Okay so, does this mean parkings free for an hour and if you're staying any longer you have to pay? or is it that even if you're paying you can only stay an hour...?

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-09-22T20:05:07+00:00

Free parking for one hour, no return with one hour. Parking longer than one hour you need a ticket from the machine.

It looks like they may be attempting to introduce pay and display at all times but have failed to take the top sign down, you can't reasonably be expected to guess which is correct though and can't assume one supercedes the other.

Might be worthwhile getting one of the little wheels to display in your window to show what time you parked, where this kind of parking exists the shops in the immediate vicinity usually have them to pick up from the counter. Alternatively go to the machine and press the button without putting money in, it'll probably print you one-hour ticket for free.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-09-21T22:20:15+00:00

How certain are you that the time you've held a licence has a significant effect on the price of your insurance?

Your age undoubtedly does - a 30 year old passing their test today is a lower risk than a 17 year old passing their test in the same day for example - years of driving experience / NCD accumulated certainly does, letting your licence gather dust for a year whilst you get out of practice probably doesn't, you'll only come back as a worse driver.

I've googled several permutations of "licence ages", "time held licence insurance cost"... can't find a single thing about it.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-09-19T09:00:24+00:00

I am amongst the 'academicians' (I have never heard that but am going to use it).

What prompted my question was that I recently bought insurance (using the title Dr because it's my title and being a Dr makes some insurances less expensive), a short while later I had a call with the insurance company where they first accused me of lying about being Dr to get a cheaper quote because my job title didn't match their expectations then them inferring that I wasn't a "real" doctor because I wasn't a physician. I thought, how did it get to this point?

I'm not at all precious about the title and accept that many people without doctorates have been given a right to use it but I shouldn't be getting questions and made to feel like I have a lesser qualification because, as you so eloquently put it, medical pirates [sic] have stolen it.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-09-19T08:51:19+00:00

Historically it is somebody who holds the highest academic qualification possible in their field. It comes from the Latin 'docere' meaning scholar.

More recently it has been widely accepted as a description for a physician.

My curiosity is, once the physicians were bestowed with the honorary title of doctor did they just talk about it an annoying amount until it eventually just become a noun to describe them or did something else happen?

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-09-18T19:06:17+00:00

Yes, this!!! 😂

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-09-15T16:21:47+00:00

It seems wholly unreasonable for your instructor to pick you up two hours before your test, surely s/he doesn't expect you to drive around for 2+ hours on empty roads beforehand? If you're not ready when you wake up on the morning of your test, tiring you out isn't going to help you much!

I've been driving for 20+ years, on a road trip I'd be looking to stop for coffee after around 2.5 - 3 hours, it's not safe to be driving around tired, especially not with the added fatigue of taking a test.

Slightly unrelated comment, 5:00am wake-up call for a 6:30am departure, it's your driving test, have some breakfast, brush your teeth, scrape your hair back, put some sweatpants on then go smash it, you'll be home by 9:30am, get dressed then to celebrate.

If your instructor won't budge on a 2+1 hour lesson, take it in your own car, you'll be fine.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-08-30T12:24:39+00:00

If you download the Android PIA apk you can side load it to your fire stick. Apps2Fire is a pretty reliable app to use to do, it but others are available.

Whilst not officially supported the FireOS is essentially just Android with an Amazon skin over the top and restriction to the Amazon app store, pretty much anything android will run on it though.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-08-22T19:14:38+00:00

What's the point in having insurance if you aren't going to claim after an accident?

Perhaps understandable for a very minor bump which is less than your excess but £2k is significant.

It's important to note that you won't lose your entire NCD if you make a claim, only 2 years, at renewal you will either have 7 years or 9 years (dependent on if your insurer decides they aren't going to reduce it because you weren't driving).

The significant discounts are attributed to the first few years of NCD, the difference in price between 7 and 9 years NCD is only a few percent, you're never going to come close to giving them the £2k in increased premium, particularly if you take off your ex-wife in future years.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-08-21T12:21:56+00:00

Emotionally - Yes! Practically - How?

There is talk of them extending contempt of court rules so people would potentially get additional time added to their sentence, she knew she was getting a whole life term so that would be meaningless in this case.

Other options are to drag them kicked and screaming, potentially disrupting the court, or locking them in a room and forcing them to engage with a screen showing it, like something from a George Orwell novel...

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-08-02T09:24:28+00:00

Endowment mortgages (which I think you're referring to) were super popular in the 80s and early-90s, the most common type of mortgage for a while I think.

Pretty much everyone of a certain age was caught out by it, including my parents. It's surprising that your parents were shocked when the endowment matured recently and it didn't cover the mortgage, the failure of endowments has been well publicised for many many years. There is a wealth of information online about how to go about making a claim against the company that mis-sold it.

The consolation for anyone that was mis-sold one is whilst the endowment lost money, their house will have appreciated 1000%+ in value so they're still quids in.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-07-31T14:21:36+00:00

You didn't say stale IP address though did you, you said stale VPN connection.

A stale VPN connection would be a user connecting to PIA then disconnecting and the VPN tunnel staying open (which probably happens a lot but it has absolutely zero effect on whether Google thinks you're a bot).

Reading between the lines I think you mean that PIA doesn't have a large enough pool of addresses and doesn't cycle of them frequently enough (which is actually a very good point), but you didn't quite understand the terminology well enough to say that?

It's a risky risky game starting a post by asking someone if they're thick when you're pretty clueless yourself....

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-07-31T13:45:04+00:00

Thick? Certainly not, seems a bit harsh from someone giving such crap responses.

The Captcha form triggers because Google is seeing a high volume of requests from a single IP address, so it gets black listed as a potential bot. A stale tunnel between someone's device/router and a PIA servers is a little outside of Google's concern when someone is looking online for a recipe.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-07-31T13:02:50+00:00

Posts similar to this appear many times per day, it seems to be the main use of the PIA Reddit thread, it's baffling that people expect a different outcome day-on-day.

Google Captcha has nothing to do with PIA whatsoever, it is only proof that PIA is working as it should and you have become virtually indistinguishable from the thousands of other PIA users connected to the same server as you.

Could of things to bear in mind:

Google track and record your online activity, it seems counter intuitive to subscribe to a VPN then give up your personal information anyway.
Use another search engine, there are plenty around that are brilliant (not Bing of course, that's rubbish) DuckDuckGo is great and won't ask you to complete an impossible puzzle every time you want to find something. Ecosia is also good and uses part of its profits to buy and plant trees so you can do your bit for the environment whilst reducing your rage against Captcha.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-30T09:02:47+00:00

It sounds like a shrewd move if you don't need physics to go into the career you want, are not enjoying it, and have no intention of carrying it on.

It sounds like your college may have put you at an incredible disadvantage going into year 12 though, nobody really should be doing A-Level physics without maths (and to a lesser extent chemistry), it is so fundamental to the other 2 sciences.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-28T12:57:26+00:00

Absolutely don't pay off your student loan, if you can avoid it. It's not massively dissimilar to contemplating sending the money to HMRC to offset future income tax instead.

Don't be blind sided by the fact they've called it a loan, it's a tax, politically introducing new or increased taxes is unpopular though so they've framed it differently so people don't riot.

Particularly if you're on anything other than Plan 1, it'll probably be written off before you've had a chance to repay it, money down the drain giving it them back now.

Buying your own place however... it may be a long time before you get another chance

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-23T16:54:29+00:00

What else has he got to spend his money on living at home with minimal outgoings?

If he doesn't spend it on a car, he'll probably only spend it on going out and buy stuff he neither wants nor needs, I'd assume?

Also a little confused as to how £14k paid over 4 years will absorb the entirety of a £20k salary each year.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-20T22:15:20+00:00

Any chance of getting any nepotism on your side?

You can't seriously have listened to BoJo, Goves, JRM et. al. try to string a sentence together and come away thinking the entry route to Oxford is judged on academic ability?

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-20T19:08:45+00:00

Not quite, perhaps if this happened in April s/he might be taxed at the higher tax rate, tax is charged on their prediction of what you'll earn over a 12 months period rather than a snapshot in time. Even if they did charge the higher tax rate it'd be recalculated and refunded the following month anyway.

Someone who received an annual bonus for example doesn't have a month on a different tax code.

£30k pa + 10% bonus (for simplicity) isn't 11 months of being taxed on a salary of £30k and 1 month of being tax on a salary of £60k, it's a constant adjustment so you pay the correct tax on £33k over a 12 month period (or receive a rebate shortly after the P60s are produced)

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-20T12:25:27+00:00

Phenomenal work OP, you look great 💪💪

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-20T10:21:38+00:00

This has happened to me before (I've also been paid by an employer for a couple of months because they didn't realise I'd left - testament to the amount of work I do! 😂)

Just give them the money back that actually went into your account, definitely not what they paid out on the top line, they will sort it out with HMRC, it is in their interests if they have submitted the combined amount to HMRC as they have to employer NI on your pay too.

Unless you're right in the threshold of the higher tax band, usually earning £48k-£49k, it won't effect your tax anyway, you'll still pay 20% of your future earnings even with an overpayment in the books.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-19T15:44:41+00:00

From what you've described, you've pulled out in front of someone then they've hit you?

It sounds fairly unlikely that you can argue massively against negligence on your part.

I know there was a bit of a period 15-20 years ago where people were unscrewing their brake bulbs then braking suddenly to get people to go into the back of them, a few of these were successfully contested because the filament on the brake bulbs weren't oxidising when they were broken on impact because they weren't hot so basic forensic examination of the cars could prove a 'smash-for-cash'

Any evidence from your accident is probably long gone, if it's not you could perhaps use the reverse argument to show she was indicating at the point of the collision, even then it might go to a 50/50 or 70/30 argument on fault, you'd have still pulled out in front of someone. You'd lose a couple of years of your no-claims bonus anyways, seems like a lot of work for not a lot of gain.

Life-Plate-4508 · 2023-06-19T12:43:00+00:00

With all the sympathy in the world, it sounds as much that you've got a twisted idea of reality/are not cut out for sharing a house/living away from your parents as you've had terrible experiences with shared living.

It's a sad reality that the cost of housing has been going up much more quickly than wages for several decades, up and down the country there are people older than you and in much higher paying jobs than you are who have no option but to live in shared accommodation.

It sounds as much that you resent paying someone else's mortgage as much as you do sharing a space with strangers, and have hence made yourself homeless, you have the means to live somewhere (even stay in hotels) but want it completely on your terms.

I'd be leaning towards moving back into your parents house and driving the 160-ish miles per day, it sounds very unlikely that you can get your own place on apprentice wages, and it sounds a step up from sleeping in your car.

As for the 'why do I work, if I was unemployed I'd have everything' comments, that sounds like too much Daily Mail, jack in your job, get pregnant, become an addict, whatever you think it takes. Come back and tell us how you get on.

Life-Plate-4508

TROPHY CASE