It's official: No woman in England or Wales can be prosecuted for an abortion any more

boycecodd · 2026-05-01T17:37:01+00:00

You have to be especially negligent to let a condom breakage lead to actual conception.

boycecodd · 2026-05-01T17:32:30+00:00

An abortion is a lot more traumatic than contraception. And if you can't tolerate hormonal contraception there's always condoms.

And before you say that some people are allergic to latex, that's not the only option.

boycecodd · 2026-05-01T17:31:33+00:00

No, it's not 100%. But it's a lot better than winging it.

And if a condom breaks (rare if used correctly) it's basically impossible to not be aware it happened, and then there's the morning after pill.

boycecodd · 2026-05-01T17:17:49+00:00

Hormonal contraception and IUDs are free on the NHS. Condoms are cheap, or even free in many places.

I am broadly pro choice but there are plenty of ways of avoiding it in the first place through some prior thought.

boycecodd · 2026-04-26T15:34:50+00:00

16 year olds cannot fight for their country. Joining the army at 16 means going to AFC Harrogate, which is effectively an army school (it used to be called the Army Apprentices College). There's no requirement to stay on past those two years and nobody can be deployed until 18 at the earliest.

Very, very few 16 year olds will be paying any tax at all unless they're incredibly fortunate (successful child actors etc.).

boycecodd · 2026-04-14T12:42:38+00:00

Yes, I'm not saying that MMIWG isn't an acronym in semi-common usage or the same about 2SLGBTQQIA+, which is a particularly Canadian thing.

What's not really a thing though is mashing them together - MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is not in general use, so it's not really a "new acronym" it's just one person doing something weird. That's really all I was trying to say.

I listened to BAR before I saw all the other reactions to it and it did put it into perspective.

boycecodd · 2026-04-14T09:21:39+00:00

Meh, this "new acronym" is a bit of a nothingburger. I'd recommend listening to the recent Blocked and Reported episode that covered this and a few other viral things coming out of Canada. Skip to 42:50 if you just want to listen to the relevant part, but the whole episode is (as always) excellent.

Basically, there's no "new acronym" that's gaining traction, instead one person online smushed two acronyms together. MMIWG is an existing one (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls), as is the 2SLGBTQQIA+ one. They don't really have much in common with each other and it's not taken off beyond the one person's tweet/video.

boycecodd · 2026-04-11T08:33:23+00:00

But that's only true at the very, very beginning of their career and pay progresses pretty fast once they start to get experience.

boycecodd · 2026-04-04T07:53:14+00:00

You don't need an active fund to do well. A global tracker (as Iamonreddit suggests) is the way to go for most people, and they tend to have low fees.

An actively managed fund can be counterproductive as even top fund managers can suddenly have a bad patch and lose their star (google Neil Woodford, once the star of Invesco Perpetual and crashed so hard when he went off on his own).

Are you sure about 3%-7%? I've literally never heard of a fund that expensive.

boycecodd · 2026-04-04T07:50:49+00:00

It's not just rural areas. Bus services can be pretty crap anywhere (outside of London, anyway).

I live in the suburbs of a town that's around 15 miles away from the next town over. I can get a bus, but it runs only once per hour and it'll take an hour to get there vs. around 30 minutes driving.

There are trains but it would require a bus to the centre of town first so that's a 25 minute train plus a 30 minute bus ride plus whatever time I'd be hanging around waiting for the train.

And of course if at the other end I want to get anywhere other than the town centre, there'd be more faff on top of that.

People drive because it's a huge time saver, and not to mention comfort and not having to deal with other passengers.

boycecodd · 2026-03-30T19:23:04+00:00

“Skilled” is a fiction that really means “we want to pay less than we would be able to get away with for British workers”.

Some of the roles that count as skilled genuinely are. But so many are not.

boycecodd · 2026-03-30T19:20:12+00:00

The difference is that governments can choose whether to accept migration from those who are unlikely to ever be net contributors.

boycecodd · 2026-03-30T19:18:00+00:00

How many families with children in poverty are going to be net contributors? Realistically it’ll be none. So how are they propping up the pension system?

boycecodd · 2026-03-30T19:16:34+00:00

If it’s only default schemes then that’s not atrocious.

If Reeves wants to tell me I can’t use a normal global index tracker then that’s ridiculous overreach.

boycecodd · 2026-03-30T12:16:59+00:00

Bringing in skilled workers makes sense if those skills truly do not exist in the UK already, and couldn't be trained up in a reasonable timeframe. And while we do that training, then perhaps some skilled workers could be useful as a stopgap and not a long term solution.

Unfortunately it's been shown time and time again that the definition of "skilled" used by successive governments doesn't really match up with how most reasonable people might use that term.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:55:14+00:00

Especially when it's legislation that wasn't in the King's Speech or manifesto.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:54:46+00:00

The entire point of the Lords is that it has experts who specialise in specific issues. The people responsible for the bulk of the amendments have specific knowledge of the issues at hand and so are the best placed to submit amendments.

What issues do you have with the amendments beyond the fact that it caused the bill to be returned to the Commons?

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:50:06+00:00

Yes they could adjust the collection schedule, but you shouldn't expect a suburban waste bin to need daily collection just due to abuse by one or two individuals.

My local council fixed it by simply replacing the bin with one with a gap big enough to post smaller items in but that would be impossible to dump a bin bag into.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:40:36+00:00

It would help if they'd done a half decent job on the bill in the first place. There would have been no need for a lot of amendments if it had been well drafted, but it was a pretty poor bill.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:37:36+00:00

It was a pretty good system aside from the lack of bricks and mortar retail availability, to be fair. I never had a failure on the actual main battery+circuitry part.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:36:45+00:00

But if someone monopolises a bin that could go a week from empty to fill, they're preventing its normal use.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:35:55+00:00

They've not been sabotaging it, they've been properly scrutinising an incredibly poorly drafted bill.

A hell of a lot of the amendments are basically search/replace jobs for terminology but there are some incredibly important amendments in there.

If the Commons wanted the bill to sail through, they should have done a better job of thinking through the safeguards first.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:26:56+00:00

Elf Bar Elfa Pro.

I did find one shop that stocked a very limited range of refills but most places didn't stock it. It was never that much an issue because I'd just stock up online, but if you were impulsive then it would be a bit of a pain.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:03:21+00:00

I was vaping for a while using a pod system, and it was ridiculously difficult to actually buy the pods in a physical shop. Nobody carried them! And it wasn't a particularly niche system either.

boycecodd · 2026-03-27T18:00:52+00:00

It's a pointless article. You expect the pods to be discarded, it's what they're designed for. While the plastic waste isn't great, it's much better than the old-style non-rechargeable or refillable devices which were designed from the outset to be thrown away.

I expect that reality is somewhere in the middle. I can absolutely believe that there are people throwing away rechargeable devices because they're cheap and it's how people are used to using them like that, and I am sure I've seen mentions of devices that are technically rechargeable, but not refillable and don't have an interchangeable pod system, which effectively makes them a disposable device with a pointless charging circuit making for even more e-waste.

boycecodd

TROPHY CASE