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Pistol_Pete posted:Lol, when I was close to completing on my house, I got a call from HSBC saying: "Ooh, there's a problem: there's potentially a £15 annual rentcharge on your house that's been moribund for decades and we don't lend against leasehold properties!" I was of the understanding that if a ground rent like this hasn't been collected for X number of years then it's considered null and void. Technically my last house in the UK, I was owed £12/year by my neighbour, since their garage was on my land (my house was a "coachhouse" with all the living space on the first floor, with my garage, my neighbour's garage, and a pass-through driveway to a shared courtyard underneath. I never bothered collecting it.
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Mar 9, 2023 00:23
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Reading the "moving to another country" chat from a couple of pages back and it got my interest - obviously because I've done it but also other reasons. Canada is alright. It's less unrelentingly-grim than life in the UK. The government are liberals and the two alternative parties are centre-left and centre-right, so there's no hope of anything actually good... but at least I don't have to see the government trying to loving crucify immigrants and all that poo poo on the daily. Of course things aren't perfect here - I wouldn't want to move here without being at a moderately good level of qualification etc. - though that said, there are jobs here if you know where to look, that you can do and get paid like $30/hr (£18.20) to start and like $42/hr (£25.50) after a year or two, with no real qualifications or with a short course of a few weeks. Stuff like welding or working as a utilities locator (goes and tells people on building sites and at their homes where to/where not to dig to hit pipes and cables). Also apparently there can be some quite well-paying jobs for stuff like call centres here, but I'm not sure if you have to be bilignual? Anyway if you're working minimum wage here or close to it, life is gonna be pretty poo poo. House prices here are less than in the UK (excepting Vancouver and Toronto), and petrol is cheaper, but almost everything else is more expensive. Food inflation is currently ridiculous - and it was already way more expensive than the UK. Healthcare is totally hosed, by design - Doug Ford (Premier of Ontario, most populace province, and all-around piece of poo poo) is trying to privatise it. Overall I'm still glad I moved here. I wouldn't move back - the political climate in the UK and the press are just too depressing. Thinking about that stuff got me wondering though. Is there anywhere in the world that isn't now hosed for ordinary people? Like, houses and food, energy and daily essentials are affordable for the average person, and there's good access to healthcare and reasonable working rights and social safety-nets and that kind of thing? I know some Northern European countries used to have reputations for that sort of thing but IDK if that's still true? Supposedly Spain and Portugal might have their poo poo together to some extent? I've seen some people mention Vietnam is a good place to live but IDK enough about it. E: Cat tax  We got the cats some paper rope for them to chase around. I figure it's probably better for their teeth than any kind of fibre rope, since they like to bite and pull on it a lot. It is a hit. Excuse my messy table, it's usually... well nah it's usually a mess tbh. WhatEvil fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Mar 9, 2023 |
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Mar 9, 2023 19:13
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Gort posted:I'd go to Canada if it wasn't for the mosquitoes and snow Oh yeah I mean those are factors. Mosquitoes aren't necessarily too bad. It depends where exactly you live, if your municipality has a program to reduce them etc. Otherwise you just avoid being outside at dusk and/or wear repellant. The snow can be nuts but again you get used to it. I guess if you don't like the cold and winter then yeah, fair.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:20
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Hmm I was about to embark on a journey to lose a couple of stone and get back to a healthy weight... but now you've got me thinking if I should keep some blubber.
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Mar 9, 2023 19:51
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Magic Mushrooms can apparently help massively with curbing alcoholism (though don't take them at the same time as drinking, probably). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/psychedelic-magic-mushroom-ingredient-could-help-treat-alcohol-addiction-180980658/ quote:In the new study, 93 patients took part in two medication sessions that were separated by four weeks. Each participant received either psilocybin or a placebo without being told which one they got. During their sessions, they were “encouraged to lie on a couch wearing eyeshades and headphones providing a standardized playlist of music,” write the authors. Patients also had 12 psychotherapy sessions—four before receiving any medication, four between the treatments and four after the two doses. It's probably just an extension of the thing I've talked about before where they can allow you a level of self-insight you're normally not able to reach. It's like you're stepping outside of yourself and you can see and analyze your own behaviours more rationally, and see more clearly what you really want out of your life and how you might get there. For some things it makes things that should be really obvious (like maybe "All this drinking is actually making me feel awful, I should cut that poo poo out"), seem really obvious and clear to you, which makes it much easier to act on. Sometimes it's really easy to get caught up in behaviour that you *know* is bad for you and maybe others around you, but still find it difficult to stop, and a psychedelic trip can be like a slap in the face that wakes you up to it all.
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Mar 10, 2023 17:18
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Barry Foster posted:Like I said to Owlie earlier, it was, in fact, a psychedelic experience that led to me making the final decision to quit Ahhh sorry mate I missed that. Good on you anyway. Glad to hear you're making a positive change, and I wish you all the best. E: Oh, for what it's worth, my parents at one point were drinking 2 bottles of wine a night between them, every single night, while I was living with them. I had a word with them about it and pointed out what the government guidelines were for drinking - I think at the time it was maybe like no more than 20 units a week? Anyway they were each drinking 70... and to their credit they did massively cut down, then I think maybe they quit for a while, and then they went back to just having a single drink sometimes when they went out for a meal (which was maybe once a week), and that worked for them. I understand that it's safer to go teetotal if you have been truly addicted but I guess some people are able to cut back to just drinking small, healthy (well, there's no actual healthy level of drinking but you know what I mean) amounts. WhatEvil fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 10, 2023 19:07
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https://twitter.com/joelycett/status/1634269971512426498?s=20
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Mar 10, 2023 20:10
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I *must* have told this story before. The details are a little hazy now because it happened quite a while ago - at least 15 years. My Mum used to work in a pet store in Milton Keynes. One day a fellow from a Japanese TV production company comes in and asks if she knows anybody with a cat they can borrow. Turns out they're filming something about ghosts, and there's the "most haunted hotel room in Britain" nearby - though I'm sure there are about a hundred hotels making that claim. I think it was somewhere in Bedfordshire? Anyway they wanted a cat because according to Japanese folklore (or something) cats are particularly able to sense spirits and ghosts. I think they said they'd pay a small amount (I dunno, like £40-100?) and all it would involve would be taking a cat to stay in a hotel room overnight, with a camera set up filming it. It'd be well looked after and fed etc. So my Mum said "I have a cat!", and they did exactly that. And.... nothing happened. He just looked around the hotel room a bit, then slept, like a cat.
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Mar 16, 2023 03:23
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Just seen a couple of pages back that you guys are getting emergency alerts. You're in for a treat. We get those here in Canada, and they loving suck. Apparently they feel the need, whenever there is a child kidnapped anywhere in Ontario, to send an alert out across the whole of Ontario. Of course, Ontario is loving huge, so quite often you get alerts for somewhere that is over 1000km away. Also fairly often it's just like "A child named [x] has been abducted, she may be with her father [y], last seen at [time] in [super faraway place]" and that's it. Like.... great if you know what those people look like I guess. Also they make an insanely loud noise - much louder than I realised my phone's speaker could go, and it freaks my cats the gently caress out every single time. That said, we have had a couple of useful warnings - we had one that told us we might be in the path of a tornado, and another one which told us we were in the path of a very severe storm, which, yeah, did knock our fence down and leave tons of people without power for days. Oh, also, in Canada the alerts are mandatory, you can't turn them off.
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Mar 20, 2023 01:54
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:If the phone is off or on silent do they still get through? I turn my phones off at night unless I need an alarm to get up. I do have a non-smart phone with a non-functioning SIM in it (it won't work without a SIM so I use an old long-expired one). Yeah they come through if it's on silent, not if your phone is off. If it's a non-smart phone I think you might also be safe?
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Mar 20, 2023 04:05
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crispix posted:CHEREMY CLOHKSHON Speaking of: https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1639904156168093697?s=20 He's still a oval office, obviously, but maybe this is a sign of the tide turning on the "trans debate".
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Mar 26, 2023 16:06
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Eh I mean lots of ex-main-party-MPs have tried to run as independents and gotten slaughtered... but usually the reason they're ex-main-party is that they were kicked out for being a sex pest or similar.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:13
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fuctifino posted:Limmy! Eat the eggy! All good points, except the bit where she said "you can find the money to build HS2!!!". High speed rail is a good thing, actually.
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Mar 31, 2023 00:41
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:These are really good. "There but for the grace of God, go I". A phrase I think about often, never uttered or even considered by any one of these Tory cunts. You're born into circumstances, at random, which *entirely* decide the path of your life. "Successful" people love to say "Ah well everybody has equal opportunities! I worked hard to get where I am!" as if there aren't people born in Somalia who work harder than them, but never end up where they are, having been born in the West, probably to well-off parents (literally, it is more probable that successful people have been born into wealth - familial wealth is the number 1 predictor of being wealthy yourself, unsurprisingly). Reminds me there was a game released (Rust) where when you sign up, your character is assigned a random gender, race and some other traits (including penis size if you're male!), and those traits are permanent and unchangeable. It was controversial at the time but it's obviously how things work in real life. Funny really. https://www.pcgamer.com/rust-now-assigns-players-a-random-permanent-gender-developer-explains-why/
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Mar 31, 2023 18:46
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OwlFancier posted:To be honest I feel like a life skills class should probably focus on "figuring out how to do things" as a skill in and of itself, because if I want to know how to do something I just type it into youtube and there's someone who has made a helpful video on how to do it, which is how I pulled the light module out of my car to change a bulb and put it back in again, and then got asked to do the same thing for a friend who didn't feel up to typing it into youtube, on the basis that I already knew how. Yeah this is true. The bolded part applied to me big time - even though I'm a very practical person and have been for years - including being a professional woodworker, I'd never done any kind of DIY. I owned a house in the UK from 2012-2019 until I moved to Canada, and as that house was relatively new, I didn't do a single thing to it in the whole time I had it. Well, I suppose I changed out 2x toilet fill valves that had knackered - but I knew that was a relatively risk-free job since it was "Unscrew a thing, screw in a new thing" - though it did involve taking the cistern off the toilet which was a pain in the arse. Anyway, I digress. I did buy, in about 2016, a set of railing thingies for the kitchen, from Ikea, which you're supposed to screw to the walls above your worktops, and then you can hang stuff off them, for more storage. I never got around to fitting them because I didn't know how stud walls were made up, what kind of fixings I would need, whether I would need to add some kind of reinforcement to hold the weight, what I would do with the plasterboard if I knackered it, etc. I moved to Canada and ultimately in 2020 we bought a house that was built in 1985. Needed more stuff doing to it, which I was prepared to look into doing but was still kind of nervous of screwing something up... until we had a roof leak. I found water pissing through my ceiling, and knew I had to cut away the damaged plasterboard and work out where the leak was coming in from ASAP, so I just went at it. Found the leak, hired a roofer to fix that (since I didn't feel like falling off my roof)... but once you've done something as drastic as that, loads of other stuff seems easy. I even got the courage to repair the hole and plaster over it myself, despite never having done any plastering before. Plastering a ceiling is not easy, but I did a pretty decent job of it in the end. Just watched a load of youtube vids from a guy called "Vancouver Carpenter" who does lots of plastering (/drywalling as they call it over here). So yeah, don't be scared, just look stuff up on youtube and give it a go.
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Apr 2, 2023 23:53
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Tory MP Scott Benton has been caught in a cash-for-access sting, taking money for the gambling lobby, and had the whip removed: https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1643730537196974084
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Apr 6, 2023 17:33
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NoneMoreNegative posted:Edit: Also Happy Dead Thatcher day, UKMT It's not just any Thatcher Day... it's the 10 year anniversary!
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Apr 8, 2023 05:12
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Official stats say it was still 0.5 last year. Which is apparently 30 million quid which won't get you much. That'll get you an unusable PPE face mask and a single latex glove from Matt Hancock's local pub landlord.
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Apr 21, 2023 18:49
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Guavanaut posted:These days, you just have to play Hitler ironically and then start thinking that he had a few good ideas about the races actually, and you know what they call you, these days? English?
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Apr 29, 2023 03:08
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Guavanaut posted:What are your blokes thoughts on threadbanning the weak gimmick troll Wizard Master? Yup.
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May 1, 2023 14:55
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Let's see what the SCG are up to today: https://twitter.com/RLong_Bailey/status/1654771137690083329?s=20 Oh.
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May 6, 2023 18:57
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OwlFancier posted:I mean the process by which a monarch is supposed to produce a successor is literally generational. I dunno. William is 40. He could be king in the next 10 years, and Phillip lived to 99. Could have a short reign for Chucky and then a loooong reign for Wills.
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May 6, 2023 21:39
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Computer buying talk: I used Novatech and PC-Specialist several times for work and personal computers and they were always good. Good prices, often had a better selection than other builders, and good service.
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May 8, 2023 05:04
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forkboy84 posted:Well a can of Red Bull is about £2.50 for a 490ml can and as it is mostly water you can assume it's about 1g/1ml. A box of 200g of Earl Grey (or 100 teabags) is £4 in Asda. Yeah but you use about 2g of tea per cup (~250ml). Conveniently, the small cans of Red Bull are 250ml. You can get a 4-pack of 250ml Red Bulls from Tesco for £4.75 apparently so £1.19 each (obviously more if you buy them individually and less if you buy the bigger cans/bigger packs). If the tea is €60/100g that's about £52 per 100g, and with 2g per cup that's ~£1.04 per 250ml cup. So yeah, fairly comparable to drinking a can of Red Bull really in terms of cost, especially since I assume it costs about 4 quid to boil the kettle now. Also almost certainly less than you'd pay for a cup of tea from a Starbucks or wherever. Nice tea is nice. I'm not much of a tea drinker but my wife and I went for afternoon tea at Claridges once (yeah I know, wall) and you get a selection of sandwiches and cakes and stuff and you can have basically as much tea as you like, and of course they're all the fanciest teas... I realised I actually quite liked tea, I'd just been drinking really crap stuff. They sell the loose-leaf tea at Claridges too, and I almost bought some to take home... but I resisted, and then I found out you can buy it for like a 3rd of the price they were selling it for online.
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May 9, 2023 15:23
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forkboy84 posted:https://twitter.com/jrc1921/status/1658027700391485440?t=oDsamwRerS7OVhEoeVp_KQ&s=19 "We can't put taxes up for rich people because we're in debt close to the levels after WW2!" Taxes after WW2:  Top tax rate was at 90+% until the mid-60s, it looks like. Let's do that again.
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May 15, 2023 18:26
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big scary monsters posted:They always want people to love the country but they never seem interested in making the country more lovable. Probably an extension of the viewpoint of certain parents that seem to feel that they *own* their children and are entitled to their love, no matter how horribly they treat them.
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May 16, 2023 18:13
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Chubby Henparty posted:I liked Self's track on classic Bomb The Bass album 'Clear' Yeah that's all I can think of any time I hear/see him/his name.
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May 18, 2023 22:24
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:^^^ I cannot parse that tweet. Transgender Trend is a UK TERF organisation who talk about the "harms of transgender ideology to our children" and all that shite. They're saying that Transgender Trend is not so much an organisation as it is an old lady in her basement who has never met a trans person. Marianna Spring, the host of the BBC Verify bullshit has apparently co-hosted a show with somebody who uses Transgender Trend as a source of information. I'm guessing she then got some criticism for this and responded with "I see the trolls are out" or the usual lib-brain poo poo.
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May 23, 2023 15:42
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Remember back when we had proper Flakes? None of this modern rubbish.
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May 27, 2023 20:55
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Failed Imagineer posted:That book The People's Republic of Walmart made the case that Walmart was the biggest centrally -planned Western economy. It might be Amazon now though. Yeah there's a good video on that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuBrGaVhjcI&t=739s This guy's vids are good. The concepts are generally a bit "Marxism 101" but he puts things in accessible and easily understood terms and I think that's valuable in its own way. He's got 1.5m subs so pretty decent reach. Basically "markets are really great, they're the most efficient way to run everything" falls down when you realise that large companies try to deal with markets as little as possible - like how Walmart operates its own logistics rather than going out into the free market.
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May 29, 2023 17:54
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NoneMoreNegative posted:I have this somewhere but not the wall space for it I've been into The Devil's Arse! It's a cave. Highly recommend it.
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May 30, 2023 21:45
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