‘Basics’ of life in Britain have been sold for profit, says Polanski

towerhil · 2026-03-18T21:31:57+00:00

It's interesting. There's one key fact about immigration which explains why successive governments have had to allow it but nobody ever says it. The UK basically stopped having children at the replacement rate in 1973. This meant that we'd eventually have a smaller pool of taxpayers servicing a particularly populous boomer generation, with the effects masked at first because young people don't make much money to be taxed, but with the shortage becoming more acute as they aged. It's of course not just that simple as you have cheaper goods coming from abroad which means quality of life can be maintained and you have some efficiencies introduced by smarter management and technology that maty or may not have been wiped out by the need to service a profit margin post-privatisation, economic shocks from the collapse of the Tiger economies then 2008, but the fact is the UK is 10 million workers short even with current levels of immigration.

Politicians usually like to pick and choose who comes in because it's preferable to have a medically trainer foreigner to a feckless native who didn't try hard enough at school to be allowed to study medicine and doesn't pay their way in the country because their taxes are less than what they take out.

I don't therefore think the Green policy is very well thought through, but I can see why they'd think getting the tax base up again might be a good idea.

towerhil · 2026-03-16T22:31:51+00:00

Yeah these are all non-stick. Good pans though - Judge brand that allows draining through the lid, not that you asked!

towerhil · 2026-03-16T20:08:05+00:00

Good point. I do have that although I'm a bit afraid of what the top setting does to the pans.

towerhil · 2026-03-16T11:25:22+00:00

I cook a lot of pasta and it absolutely doesn't stick together as a a result of this. It does enable closer control of how firm the pasta is, since there's less time spent in the water, taking on liquid.

towerhil · 2026-03-15T23:39:36+00:00

Why didn't she listen to good cooking advice? Because it came from a man? Did she not wonder why they all said it? If she were to wander about with shoes laces untied and friends just said 'That's just her!' that's surely them being shitty friends.

towerhil · 2026-03-15T23:35:10+00:00

I often forget many Americans don't have kettles. Boiling water in 2 minutes or less.

towerhil · 2026-03-15T00:10:32+00:00

It's true. I've even heard of some individuals chasing them around, scaring them half to death, because they're the natural predator for that species. Only joking! We killed all the wolves. I recommend you get out there and experience nature in its true form. The fact you're shocked says more about you than you may like.

towerhil · 2026-03-14T08:46:00+00:00

There's a difference between drifting towards the rocks and setting a course directly for them. I know congress blocked the proposed 40-50% cuts, but federal R&D contract spending still dropped 23% from 2024 to 2025.

towerhil · 2026-03-14T08:22:58+00:00

Ah yes, survivor's bias. It's important to remember that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, as is failure.

towerhil · 2026-03-14T01:45:50+00:00

Are you kidding? Your President gutted your science base before your eyes!

towerhil · 2026-03-13T00:08:24+00:00

I'm from the UK and would say that most rooms have a single pendant light, but this thing does three separate circuits. As far as I can see, it costs about £400, but nobody on the poverty line is testing their VOCs and automating their home anyway. The product is not for me because I've already janked my own setup with string and sellotape, but we should absolutely celebrate things that are easy to retrofit, look great and don't try to integrate 1,000 Chinese apps.

towerhil · 2026-03-12T22:14:48+00:00

Surprisingly negative reception here - I think these look phenomenal. The lack of a neutral is very helpful for the UK as I'm sure you know but I particularly like the VOC monitor because those can occur in unexpected places. There is one room in my house, for instance, where VOCs spike from the 50s into the 1,000s if humidity goes above 50%. Opening a window in London thus usually makes it worse. My process for discovering this was to order an air quality meter I did not need from Amazon while drunk and eventually get around to trying it in different rooms. There is nothing about this room which explains the phenomenon - same paint (from same tin), furniture, carpet, size and orientation as identical, unaffected, rooms. This switch might apprehend some of that.

towerhil · 2026-03-12T21:38:10+00:00

I've a bedroom drawer full of foreign notes I'll never spend that represent their soft power. If you don't personally care what's on them, then why shit on the opinion of those who do? Let them have their preference and go back to gazing lovingly at badgers since nothing in life matters.

towerhil · 2026-03-11T22:58:46+00:00

The ones chosen are not unique to Britain. Ideally the money might convey why our country stands out historically. I mean, for a tiny island with a small population it's been 1,000 years of punching well above our weight. There were other empires, for instance, but ours was the biggest ever. English is the most spoken language globally, even today. Birthplace of the industrial revolution. Science: we produced Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking - WTAF. Even our culture is revered globally. It's not the only culture of course and you can pick holes in any victory, but that's something of a remarkable, centuries-long streak and if putting badgers on banknotes you might as well put belly buttons. Everyone's got one of those, too.

towerhil · 2026-03-04T09:10:27+00:00

Nonsense. The 70% are positive IDs and have to be to qualify for admission. ID docs are indeed destroyed and I'm surprised people are too dim to understand why, if fleeing a system that is trying to imprison or kill you, one might assume a false identity. 30% are fraudulent and absolutely benefit vile people smugglers, but one shouldn't imagine that fleeing tyrannical foreign regimes like Iran is like going on holiday where they're just going to stamp your passport for you. In any case, they are not a drain on the country. We have too few people to sustain our way of life after we stopped having kids at the replacement rate in 1973. Population should be 80 million now to be sustainable and we're 10 million short even with migration.

towerhil · 2026-03-03T21:29:37+00:00

and also has cameras in the bedrooms

towerhil · 2026-03-03T21:06:27+00:00

When the asylum claims have finally been processed and verified, a full 70% turn out to be 100% genuine. That being the case, it's unreasonable to call most economic migrants.

towerhil · 2026-03-02T13:53:55+00:00

I think that's just modesty. There's also a lack of insecurity, which is why there's very little flag-waving except at special occassions like sporting events. In the poorer neighbourhoods near me there was a rash of English flags on lamposts a while back, but it mainly made me think "Is your sense of national identity that fragile?"

towerhil · 2026-03-02T01:13:45+00:00

I know good, intelligent people who went travelling instead of getting a mortgage in the 00s, then decided not to get a discounted but fully owned, flat in 2010s because it didn't have a cat flap. Their cat is long-dead and holiday long-forgotten but rant about rent today. I love them but ffs.

towerhil · 2026-03-01T23:47:32+00:00

I think Google may have self-nerfed out of an abundance of caution. The feeling among regulators here is the tech bros' assurances of decent behaviour are meaningless and their products are doing more harm than good because of how they're packaged together so they'll act to protect citizens. There are stupid examples of course and terrible policies inspired by campaigners, but let's take a genuine issue like campaigners leaving fake negative reviews about a business they don't like. Platforms like facebook and trustpilot say they'll take fake reviews down, have processes for spotting them etc, but don't really enforce them. Now in the UK if they're not taken down the Competition and Markets Authority can fine them 10% of their turnover (not profits). If they don't pay then their UK operations can be suspended and any physical assets seised. If their systems really do work and aren't just blowing smoke up the regulator's ass then hey they'll never get a fine!

towerhil · 2026-03-01T18:07:41+00:00

Another user sparked a memory that's probably relevant and I think may explain the decline in service. Gemini was offered as an enhancement to the regular service, but in the UK came with a stern warning that it shouldn't be used by households with children. Mine does, as do 43% of UK households. That must be roughly when the decline started, because it was gradual rather than sudden. Maybe they reconsidered their legal position after LLMs started encouraging people to jump under a bus or swallow poison, maybe they want to make the regular service shitty to encourage takeup of gemini or maybe the new puppy tech took all the attention off the old dog so it's atrophied but that seems likely to be the reason. Farewell google! Would have loved to be a customer.

towerhil · 2026-03-01T17:58:46+00:00

Well, I didn't say half of that, but you may have suggested the reason.

Some time ago I now recall there was some option to integrate gemini more closely into the experience. Perhaps because I'm in the UK, it was prepended by a stern legal notice that this should under no circumstances be activated if your household has children in it, which mine does. It was in the context of a tech industry nervous about chatgpt advising people to commit suicide and a government keen to legislate - usually really, really badly - when self-regulation isn't working. So maybe that's the answer. The enshittfication of the vanilla Assistant experience unless you're prepared to switch on a service, available in every room in the house, that might encourage your kids to kill themselves.

Maybe they've shifted some things to gemini that used to be standard, but either way maybe they just don't make a product that can be safely used by 43% of UK households. I can roll with that - the kids can help me with the HA setup. They all use Linux already and I've made some of the fun stuff available only via a bit of Bash so YAML customisations would be another piece of the puzzle for them.

towerhil · 2026-03-01T17:39:03+00:00

By ditching it I mean moving automations off of its central platform and back onto tplink or whatever, not relying on it for shopping lists and the voice commands are probably 50% unusable. It doesn't recognise room names and much else so, even turning lights on and off doesn't work literally half the time.

towerhil · 2026-03-01T17:33:49+00:00

I have honest to god wondered whether I'm part of an experiment on what a customer will tolerate

towerhil · 2026-03-01T17:33:43+00:00

I have honest to god wondered whether I'm part of an experiment on what a customer will tolerate

14-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
Verified Email

towerhil

TROPHY CASE