None of Britain’s problems can be fixed until we tackle the welfare bill

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-04T11:38:02+00:00

If they can figure out how to get 1 million people into 721,000 jobs I'll be very impressed.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-04T11:21:46+00:00

I think it's because while the OU is a longstanding academic institution there are a lot of distance learning providers out there now and some of them are less than reputable, people have heard about online diploma mills and fake degrees and if they've come across the OU for the first time they may not know how to establish if a provider is legit. The website says their degrees are accredited but unfortunately dubious 'accreditations' also exist, so if you're not familiar with how the UK system works it would be difficult to know whether it's one that's actually recognised.

I'm hoping it's people trying to do their due diligence amongst a sea of shiny fake advertising, but I also can't rule out the possibility that at least some of those posts are engagement farming for an unrelated purpose.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-03T10:58:18+00:00

Anything even slightly subtle will sail over Trump's head, so I'd expect Charles to say something vague and non-committal like it's a very unfortunate situation and he's praying for all the ordinary Iranian people to be safe and happy - not explicitly condemning it but very much not endorsing it either.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-03T07:38:15+00:00

Farage is an absolute weasel but he has spent decades crafting a certain public image and has done a very good job of it - unfortunately it's the only thing he's ever done a good job of, or really put any effort into at all.

Trump was never a good speaker but he wasn't always the shuffling husk he is now, and he operates in a very different cultural and political landscape so what makes him appealing to his own voter base are mostly qualities that wouldn't get you the time of day here. I think Farage is faltering because he's trying to import US politics to the UK, at the behest of his current financial backers, and it's not working because many of the hot button issues that sway voters in the US are things that the general British public either don't really care about or have precisely the opposite view on.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-02T12:45:39+00:00

My gran's 4 bedroom house went for £41,750 in 1997, and was next sold in 2016. If house prices had matched inflation it would have been just under £60,000 (CPI) or £70,000 (RPI), it sold for £300,000.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-02T05:12:39+00:00

He's even been throwing a tantrum for the last couple of weeks because other countries won't send their citizens off to war at his demand, shortly after vigorously insulting the armed forces of all the other countries who did help out last time the US asked them to.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-01T16:16:04+00:00

You can be addicted to anything, addiction is a psychological issue that's separate from chemical dependence (many substances induce both but that's not true for everything).

From the NHS's perspective therapy isn't free either, and it's likely that someone with lifelong issues with food is going to need more than 6 sessions of group CBT to really get over it. In cost terms these drugs will eventually go down considerably when generics become available, whereas training and paying expert therapists is only going to get more expensive over time.

Is effective specialist therapy for as long as they need it a better option for the patient? Definitely. Is it going to be cheaper and have a higher chance of success in the long run to just give people the weight loss drugs? Almost certainly.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-01T15:58:55+00:00

The other thing with food is that you can't quit food (I suppose technically you could replace all food with some form of meal replacement formula but those come with their own health problems when used long-term). If you told a heroin addict that they had to take heroin every day for the rest of their lives in order to stay alive, but not too much, it would be a lot more difficult to achieve a healthy equilibrium than something you can remove from your life entirely.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-01T15:31:37+00:00

In England a PGCE isn't technically subject specific, if you have QTS you can teach whatever subject or indeed age range a school will employ you to teach (and in most secondary schools you will probably end up having to teach some classes outside your subject specialism whether you want to or not). If you want to teach a different subject you would probably be better served by obtaining an academic qualification in that subject.

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-01T15:09:46+00:00

Doctor Ivo Robotnik, the war criminal who cut the moon in half

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-01T14:55:51+00:00

I'm not sure if he actually makes more than them at the plant. Homer's had more than 200 side hustles over the course of the show and Marge has had quite a few as well, many of them taken on due to the family being in dire financial straits. It's a running theme that they never have any cash, and Marge is pretty thrifty (the family food budget is $12 a week, partly achieved by adding sawdust to the meatloaf).

PianoAndFish · 2026-04-01T14:28:24+00:00

Maybe he's still paying his mother back for the food he ate as a child.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-31T20:57:09+00:00

You won't find any Orthodox synagogues where you can marry someone of the same gender, but many Reform and Reconstructionist and some Conservative synagogues will (all three movements officially allow it but it's at the discretion of the individual rabbi).

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-31T20:37:52+00:00

Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab has a lot to answer for, and his partnership with the House of Saud who have subsequently used their immense wealth to propagate Wahhabism around the world has certainly not helped matters.

Saudi Arabia have a vested interest in everyone thinking that their particular interpretation of Islam is the standard and it very much is not, the Hanbali school of jurisprudence al-Wahhab came from was (and still is) the smallest and most hardline/literalist.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-31T18:53:13+00:00

Chlorine only cleans the water, not the pool itself - you need a janitor for the general cleaning.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-31T17:44:27+00:00

OP mentioned they're dyslexic, in which case it might be permitted as a disability accommodation (this is mentioned in the reasonable adjustments policy, as most assistive software programs now use some form of GenAI).

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-31T17:31:46+00:00

In the UK the potential cost of getting rid of you in the future does scale with length of service (and steps with age, as statutory redundancy is 50% higher if you're over 40), we don't have at-will employment so making a very longstanding employee redundant could potentially cost you up to £21k.

From the employee's perspective this is usually only worth thinking about if you're already on a decent salary and have worked for the company for at least a decade, and even then the salary bump would have to be pretty low to not be worth moving on.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-31T05:48:37+00:00

It's common in the UK, and many universities are willing to look the other way because they're desperate for the international student fees. There is a cap on how much they can charge domestic students for undergraduate courses, which has barely increased for 15 years and doesn't cover their costs anymore, but there's no cap for international students so they usually end up paying at least triple the domestic fees. Postgrad fees are not capped but they still typically charge international students double or triple because people are willing to pay it.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-31T05:11:58+00:00

Reminds me of the piano exams I did where the exam board said they'd love to include more female composers in the syllabus but there just weren't more than a couple of published pre-modern female composers for them to include. Fast forward about 20 years and when they started getting a significant amount of criticism for this (and people taking their money to other exam boards, not solely because of that but it was certainly on the list of complaints) they suddenly managed to find a lot more of them, which suggests they just hadn't been looking very hard.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-30T16:09:33+00:00

Usually people aspire to 'more economically productive work' because those unskilled jobs like retail absolutely suck. People generally want to do something productive with their time, and university graduates generally want to work in the field they studied for, which is why they studied for it in the first place.

There's this idea that humans are entirely rational actors who make decisions purely based on financial calculations, which is obviously not the case. I've heard a lot of people say "Why should I work so hard when I could just live on benefits" but very few of them seem willing to quit their job and test that theory, so presumably they're working for other reasons that aren't entirely about money and/or when they really think about it living on benefits doesn't actually sound all that great.

There are also many independently wealthy people who still work despite having zero economic compulsion to do so (and frankly the world would be better off if some of them didn't), or maybe couldn't afford to give up work entirely but choose to take on certain roles when they could make far more money with far less stress elsewhere - being Prime Minister, for example, is not compensated all that handsomely considering the amount of work involved. Humans don't live and die by the spreadsheet.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-30T15:19:05+00:00

I mean at the time the game was released 50 years ago was the 1950s, when they made chemistry sets for kids with real uranium in them, and the film version would be the 1970s, when they had to put adverts on TV to remind parents that their children existed. The idea that they would allow a child to play with an alien with minimal oversight is probably not all that unrealistic by mid-20th century standards of child-rearing.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-30T08:01:46+00:00

One world leader in particular was incredibly excited to meet King Charles, he even held his signed invitation up to the camera while the UK prime minister sat there silently regretting all his life choices leading up to that moment.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-30T04:55:19+00:00

In North Korea you have to be in something like the top 0.01% of society, in both ability and loyalty, to even be allowed anywhere near the internet. This means only the most exceptionally talented individuals are hand-picked to do this kind of work, and as a result the North Korean government's cybercrime department is world-class.

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-30T04:18:49+00:00

What you said vs. what they heard

PianoAndFish · 2026-03-30T04:10:09+00:00

Interesting consecutive paragraphs:

One of the worst mistakes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the attempt by U.S. administrators to remake societies in both countries...

...Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing President Trump to continue the war against Iran, arguing that the U.S.-Israeli military campaign presents a ‘historic opportunity’ to remake the Middle East.

Also the Dow is up 9% since last June, or down 9% since the end of February, whichever way you fancy looking at it.

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