Spangly A posted:

I can't just send HMRC a brown paper bag and write "I smoked some weed this year, here's 17.5%".

Spangly A posted:

Canterbury now, which is mostly dreadful so I rarely bother. I used to get £20 an hour at peak times in Ramsgate (the three market hours on sat/sun and school runs on weekdays).

It's performance art, not music. Just belt out a mix of popular covers and some dancy written stuff while getting as many people as you can involved, tourists are good for this. You want an area with a high volume of people stopping briefly, so tourist photograph spots and shops are good (shops will chase you though). People walking past don't throw money at you so high streets are usually a bit crap.

In low hours I used to play more of my own material and would occasionally get phone numbers and gig offers but unless you're Rodrigo y Gabriella you want to focus on entertainment, not talent.

JFairfax posted:

No, I'm not a troon

JFairfax posted:

No, I'm not a troon

Coohoolin posted:

Cool, I'm great at entertainment, all I play is covers whenever I host acoustic nights at my bar. Cheers for the advice, gonna have to find somewhere "touristy" in Aberdeen that won't be loving freezing. How about outside shopping malls or centers? Also ever try busking at night after the clubs close? I'd imagine you'd get loads if you can tolerate the drunks.

Gonzo McFee posted:

You're not a town in South Ayrshire?

Gonzo McFee posted:

You're not a town in South Ayrshire?

Jedit posted:

You need to book one of the official pitches if you want to busk, as I recall.

Alternately, Old Blackfriars are advertising for musical acts and Cafe Drummonds have an open mic night.

Semprini posted:

Start a business that's mostly cash-based (taxi driver, car wash etc). Report to taxman that you're the best drat car wash in town, just look at all these profits.

There's more to it than that, obviously, but old bill watching the thread etc...

quote:

• One in five of 23-27 year olds have no desire to own a home
  
• Almost half (48%) agree Britain will become a nation of renters within the next generation
  
• 46% agree Britain is becoming more like Europe, where renting is ‘the norm’
  
• 86% of potential homeowners refuse to sacrifice the quality of accommodation they currently live in to reduce the amount of rent they pay in order to save for a deposit
  
• 54% of homeowners think people aren't willing to make the necessary sacrifices to get on the property ladder
  
• 57% say first-time buyers today are guilty of trying to find their perfect property rather than adjusting their expectations to their means
  
• 57% of would-be first time buyers would like to save but claim to not have any spare cash that they could save.

LemonDrizzle posted:

- 86% of potential homeowners refuse to sacrifice the quality of accommodation they currently live in to reduce the amount of rent they pay in order to save for a deposit.
- 57% of would-be first time buyers would like to save but claim to not have any spare cash that they could save.
- 57% say first-time buyers today are guilty of trying to find their perfect property rather than adjusting their expectations to their means

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:

Launderettes. Lots of notes getting broken down into change and an entirely cash based business.

Ddraig posted:

I once tried busking in Cardiff but then I realized that there was enough local characters that were giving entertainment away for free that it seemed like pissing in the wind to try and rake in any cash.

That said, quite a few of them have vanished. I heard rumours that the wonderful Trevor may have died, which is pretty loving if true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsGVa7BcqPs

LemonDrizzle posted:

I leave this here without further comment: the key highlights of the Lloyds/Halifax "Generation Rent 2014" report.

http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/press-releases/2014/halifax/generation-rent-2014-will-rental-rungs-replace-the-property-ladder/

Robot Mil posted:

The problem with the UK becoming a nation of renters is that renting here is poo poo. Landlords can get away with renting out houses in terrible condition, agents gouge money out of you for every last thing, there's very few long term rental agreements around... the only thing that has improved is deposit protection.

kingturnip posted:

Yeah, the Coalition have shat out a massive steaming heap of dung in the last few years, but there are some nuggets of value hidden inside. Like deposit protection.

LemonDrizzle posted:

86% of potential homeowners refuse to sacrifice the quality of accommodation they currently live in to reduce the amount of rent they pay in order to save for a deposit

Quincey posted:

Political Scrapbook report Tories trying to smear the Trussell Trust: http://politicalscrapbook.net/2014/04/tories-go-on-warpath-in-sickening-attack-against-food-bank-charity/with a bullshit article about foodbanks giving out "restaurant tokens": http://politicalscrapbook.net/2014/04/the-truth-food-bank-users-dont-get-restaurant-tokens/

Jippa posted:

Yorkshire.

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/main-topics/general-news/beauties-brawl-as-miss-scarborough-contest-descends-into-catfight-1-6566461

LemonDrizzle posted:

I leave this here without further comment: the key highlights of the Lloyds/Halifax "Generation Rent 2014" report.

http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/press-releases/2014/halifax/generation-rent-2014-will-rental-rungs-replace-the-property-ladder/

peanut- posted:

Why would you when the base rent of anywhere to live is so high that the premium for a nice place isn't (relatively) that significant?

This is London centric, but around where I am it's probably about a £200 a month difference between getting a complete dump and getting a decent spec place. An extra £2400 a year in your savings account would be nice, but it's hard to argue it's the difference between buying and not buying compared to the insane purchase price of housing.

TinTower posted:

JFairfax posted:

also he can't spell blackup?

JFairfax posted:

hmmm what tradition is this.

also he can't spell blackup?

if this is jack straw's kid I've now lost all respect for him gained when we found out he was knocking out weed.

AA Gill, The Times posted:

The dance begins with each Nutter cocking a hand to his ear to listen to something we human folk can’t catch. They then wag a finger at each other, and they’re off, stamping and circling, occasionally holding bent wands covered with red, white and blue rosettes that they weave into simple patterns. It’s not pretty and it’s not clever. It is, simply, awe-inspiringly, astonishingly other. Morris men from southern troupes come and watch in slack-jawed silence. Nothing in the civilised world is quite as elementally bizarre and awkwardly compelling as the Coco-nutters of Bacup.

mrpwase posted:

In my latter days at uni I read about and came to support workplace democracy, getting rid of workplace hierarchy, co-ops, that sort of thing. It's only now that I've got a full-time job above minimum wage that I appreciate what damage lovely managers and top-down decisions do to morale, worker happiness and health, productivity etc. My work's new assistant manager is a bit of an arse, delegates all his work, spends all his time chatting to customers, and complains whenever anyone gets him to do his job. He goes out of his way to inconvenience others if it means he skips working, and he uses his position to defend his actions. If the place was run more democratically he'd be forced to stop being a prick!

What's the thread's opinion on non-hierarchical workplace management? I know not too many of you are anarchists, but it's not too outlandish of an idea the way I see it.

E: for example a democratically run beauty pageant would have 30% less 'catfights'

Kegluneq posted:

quote:

HM Revenue & Customs is preparing to sell UK taxpayers' personal data to private firms.

HMRC officials are examining "charging options" to release anonymised tax data to third parties including companies, researchers and public bodies, the Guardian reported.

The plans are likely to raise serious concerns among privacy campaigners and MPs in the wake of the Care.data scheme, which shares "anonymised" medical records with third parties, the newspaper said.

The Care.data initiative was previously suspended for six months due to concerns that people could be identified easily from the given information, such as postcodes, dates of birth, NHS numbers, ethnicity and gender.

Likewise, the sharing of taxpayer information despite the government's assurance of suitable safeguards would be risky and could break trust between HMRC and taxpayers, according to experts.

Under the data sharing scheme, details about income, tax arrangements and payment history are expected to be traded. Such information would be useful to credit rating agencies, advertisers and retailers who want to practise price discrimination, Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, told the Guardian.

"If they were to make HMRC information more available, there's an awful lot of people who would like to get their hands on it. Anonymisation is something about which they lied to us over medical data ... If the same thing is about to be done by HMRC, there should be a much greater public debate about this," he said.

Former Conservative minister David Davis told the newspaper that the proposal is "borderline insane".

"The Treasury lists no credible benefits and offers a justification based on an international agreement that does not lead other governments to open up their tax database," he said.

"It defies logic that we would remove those restraints at a time when data can be collected by the gigabyte, processed in milliseconds and transported around the world almost instantaneously."

"The ongoing claims about anonymous data overlook the serious risks to privacy of individual level data being vulnerable to re-identification," said Emma Carr, deputy director of campaign group Big Brother Watch.

spikenigma posted:

Can't think how this will be potentially abused.

Tortuga posted:

It's not racist if you don't do the hands.

Tolth posted:

It brings up the old and oft-repeated chestnut about human nature, I guess. Non-hierarchical workplace management runs into the issue that a significant portion of human beings are entirely exploitative sociopaths who will manipulate everyone around them, and it only takes a small number of said people to make such a system impossible. That's still probably an improvement over the current system in which entirely exploitative sociopaths are inevitably promoted and given increasing amounts of power, though.

a var of piss posted:

Oh yeah, I hear that story by the watercooler every day. And from my mate's mate down the pub.

Tolth posted:

That's not quite what I meant, but I appreciate why you've misinterpreted my post. I was referring to the 'human nature is why communism doesn't work' argument that is repeated with hilarious frequency by people trying to debate with socialists/communists. While that's normally weak as hell because the entire structure of society and law is designed to counter 'human nature', the logic is a lot more applicable to explaining why trying to run a workplace democratically is a dodgy idea. I hope this helped you to understand the context and intent of my post!