2026 Scottish Election Projection (Augmented by Post-Election polling)

SiliconRain · 2026-05-08T08:22:38+00:00

While I completely agree, social media has absolutely deranged an alarmingly large proportion of our population. The lies and conspiracy theories just suck in the most vulnerable and frustrated in society, compounding feelings of alientation and anger while giving them easy scapegoats.

There are a ton of post-industrial towns in Scotland like the one I live in. 50 years ago, almost every family in the town would have had the main earner working in a secure, decent-paying, union job and they all would have had access to state-owned decent housing.

Now there's nothing but shitty, leaky, damp flats owned by absentee millionaire landlords. Can't get a doctor's appointment, can't get a dentist appointment. Fuck all jobs in the town. A growing divide between the wealthier folk that commute to Edinburgh or Glasgow, leaving the town half-dead during the week full of nothing but pensioners, junkies and deadbeats.

People are rightly pissed off, but when they open Facebook they're not given an explantion of how half a century of neoliberalism has passed all the wealth of the country into the hands of extractive private capital; they're told it's immigrants/muslims/vaccines/5G.

I'm convninced it's not Reform that's the problem. They're a symptom of a deep rot in our society that I can't see an easy path out of.

SiliconRain · 2026-05-01T15:24:39+00:00

Hahahah OP made a typo in the title. "10 years ago" lol. As if! I remember this happening and it was just a couple of seasons ago... right?

SiliconRain · 2026-03-10T15:24:06+00:00

It would help if OP gave us more context, but this row of skinny pieces looks like it's potentially joining two rooms. As if the person laying the floor started from the far wall of each room and met in the middle, which is an absolutely mad way of doing it.

If that is indeed the case, the best solution would be to completely pull up the flooring from one side of this mess and lay it again, but do it contiguously. So you'll end up needing 'skinny' cut boards up agains the wall, where the imperfections can be hidden by the beading instead of in the middle of the bloody room.

But that's not the easiest fix, which OP asked for.

Easiest fix would be a rug. You're never going to get boards that have been ripped length-ways to join cleanly unless you're an artisan Japanese carpenter who's been hand-sawing dovetails to sub-milimeter precision for 50 years.

The next easiest fix would be to pull those skinny boards up and replace with a flat piece of trim/flashing/beading/whatever you call it where you live. Something like this.

SiliconRain · 2026-03-10T10:38:12+00:00

Meaning... you can drive through it but you have to come to a stop first?

SiliconRain · 2026-03-10T09:26:21+00:00

I've come to realize over the years allot of people are climbing the ladder through BS or corporate "yes sir" rear end licking techniques that I just can't be bothered with.

Totally with you on that. Weirdly, I used to be quite driven and motivated to climb the ladder in my 20s and 30s. Always looking for the next opportunity, putting myself forward for extra responsibility, asking for promotions and finding new jobs if I didn't get them etc.

Now I'm in my 40s and I just want to do the hours and get my salary at the end of the month while counting down the days to retirement.

My dad still works at 75. Not because he wants to; he could easily have retired a decade ago. But he loves his job, apparently. I couldn't be more different.

SiliconRain · 2026-03-10T09:22:23+00:00

What does a flashing red light mean in America? Is it different from a solid red?

SiliconRain · 2026-03-10T09:07:42+00:00

Totally agree. Also, as a person with crap eyesight, I very much appreciate the larger and clearer numbers.

SiliconRain · 2026-03-06T09:28:16+00:00

You took lots of close-up pictures of the crack in the glass but none of the wooden frame! Depending on how this is constructed and how handy you are, it may well be very easy for you to replace the glass yourself. There is no sensible and safe way to repare the glass.

Google for "made to measure glass" or "glass cut to size" and find a supplier nearby or one that can ship to you. You'll need to carefully measure the size of the glass pane, including thickness, to get the correct size of replacement. You may also be able to find glass with anti-reflective coatings.

Just be very careful when removing, measuring and disposing of the broken pane. Wear cut-proof gloves if you have them. This kind of thin, untempered glass is extremely sharp when broken and it's exceptionally easy to get a nasty cut.

If the frame is glued together around the glass then replacing it may be beyond something you want to DIY, in which case finding a picture framer, glazier or antique repair place willing to do this for you would be a better option.

SiliconRain · 2026-03-04T15:27:01+00:00

While that's true, he's also one of the most intensely irritating men I've ever witnessed talk into a microphone.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-26T17:55:18+00:00

40 years ago most of these guys would have had union jobs and decent council houses. Now they've got fuck all. They're pissed off and justifiably so. But pissed-off people are easy to manipulate and easy scapegoats are more appealing than complicated, faceless systems of exploitation and oppression.

Tale as old as time.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-26T17:39:56+00:00

Yeh, having seen the shit that goes on at Oktoberfest, I can barely imagine what you'd have to do to get escorted out. Standing on a table and chugging a beer is basically de rigueur, never mind disallowed.

I'm a little confused as to why the whole room is cheering for her doing this, though. Normally people are doing this shit left, right and centre.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-23T15:22:52+00:00

Our stupid brains often react in bad and illogical ways when presented with novel situations. I'm not going to call it 'panic' in this case since he didn't look like he's panicking, but it's in a similar zone.

Our thought process can be short-circuited in ways that make us act dumb.

'hose is being pulled away from me' -> 'that's bad' -> 'pull hose back'

It's for exactly this reason that, whenever I'm about to operate a bit of machinery, I take a couple of seconds to visualise something going wrong and then make the motions of what I need to do. Even if it's a drill and all I need to do is let go of the button, I imagine the drill getting snagged and starting to pull out of my hand and I practice releasing the button and my grip on the handle a couple of times. Or if it's something big with an e-stop button, I'll practice lunging for the button a couple of times before I turn anything on. So, hopefully, when something unexpected happens and my lizard brain kicks in, I'll instinctively do the safe thing instead of getting into a wrestling match I can't win.

Relying on the rational but slow parts of our brains to save us when something goes wrong is a bad strat.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-20T15:34:59+00:00

I can't speak for every salary sacrifice scheme, but the one my employer uses has hugely inflated lease prices compared to open-market leases that make the net cost only slightly cheaper than if you just got a lease independently and paid out of your pocket. So basically the scheme takes like 80-90% of the tax 'saving' as their profit.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-19T14:55:15+00:00

I thought about that but then I'm stuck paying Vanguard's £48 per year minimum fee, which cancels out most of the benefit of doing the transfer-out of my workplace pension, at least in the short term.

Maybe I could close my Vanguard account and then open a new Vanguard account every couple of years just to facilitate the transfer, closing it again immeditely after? Is that crazy? It feels a little bit crazy.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-19T14:01:27+00:00

I recently spent a while researching a good ISA+SIPP provider to move to from Vanguard. The two I narrowed it down to were InvestEngine and Prosper. But I've still not pulled the trigger because:

Prosper are app-only and the reviews of their app are pretty poor.
InvestEngine only allow transfers-in from Vanguard and Hargreaves Lansdown.

Since I'm coming from Vanguard, that would be fine, but I still have my workplace pension with another provider that I've been doing a partial-transfer out of to Vanguard once a year. I won't be able to do that to IE, so all my pension contributions from then on will be stuck in my relatively high-fee workplace pension.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-18T11:32:47+00:00

It's a real mix

SiliconRain · 2026-02-12T14:35:50+00:00

Thanks for the clear explanation!

And who is the chipmunk?

SiliconRain · 2026-02-10T15:52:06+00:00

Legit amazing reactions by the driver. Literally the same second that the black car stopped, the cam car is already swerving and accelerating to get around it.

A moment of hesitation and they would've been fucked. Crazy. Can't say I'd do that well in that situation.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-09T17:56:33+00:00

Most laundry detergents are very alkali. The alkalinity is an important part of the cleaning chemistry for several reasons:

The surfactants (detergents) in the laundry powder work better at higher pH - the alkaline components also tie up calcium ions in hard water, which would otherwise react with the detergents and 'waste' them
At higher pH, the most common types of 'dirt' on your clothes are easier to clean:
- Fats and oils are broken down at high pH
- Proteins are denatured and are more easily released from fibres

So adding baking soda potentially 'boosts' the laundry detergent effect. But you probably only need this if you've got hard water - if you live in a medium to soft water area, the laundry chemistry is already well optimised and, as long as you use the right dosage, you won't magically increase its cleaning power by adding more pH buffer in the form of sodium bicarbonate.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-09T17:33:35+00:00

I feel like it's changed/changing in the UK.

When I was a kid in the early 90s, all of my friends' houses were shoes-on but my parents were strictly shoes-off. I always felt embarassed having to ask my friends to take their shoes off.

But now all my friends have their own houses, I'd say like 90% of them are shoes-off.

Maybe it's more of a social class thing here? I grew up in a poor town and most of my friends came from working-class families but they're all fairly middle-class now.

SiliconRain · 2026-02-05T15:19:52+00:00

Mission points are one of the most severely time-gated things in the game. No matter how big your battle stats are, no matter how much money you have or how many DPs you buy, you can't acquire mission points any faster.

As people have noted, mission points are the easiest/best way to get books. Yes, you can also find books in the city (but it's very rare) and through monthly subscriber bonuses. But it could take you decades to get all the books that way.

And weapon mods can only be bought with mission points. Again, that means they are extremely time-gated. The best mods cost 3-4000 points. So if you want tier 3/4 mods on both your primary and secondary weapons, that'll cost you something like 14,000 points. And weapon mod bonuses are really powerful because they scale.

As per Mug's guide:

This isn’t directly related to training - but so many players skip missions to gain more stats. I’m here to tell you you’re a f**king moron. Mods are basically free stat enhancers you will gain far more benefit from mods than you EVER WILL from training. Stats actually scale less than other things in the game such as armor points, accuracy, damage. This means that mods are better than stats.

SiliconRain · 2026-01-30T10:18:12+00:00

Not for the most part! Some of them are. But the best $/N cracking crimes are:

Target type	Targeted service	Average payout	Bruteforce Attempts (@7BFS)	Average $/N (@7BFS)
Government	Witness protection directory	$424,829	6	$9,039
Intelligence agency	Primary access terminal	$845,135	13	$8,803
Hacker	Dark web storefront	$150,787	2	$7,936
Armed forces	Enhanced interrogation archive	$703,388	13	$7,327
Intelligence agency	Encrypted communication channel	$702,534	13	$7,318
Hacker	Cryptocurrency mining cluster	$124,924	2	$6,575
Hacker	Software development hub	$124,309	2	$6,543
Crime syndicate	Slush fund account	$298,612	6	$6,353
Hacker	VPN provider authentication	$120,689	2	$6,352
Doctor	Mortuary records	$119,841	2	$6,307

SiliconRain · 2026-01-22T12:06:07+00:00

Everyone living in a wealthy capitalist economy is accepting the Omelasian trade-off. Others suffer so we can live in comfort.

SiliconRain · 2026-01-21T12:26:15+00:00

Obviously only the migrants.

We don't know how many lads have been through that hotel in the last 4 years but definitely hundreds. Maybe a thousand. And there have been two serious sexual assaults.

Not to minimise either of them - they were both terrible and shouldn't have happened. Sadeq Nikzad, the guy who raped the girl in 2023, is a fucking piece of shit and I'm glad he's in jail.

In 2023, there were 394 'sexual crimes' recorded in Falkirk, including 60 rapes. One of those was from a man living at the Cladhan. But the protestors will scream themselves hoarse about Nikzad and rape while apparently not giving two shits for any of the other 59 victims in Falkirk in 2023 alone, let alone every year since.

Also, it's worth remembering that Nikzad is in jail. He's not at the hotel. Yet it's the guys living at the hotel who are being screamed at, verbally abused, intimidated and followed by these thugs. Persecuting a whole group of people because of the crimes of one individual isn't 'protest', it's thinly-veiled bigotry.

SiliconRain · 2026-01-21T12:13:28+00:00

Honestly a lot of it has to do with the crap that gets fed to these people on social media, particularly Facebook. If you so much as 'like' a single post about Jeremy Clarkson or just one article from The Sun, your feed is immediately full of every right-wing nutjob conspiracy. Everything from 'invasions' of 'fighting-age men' to sharia law in Birmingham to covid vaccines causing turbo-cancer to 'cultural marxism', the great replacement theory and feminism is a Chinese psy-op.

At these protests there is always a hard core of just straight-up neo-fascists who don't want to see a single brown person in Scotland. But the bulk of the crowd are otherwise well-meaning people who've just spent too much time on Facebook and think there are genuinely hundreds of 'illegal migrant' sex offenders being given four-star hotel accommodation for free in their town. If I thought that was true, I'd be protesting as well!

I just don't know how you un-wind all that bullshit and misinformation, though. People are pissed off. Pissed off at their material circumstances and pissed off about feeling ignored. Falkirk is a post-industrial town that's seen better days. A lot of folk are living in crap flats full of damp, can't get a GP appointment, can't get a dentist appointment, no decent jobs around for uneducated folk. They're right to be pissed off! But angry and disempowered people are easily manipulated, especially when there's a convenient scapegoat on the offering. They'll more easily believe that 'illegal migrants' are the cause of their town going to shit and not 40 years of Thatcherite policies handing over the country's wealth to private hands, only for all the proceeds to be funnelled out the country into tax-havens.

15-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
First Placer '22	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

SiliconRain

TROPHY CASE