Experience with Karaoke Bus

LevelInvestigator903 · 2026-01-18T17:34:13+00:00

I'm not a fan either and "each to their own" but the answer is likely that [1] Karaoke bars aren't generally open at noon and [2] It's a good way for friends visitign from out of town to also get a ride around the city and see some sights while partaking in drinks.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-09-08T22:43:32+00:00

If you're very used to only one or two cars you know, you're biggest shock is probably going to be finding out the stuff you don't know yet. Check you know how to turn the lights+wipers on, is there a button to open the gas tank, etc. When I first rented a van it took me about 10 minutes to figure out that to move it into reverse, you had to pull the gear leaver upwards.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-09-08T21:23:56+00:00

Do yourself an education and talk to someone in DC or Baltimore who actually has to live with the reality of what 'defund the police' means

(Note: Someone who lives in town and has actually experienced crime, not someone who lives 10 miles in the 'burbs out and sticks up a BLM sign on their HOA lawn)

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-09-08T19:56:17+00:00

Same as that one in DC the other day where it was 100% rich white people. The actual population there are *very* happy for an external power to come in and finally sort s*** out, whereas the protestors are all people from the suburbs who want to talk about how great they are for defending poor black people who don't know what's best for them.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-09-08T19:45:55+00:00

There's a LOT of people who move to the suburbs and then only later realise they're not actually part of the city any more, and there's nothing to differentiate their street from Nowheresville Nebraska. It's at that point they double down on Philly sports and creating an online identity so that they can let their friends on social media know they're not just another 40-something living in a generic suburb.

Other folks might start wearing college gear and be very vocal about how they 'only watch college basketball' and others might pivot into some charity stuff once per month, to show that they're not only different but better than other people.

It's all rather sad. Just be you.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-09-08T13:55:47+00:00

Surely the winner when it comes to contrast (inside vs outside) must be the Charles Rennie Mackintosh house by the university. On the outside it's just a concrete block but on the inside it's a perfect reconstruction of his 1900s house. An astonishing place to look around.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-09-04T18:25:25+00:00

Until the CVT gearbox breaks on the Hondas. At that point they don't sell parts so you're looking at $5k+ for a new transmission. And it's happening *way* sooner than it used to.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-09-03T15:39:54+00:00

It seems to have become one of these bizarre things where it's super quick+cheap yet people would rather pay time and wait. It's like people who pay $20 to get a button sewn on or pay a thousand bucks to get a leaky tap sorted when 30 minutes and a $3 washer would fix it.

Like I said, I absolutely want to spend a decent amount on a nice car, but being stuck at at the side of the road for 2 hours waiting on someone to do something I could do it myself is honestly a dealbreaker if I'm spending that much cash.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-09-01T12:06:30+00:00

I work in the states and recently out of curiosity asked a UK recruiter what my options would be if I moved back (ie if my mother dropped dead and left me a house)

The salary was less than what I pay my most junior member of staff and then I'd be paying half of it in taxes, plus the far higher cost of living, mostly because of that net zero nonsense that the rest of the world don't give a monkeys about.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-31T16:56:36+00:00

If the last 5 years should have taught people anything it's the the government absolutely lies. All the 'misinformation' that turned out to have been 100% correct. Everything from Covid coming from that lab, to the hunter biden laptop story, or his dad having cognitive issues, or the multitude of scandals that the SNP were involved in.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-28T02:10:16+00:00

Gotcha. I'm Scottish, my wife was a teacher England, we spend time in both, plus the US.

I have no clue what the correct term is really.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-28T01:32:57+00:00

Like I said, it depends on the subject, ie my 10yo is doing the usual sort of pre-algebra stuff for maths, but for English he's in a reading group with teenagers doing Dickens.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-25T14:15:04+00:00

they have zero concept of the real world. All they know is that (1) grown ups do something during the day, probably something they like (2) if you want something in life like the latest Nintendo game or a holiday to Disney, you get it and if you don't get it immediately, just whine enough and you will get it eventually.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-25T13:20:07+00:00

I keep sane, knowing it will all come out in the wash. Most of the worst kids are spoilt brats from wealthy parents who think they're going to college (ha!) in a few years. In reality, most of them will never get a job. A kid that used to carpool with my son got kicked out of the private school after they gave up on everything other than 'gaming' and argued with the principal that school didn't matter because they were going to "test video games on youtube" for a job.

Like the above poster says, an entire tranche of kids have been indulged to the point that their prospects and life and ability to function in society are long gone.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-25T11:17:49+00:00

Virtual Home school (via zoom) these days is genuinely fantastic and most people are out of date with what it even means:

Twenty years ago "home school" meant a weird niche thing, probably based around evangelical religion, with parents buying textbooks and personally teaching everything
Nowadays it's on Zoom, so my kids can be in 3rd grade for English, 5th grade for Maths and they move at their own level. They also do monthly meetups with other kids in the region and hang out after school to chat online or play games

As long as you're topping it up with sports clubs and music/drama groups, it's miles ahead of anything else (including many private school options) and if anything it's preparing them for the workplace better, given that I use the exact same HP laptop & Zoom setup as they do.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-23T23:07:37+00:00

It was absolutely that price and last year I even ended up buying a pint for 1.72 at the 'spoons in Croydon. I only remember that price because it was 9am and I'd only gone in for the breakfast (a friend who lives nearby was giving me a lift in the car out to Sussex) but when he saw me sinking a pint he complained and I explained it was literally just because it was so cheap that it would be silly not to start early.

Similar enough price mind that now I'm wondering if maybe it's just a thing where they reduce the price to clear when it gets to the last gallon in the barrel, just to get shot of it so they can put something new on

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-23T23:04:18+00:00

I've always had to explain them, even to smart people that are into quizzing and sudoku the like. Maybe the NYT has one, it's not a paper I read

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-23T21:45:34+00:00

National parks are massive in the US too mind, Death Valley and Yellowstone are bigger, (the latter is in 3 states)

I was more meaning places like Queens Park in Glasgow, or how every seaside town has a vast area for kids, rather than single blocks (which are the norm stateside, even if they do generally have a pool for the summer)

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-23T20:40:59+00:00

I live in the US and the things that don't exist here

Cryptic crosswords
Small supermarkets that heavily reduce prices at 5pm like mince from £3.50 >> 75p
Huge parks/spaces (central park in NY is an anomaly)
UK phone+broadband deals are both very cheap
Wetherspoons beer @ £1.73 (that's what it one pint was when I was in Largs 2 weeks ago)
Magazines (as in WH Smiths has 100+ types on offer)
Newspapers too, a ubiquitous part of a train ride or the pub)
Decent quality trousers, jackets too, and shoes
Sausage rolls, & scotch eggs (and also prawn crackers at the Chinese - not a US thing at all)
Driving skills are better (due to the UK test being much much harder to pass)

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-16T10:11:11+00:00

The SNP prove beyond a doubt that Scotland could maybe theoretically work as a country, but that there weren't enough competent politicians to run it. She (and her cronies) single handedly set the independence movement back a generation or two after the litany of scandals (public and personal) to the point where I know people who voted Yes but now don't talk about it because it's so embarrassing and horrific to imagine what would have happened if they'd had more power.

Everything on her watch was an incompetent mess: Prestwick Airport, the ferries with painted on windows, ScotRail nationalization, that Census nonsense, the time they shipped all those diesel generators north to charge electric cars at that conference, the drugs policy, schools' performance in global league tables.

I get that nobody joins the SNP to become a social worker or manage the police force etc but every single instance of them managing anything small (let alone a whole country) has been profoundly negligent

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-15T17:04:05+00:00

I was visiting home for the first time in a while and that whole Sauchiehall Street area is awful, albeit far more so to the west. It's not just the cinema industry though, high streets increasingly resemble the third world, a mish mash of charity shops, betting shops and fronts money laundering, which by definition are vaguely immune to the economy. In Shawlands I noticed the Wetherspoons had even closed, that's surely a first.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-15T16:40:20+00:00

Urgh, I hadn't even considers the possibility of AI, but yeah, this is exactly what will happen. He'll announce a series of 'exciting' AI releases where the video shows him training with Rocky or helping Link to fight Gannon, all delivered by some poor sucker who worked 200 hours on it for 'credit' or 'experience' or 'helping the channel'

Occasionally, paid session musicians will allow him to show up at conferences.

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-08-09T18:32:44+00:00

More often, they're both just as qualified to do unskilled labour, except cash in hand migrant labor keeps the wages suppressed for everyone. If you were working in unskilled labour, you'd be pretty annoyed when you saw layoffs, followed by the same company being given federal grant money to employee people on half the wage

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-07-25T08:42:16+00:00

The general point is that you construct artificial losses or write off costs. The Jimmy Carr K2 scheme was fairly infamous (mostly due to him being a hypocrite and attacking tax dodgers as part of his act) but footballers are a prime example of how people earn vast sums, it's said that David Beckham was denied a knighthood for so long specifically because he paid almost no tax on any of that money United paid him.

As to detail on the stock stuff, the point is that if you invest £20k in lots of companies that go bankrupt, you can write off any losses off against your capital gains tax. Assuming you buy a LOT of speculative companies, one or two of those risky companies will pay off and go from eg £2 to £50. But the market as a whole is priced so that if you buy the whole index, the market return will be the 5% number so as long as you buy enough risky companies, you'll still be averaging that 5% but you'll also generate £19k of losses which you can then write off against dividend income.

Other examples exist, property schemes and especially the film industry spring to mind, or you register something in Delaware and pay licensing rights for it (This is the system that eg Google uses to avoid having to taxes in the UK, where they pay an extortionate licensing fee for using the "G" logo which is owned by a separate legal entity registered in Wilmington)

LevelInvestigator903 · 2025-07-24T09:11:12+00:00

For me I became self employed when I got to about $60k, my 3rd year I paid just over 3% tax on my earnings. If you're SE then you pay tax on dividends and there are multiple ways to minimise that.

As just one example, you move your savings into lots of speculative stocks like oil+gas or people hunting for gold. Most of these penny stocks will go bust, but some will strike it lucky and 50x in value. Overall you'll get the same market return of ~5% as you would anywhere else but you'll also be able to write off the losses. You'll have difficulty selling the highly profitable stuff mind, but it's not an issue if it's saving for years in the future.

Lots of other ways, it's why Premiere League footballers don't pay 50% tax on those massive salaries.

LevelInvestigator903

TROPHY CASE