manage to be a nation of fatties. America is not self sufficient in oil yet they drive big gas guzzlers (although less so as they respond to growing petrol scarcity). If there is an ethanol shortage, the price will go up, and it will be people in well off developed countries using it, not the poor of Brazil. There’s nothing wrong in producing energy in Britain but doing it at ludicrous cost to avoid possible higher costs from abroad is, well, ludicrous. Producers can only ever sell to people who have got the money to pay them, and they cannot keep prices above the market rate for more than a short time without hurting themselves a lot more than they are hurting anyone else.

[Corporal_Jones]

I many ways that is precisely what we are doing, in spite of national and pan-national governments best attempts to get in the way. We all use and rely on the goods and services produced by millions of people around the world in ways that we will never know about or understand, talk of national self-reliance is really a bit of a myth. Britain is not self sufficient in food, yet we manage to be a nation of fatties. America is not self sufficient in oil yet they drive big gas guzzlers (although less so as they respond to growing petrol scarcity). If there is an ethanol shortage, the price will go up, and it will be people in well off developed countries using it, not the poor of Brazil. There’s nothing wrong in producing energy in Britain but doing it at ludicrous cost to avoid possible higher costs from abroad is, well, ludicrous. Producers can only ever sell to people who have got the money to pay them, and they cannot keep prices above the market rate for more than a short time without hurting themselves a lot more than they are hurting anyone else.

 

 

 

Globalisation has a limited shelf life, however. Its decomposition began with the crash of autumn 2008 and will accelerate as the cost of energy rises over coming decades.

 

'We all use and rely on the goods and services produced by millions of people around the world in ways that we will never know about or understand'? What kind of quasi-mystical nonsense is this?

[Corporal_Jones]

Anyone who seriously thought about it and failed to see the crash coming is, IMHO, an idiot whose views should be disregarded in peprpetuity.

 

 

 

The trouble is that, at the end of the 1970s the world economy came increasingly under the sway of a bunch of fantasists, fanatics and snake-oil salesmen popularly, although slightly misleadingly, known as neo-liberals. In just a few short decades they succeeded in wreaking such devastation on the world's financial system that it may never fully recover. And if it doesn't, neither will the world economy.

[Corporal_Jones]

After observing this thread (And learning one or two things!), here's a post that stood out.

This is generally the point that is missed when the subject of whether the earth's resources are sustainable.

The rubber on the tyres alone take between 3 and 9 percent of their weight in oil to produce (Depending on whether it is a Natural, Polybutadiene or Styrene based polymer), this oil in turn has taken oil to extract it, oil to refine it, oil to deliver it, oil to power the Banbury mixers that produce the rubber compound, and oil to get the production operatives to work and back (This is before all the processes needed between engineering the tyre, delivering it, and fixing it on the car.

We can develop as many alternative fuels such as Hydrogen etc as we want, but we will still need the process oils to build the vehicles they are powering, and to produce the fuel itself.

Mineral and organic oils are of course naturally replaced, but only over thousands of years, and certainly not at the rate we are mining it. Synthetic oils are an answer, but still rely on natural oils to produce them.

 

The thing is, there are still huge quantities of oil remaining untapped, it's just that it is becoming a little less accessible, and we can only expect prices to rise. So we look at alternatives.

Ethanol is fairly easy to produce, and the cane from which it derives can be quickly replaced. In 25 years time, when we have considered the benefits, Brazil will have that market completely covered, and will possibly be one of the worlds leading markets in fuels. Now is the time to jump aboard that particular ship and ensure we are back in a position where we own a good portion of shares in the next generation of fuels, rather than following America round like a faithful hound sniffing at every opportunity to dip a paw into some Arabian's oil reserve, and paying extortionate amounts to do so.

 

Our Country's future is dependant on fuel. We need to gamble on which alternative will be best, and pump everything into it, to make sure we are in a strong position when the :censored: hits the fan regarding natural fuels.

Strangely enough, we need to do the same at Latics regarding strengthening our side to the point where we are a comfortable Championship side when the football economy crumbles, and the big Premier clubs who have relied on their power tumble, while the small clubs who failed to invest fade away.

Getting into the Championship is an absolute must.

 

 

 

The problem with ethanol is that it takes vast amounts of land that was previously used for growing food. As the demand for ethanol makes it more profitable than growing certain types of food, many farmers will be tempted to climb on board the ethanol bandwagon, resulting in less food being grown. When you consider that the bulk of the food almost any nation eats is imported, this will have a significant impact everywhere, especially as food prices are on the rise.

 

The Obama government has set targets for ethanol production which, if fulfilled (they probably won't be) would take up the entire US corn crop within a few years.

[Corporal_Jones]

I’d say the last thing we need is for governments to go gallivanting around the world trying to secure ethanol or any other fuel source the way we have done with oil over the last 80 or so years, just buy the bloody stuff on the market like you have to anyway. The Brazilians can’t sell their fuel to Amazonian tribesmen any more than the Arabs can sell oil to the camels. As for the best way forward, well I have no idea, but if a government of any flavour makes the decision on what basket to put the eggs in it’s more likely than not to get it wrong, private companies will respond to the changing prices arising from increased scarcity of natural resources (if they become more scarce) in a variety of ways. I am hopeful that at some stage there will be a quantum leap such as cold fusion or vastly improved nuclear technology that will make these concerns redundant, not that we can count on it of course.

 

 

 

No free market of this kind exists in reality. It is not 'private companies' that dictate economic terms internationally but vast corporations with carefully planned strategic targets and backed up by the full force of state power, without which no markets of any kind would survive.

 

You can't have a 'quantum leap' if the energy required to make that leap becomes prohibitively expensive. Sure enough near miracles have been achieved in the past, but most of them belong to the era of cheap and abundant energy. You can't 'vastly improve' nuclear technology without expending vast amounts of oil. Neither will nuclear power run the world's ever-growing fleet of automobiles.

[Corporal_Jones]

Quite.

They are in control of their resources, rather than being at the mercy of oil vendors in countries where political and religious unrest could see an immediate and costly shortage of essential fuels.

Fingers of investment pushed into many pies containing next generation fuels has to be the way forward.

 

 

 

 

Brazil and France are every bit as much at the mercy of the oil producers as anywhere else. Without oil to maintain them, transport their waste and drive the workers to their posts, power stations, whatever they run on, will grind to a halt.

[leeslover]

Globalisation has a limited shelf life, however. Its decomposition began with the crash of autumn 2008 and will accelerate as the cost of energy rises over coming decades.

 

'We all use and rely on the goods and services produced by millions of people around the world in ways that we will never know about or understand'? What kind of quasi-mystical nonsense is this?

There is a banana on my desk. I’ve no idea who grow the cotton that made the trousers of the miners who dug up the coal that was used in making the steel that the boat that brought the bananas over the Atlantic, nor the teachers who educated the man who designed the chainsaw that cut down the tree for wood to make the pallet that they were on in the ship, nor the nurse who gave a vaccination to a kid that saved his life so that he could grow up to be a security guard at the oil field were the seven gallons of oil that were used to make the front left tire of the car of the accountant who processed the invoice for the tractor of the farmer who grew the potatoes that made the chips of the docker who unloaded the bananas.

 

I just went into the shop (which was there, and had a floor, tills, lights, electricity) and magically, there were bananas on the shelf.

 

[Corporal_Jones]

There is a banana on my desk. I’ve no idea who grow the cotton that made the trousers of the miners who dug up the coal that was used in making the steel that the boat that brought the bananas over the Atlantic, nor the teachers who educated the man who designed the chainsaw that cut down the tree for wood to make the pallet that they were on in the ship, nor the nurse who gave a vaccination to a kid that saved his life so that he could grow up to be a security guard at the oil field were the seven gallons of oil that were used to make the front left tire of the car of the accountant who processed the invoice for the tractor of the farmer who grew the potatoes that made the chips of the docker who unloaded the bananas.

 

I just went into the shop (which was there, and had a floor, tills, lights, electricity) and magically, there were bananas on the shelf.

 

 

 

You don't know the people involved in the process, but you, as you have shown, have a fair idea how the process works. It can be modified or altered completely.

 

Nothing mysterious about it whatsoever. It is, in fact, completely knowable.

[leeslover]

You don't know the people involved in the process, but you, as you have shown, have a fair idea how the process works. It can be modified or altered completely.

 

Nothing mysterious about it whatsoever. It is, in fact, completely knowable.

I don’t believe you are as dense as that comment makes you seem, it was surely obvious that I didn’t even scratch the surface of a tiny fraction of the processes involved in getting a banana to my desk. It could have gone on to a practically infinite list of interactions. And guess what? Virtually nobody involved in any of them knew that they had anything to do with me or my banana. Nobody planned it, it just happened that way. It’s a strange and rather complex world we live in, something that isn’t understood by people such as yourselves who think that large parts of the world are mapped out by sinister men in suits.

[singe]

There is a banana on my desk. I’ve no idea who grow the cotton that made the trousers of the miners who dug up the coal that was used in making the steel that the boat that brought the bananas over the Atlantic, nor the teachers who educated the man who designed the chainsaw that cut down the tree for wood to make the pallet that they were on in the ship, nor the nurse who gave a vaccination to a kid that saved his life so that he could grow up to be a security guard at the oil field were the seven gallons of oil that were used to make the front left tire of the car of the accountant who processed the invoice for the tractor of the farmer who grew the potatoes that made the chips of the docker who unloaded the bananas.

 

I just went into the shop (which was there, and had a floor, tills, lights, electricity) and magically, there were bananas on the shelf.

The solution is to buy apples. In season. Then buy and have the bananas as a treat rather than a staple.

It is impossible though, the genie is out of the bottle, and bananas are Britains most popular fruit.

 

[singe]

What's wrong with them?

 

Is this better?

 

 

Or, why not abolish the peculiar and selfish notion of countries and try to all prosper together as a species?

That is not better, and what I am trying to say. Lets not build a load of ugly or pollutnig monstrosities.

And the idea of living together is admirable, but there will always be someone who breaks away, so lets plan for that.

It's a tricky one, that's no doubt.

It seems to be lviing in some parralel universe.

Arguing for consideration for the aesthetics of any power plants to look good despite our whole economy depending on it, yet arguing that Latics new ground does not matter what it looks like.

Arguing use local food, yet advocating it is OK for Latics to move away from their natural resource.

At least I am arguing both should be self sustaining!

Apologies for bringing that subject into it, but it is a microcosm of the issues of the country and world at large.

[Corporal_Jones]

I don’t believe you are as dense as that comment makes you seem, it was surely obvious that I didn’t even scratch the surface of a tiny fraction of the processes involved in getting a banana to my desk. It could have gone on to a practically infinite list of interactions. And guess what? Virtually nobody involved in any of them knew that they had anything to do with me or my banana. Nobody planned it, it just happened that way. It’s a strange and rather complex world we live in, something that isn’t understood by people such as yourselves who think that large parts of the world are mapped out by sinister men in suits.

 

 

 

It didn't 'just happen that way,' LL. It really didn't.

 

Here's a clue: it isn't mapped out by sinister men in suits, but the process, whether it's by the state, local authorities and private producers (often it's a combination of all three) does involve a large degree of planning.

 

Planning is an integral part of market economies. It isn't quite the same as in a totally planned economy, but it exists every step of the way. The idea that companies, often in alliance with other companies that they deal with, plan, and also co-operate with national, international and local authorities, can surely not be unknown to you.

 

There is nothing particuarly sinister about corporations, by the way. They do most of what they do quite openly.

Edited January 14, 2010 by Corporal_Jones

[Corporal_Jones]

That is not better, and what I am trying to say. Lets not build a load of ugly or pollutnig monstrosities.

And the idea of living together is admirable, but there will always be someone who breaks away, so lets plan for that.

It's a tricky one, that's no doubt.

It seems to be lviing in some parralel universe.

Arguing for consideration for the aesthetics of any power plants to look good despite our whole economy depending on it, yet arguing that Latics new ground does not matter what it looks like.

Arguing use local food, yet advocating it is OK for Latics to move away from their natural resource.

At least I am arguing both should be self sustaining!

Apologies for bringing that subject into it, but it is a microcosm of the issues of the country and world at large.

 

 

 

The reality is that it takes only a few moments' consideration to realise that both the country and Latics will never be 'self-sustaining.'

[Stitch_KTF]

There is a banana on my desk.

 

Oh aye?

[leeslover]

Oh aye?

Yes. I also have a luverly bunch of coconuts