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big scary monsters posted:Maybe it's not the worst thing about flying into the London airports, but for some reason it seemed to me to set the tone that the baggage trolleys have a "deposit" to can use them, and once you leave the baggage pickup area you can't get the deposit back. How am I going to have pound coins when I've just arrived in the country? How badly does Gatwick need a few extra quid? Even other UK airports let you cart around your bags for free, it just seems needlessly petty and poo poo. Noticed this flying to Philadephia too in their airport, except they didn't even try and call it a 'non-refundable deposit'. You could at least pay for it on a little machine with contactless. Edit: 68. Damnit one short of the funny number.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:36
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OwlFancier posted:I was driving a car at the time. Same reason i didn't photograph it. Well, there's a moral there, driving is bad. big scary monsters posted:Maybe it's not the worst thing about flying into the London airports, but for some reason it seemed to me to set the tone that the baggage trolleys have a "deposit" to can use them, and once you leave the baggage pickup area you can't get the deposit back. How am I going to have pound coins when I've just arrived in the country? How badly does Gatwick need a few extra quid? Even other UK airports let you cart around your bags for free, it just seems needlessly petty and poo poo. Another one in favour of never leaving this heathen island. And of course they need your pound, it's capitalism, there can never be enough profit, even with passenger numbers back at 70% of 2019 last year. In 2020 they had an operating loss of £248m, 2021 was £201m. Their 2022 profit was a mere £251m, and as we all know you can never have enough profit. Got to make up for 2 lost years of £200m+ a year! Every penny counts
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Mar 21, 2023 16:47
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let's not even start on charging five loving quid just to drop someone off
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Mar 21, 2023 17:04
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Airports coming up with new ways to gouge you is nothing new. Looking at the entrance to Bournemouth airport on Street View shows how the controlled zone where cars get charged for entry has expanded and become more bastardly over time - they've removed all pedestrian access and turned the gate/turning circle where people used to hop out into a red box covered by cameras, so you have no choice but to pay a minimum of £4 just to get to the door. I'm sure other airports are just as bad.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:11
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I’m usually one of the more (sometimes toxically) positive folk here but yeah gently caress me coming back into this depressing shithole is like walking through a sudden air pressure frontier. It’s palpable. That massive loving baggage claim hall at Heathrow doesn’t help either, feels like grabbing your bags from the inside of the Borg cube. Then you have to be literally looked up and down by one of those auto-barriers.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:12
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our country is poo poo but it helps to not live in London, a land of contrasts, most of them poo poo
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Mar 21, 2023 17:13
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Yeah to be honest the south sounds much more unpleasant than this bit. For all that this bit is poo poo in its own way at least everyone's loving skint so there's nobody to gouge money out of in a lot of cases.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:17
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the best example i've seen of someone suffering from returning to britane depression is my friend who came back from a week in cuba to then be hit by all the horrifically depressing poo poo in london. (and then he was lucky to visit me in Middlesbrough very specifically the day the queen died) ultimately we're all just very very lucky to live at the end of something, specifically british society as a whole.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:30
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Hey Owlfancier have you at some point in the past expressed a passing interest in fossils? I will be in Whitby w/c 17th of April if you wanted to meet on the beach to look at rocks and that. Nearly all this was collected at Whitby: 
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Mar 21, 2023 17:31
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ItohRespectArmy posted:the best example i've seen of someone suffering from returning to britane depression is my friend who came back from a week in cuba to then be hit by all the horrifically depressing poo poo in london. We'd be luckier to not be living through thus to be honest
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Mar 21, 2023 17:33
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I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union and now I'm living through it again but dumber and 30 minutes from Moskva.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:35
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forkboy84 posted:We'd be luckier to not be living through thus to be honest ah but think of the content
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Mar 21, 2023 17:41
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Sanford posted:Hey Owlfancier have you at some point in the past expressed a passing interest in fossils? I will be in Whitby w/c 17th of April if you wanted to meet on the beach to look at rocks and that. Nearly all this was collected at Whitby: I may actually be around then, I will let you know if so depending on work! Cheers for the offer.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:41
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Nth-ing the 'Britain looks and feels like a hostile dump' sentiments. I know it's easy to fall into that trap when you're abroad on holiday because your mindset is different, you're not engaged with the minutiae of daily life in wherever you are and you generally don't visit rougher bits of other places as a tourist. But even the UK's 'shop window' or 'public face' comes across as dysfunctional, shabby, run down and strangely aggressive. You only have to compare the relative cleanliness, appearance, staffing or design of the port facilities at Dover and Calais to see that. Or the condition of the motorways leading away from them. Even stuff like motorway service stations in a lot of Europe just look and 'feel' better than the ones here - better designed, less chaotic, less brimming with gambling zones and phone accessory stalls. Less like a money-extracting facility and more like places for people to break their journey. That was my impression when I drove through a swathe of France last December. Then on the way back we routed through Wallonia and that had a grimy, grey, run-down, post-industrial malaise feel to it to alleviate any brewing homesickness. So the Europeans can do it too.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:41
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At least Walloonie have Liege Bastogne Liege
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Mar 21, 2023 17:45
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BalloonFish posted:Or the condition of the motorways leading away from them. I found the opposite to this one when going from Hull to Rotterdam. The roads were poo poo on the Rotterdam side.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:48
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I’m waiting for a Eurostar and the departures area at St Pancras has clearly been designed by our finest misery architects to make you grateful when you finally escape england
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Mar 21, 2023 18:34
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Soricidus posted:I’m waiting for a Eurostar and the departures area at St Pancras has clearly been designed by our finest misery architects to make you grateful when you finally escape england To be fair, Brussels midi/zuid on the other end of the line is also pretty miserable as stations go. It's practically like being back in Britain, except there's marginally better snacks on offer.
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Mar 21, 2023 18:39
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Eurostar was always the best way to get to the continent before brexit, now its miserable slog combined with the constant fear you wont get through security in time
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Mar 21, 2023 19:43
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1965917 posted:Eurostar was always the best way to get to the continent before brexit, now its miserable slog combined with the constant fear you wont get through security in time They are good at making sure you always get through security (in my experience) - they'll triage people by boarding time if it's busy.
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Mar 21, 2023 20:02
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Private Speech posted:It's worse than other Scandi places in terms of xenophobia, in general it goes something like Norway>Sweden>Finland>(Netherlands for comparison)>Denmark, but even then it's not that bad. Tell me you know precisely nothing about the Nordics without telling me you know nothing about the Nordics.
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Mar 21, 2023 20:17
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endlessmonotony posted:Tell me you know precisely nothing about the Nordics without telling me you know nothing about the Nordics. I mean can you elaborate? I'm basing it on both personal experiences and politics, but if Norway/Sweden are significantly more fash than Denmark please do say. Also Denmark in talks with Rwanda on transfer of asylum-seekers but there are many other things along those lines. Like that ministerial cake celebrating number of migrants deported, say. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 20:36
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Private Speech posted:I mean can you elaborate? I'm basing it on both personal experiences and politics, but if Norway/Sweden are significantly more fash than Denmark please do say. You're using the wrong names for places, are fully ignorant of their history, don't know a loving thing about the politics, and somehow haven't even picked up on Denmark getting a "could you stop being so Swedish?" whenever they get louder about being racist. Only thing you got right was Norway being the least xenophobic.
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Mar 21, 2023 20:41
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endlessmonotony posted:You're using the wrong names for places, are fully ignorant of their history, don't know a loving thing about the politics, and somehow haven't even picked up on Denmark getting a "could you stop being so Swedish?" whenever they get louder about being racist. What wrong name for places? Using the word "Scandi"? I use "Euro" about Europe too for one. Also there's like a billion xenophobic things that Denmark did which Sweden didn't, here's an article about something else like that: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglo...al-correctness/ quote:In 2006, Denmark made global headlines with the Cartoon Controversy ignited by depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in the newspaper JyllandsPosten. As riots erupted throughout the Muslim world, the Danish authorities refused to intervene in the matter as requested by a delegation of ambassadors from Muslim countries. That doesn't like the stereotype is that Sweden is more racist? Private Speech fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 20:46
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You're entirely ignorant of the local culture or history, but are making moral judgements about the place based on half-remembered rumors and then sorting them based on entirely arbitrary criteria. gently caress me that's English as all hell.
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Mar 21, 2023 20:50
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Sir Sidney Poitier posted:I found the opposite to this one when going from Hull to Rotterdam. The roads were poo poo on the Rotterdam side. The entire Rotterdam area is one giant heavy industry site, and the roads leading to and from the port serve an absolutely massive amount of trucks, which at least partly explains that. The Netherlands is behind with road maintenance as well though not nearly as badly as Germany.
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Mar 21, 2023 20:51
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endlessmonotony posted:You're entirely ignorant of the local culture or history, but are making moral judgements about the place based on half-remembered rumors and then sorting them based on entirely arbitrary criteria. I mean I'm not English? Maybe I just act like it. Also for personal anecdotes, as an eastern european in Denmark I got verbally shat on several times by various different people, while nothing like that happened to me elsewhere in the region. Stuff like "You're all a bunch of thieves" and getting denied service. I guess some of it is specific to Czechs but honestly it was pretty shocking, and I've had some pretty bad experiences in Britain too.
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Mar 21, 2023 20:52
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Guavanaut posted:I thought similar at the time. All part of the words not meaning things reality. she got herself barred from northern ireland lol
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Mar 21, 2023 20:53
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i don't even know if anyone has managed that before
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Mar 21, 2023 20:57
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Private Speech posted:I mean I'm not English? Maybe I just act like it. Yeah that's why it's so ironic you're doing that poo poo in this thread. I can't even start educating you on this, you're so incredibly wrong. Pick up a book on Swedish history, especially the bad bits (so, anything fifty years or more ago). Denmark has a long, long way to go to catch up to Sweden and the rest of us wish they would stop trying.
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Mar 21, 2023 20:57
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endlessmonotony posted:Yeah that's why it's so ironic you're doing that poo poo in this thread. Quite a few countries did heinous things over 50 years ago though, I'm not sure that's that relevant to what living there is like today. Maybe just go into a bit more detail, I'm willing to be proven wrong but I haven't seen anything beyond "they sided with nazis" and "antisemitism is more common" (which honestly is not a super strong signal these days, if at all). It's not like Denmark doesn't have its own lovely bits in history too. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 21:03
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New comrade corbyn comedy routine just dropped https://twitter.com/abcomedian/status/1638173350278352902 No I don't know if the idiocy on display is the joke either
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Mar 21, 2023 21:07
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endlessmonotony posted:Yeah that's why it's so ironic you're doing that poo poo in this thread. I'm sure neither of them are as bad as Finland 
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Mar 21, 2023 21:16
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Didn't Denmark invent Legos? Buys them a lot of leeway in my book.
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Mar 21, 2023 21:17
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SixFigureSandwich posted:The entire Rotterdam area is one giant heavy industry site, and the roads leading to and from the port serve an absolutely massive amount of trucks, which at least partly explains that. The Netherlands is behind with road maintenance as well though not nearly as badly as Germany. We were going to Germany so that further explains the experience.
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Mar 21, 2023 21:24
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I mean even if you look at surveys of e.g. police stops of ethnic minorities: and the rate or reporting for discrimination/hate crimes:  Denmark "wins" pretty handily? Maybe not by a lot, but relatively speaking. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 21:31
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Of course that doesn't come anywhere near Austria, but hey.
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Mar 21, 2023 21:35
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Austrians. Universally lovely people.
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Mar 21, 2023 21:39
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Would you feel differently if they'd invented legos?
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Mar 21, 2023 22:06
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endlessmonotony posted:Yeah that's why it's so ironic you're doing that poo poo in this thread. Lmao what're you talking about. We're all poo poo and trying to defend denmark as in some way exceptional is ludicrous
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Mar 21, 2023 22:14
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