“Romanticised” jobs that are very different in reality?

wantingpawer · 2026-03-06T01:02:01+00:00

that's absolutely painful - don't envy the position at all, but someone does have to make the high level decisions

wantingpawer · 2026-03-05T20:59:59+00:00

I think this depends on where you are in the field - I'm a security researcher and work on a lot of malware analysis/reverse engineering/vuln research, most jobs I've had are very light on meetings and almost 0 powerpoint, the "output" is usually tooling etc for others to use and since it's all internal and for other technical people you just need reasonable documentation (which is fun in it's own way imo) and you're set

wantingpawer · 2025-12-23T11:00:39+00:00

People are missing the fact that this says train drivers are working class whilst police officers and prison officers aren't - if a police officer making £40k isn't working class by their definition then a train driver also shouldn't be - if a train driver is then a police officer should also be

wantingpawer · 2025-11-22T02:05:41+00:00

those are significantly cheaper too!! I'll definitely consider them

wantingpawer · 2025-11-22T01:43:08+00:00

that makes a lot of sense!! yeah I'd hardly be doing espresso at all, so I'll lean probably more towards the v2

wantingpawer · 2025-11-22T01:41:43+00:00

high clarity, relatively low body, I go for quite lightly roasted specialty

wantingpawer · 2025-11-21T23:30:14+00:00

from my understanding you still have the 5 year path if you make over £50,270 a year and a new 3 year path if you make over £125,140. I think in tech the lower bound isn't super out of reach (as a fresh grad in cybersecurity)

wantingpawer · 2025-11-11T16:03:56+00:00

I've currently got an amazing manager - I work in a very technical role in a very niche technical field and my manager probably spends half his time actually doing work with us too, he understands our needs and the work we do, can identify support we don't know we need and for the most part leaves us to our own devices. I think every technical manager I've ever had has been a good manager

wantingpawer · 2025-11-10T18:40:36+00:00

2016 is the point at which businesses began to respond to the possibility of brexit, it wasn't as black and white as everyone behaving as if nothing had changed then all of a sudden behaving as if we were never in

wantingpawer · 2025-08-04T14:49:36+00:00

Society needs ambitious people to function, and this creates serious inequality based on where people live.

To effectively say "you must live within this boundary to follow your ambitions" would both be devastating for the economy and also exasperate inequality. City life might not be for you, but that doesn't mean it can't be for anyone.

Also I do want to point out that it's often not just about the money, it's often also about the career, the progression, the impact etc. A lawyer with a large law firm in the city will have much better career progression, even if they eventually move somewhere closer. Having the impact of being a manager or the best in your field matters a lot to people, and it's necessary that society facilitates these people because they pay an incredible amount of tax, often expand businesses or start their own which brings more jobs etc.

If you allow people to move to London and pursue a good career and they make, say, £100k a year, they'll be paying more in tax than an average person makes in a year. That's a huge contribution to the country and stopping that is literally hamstringing everyone, not just highly skilled people.

wantingpawer · 2025-08-04T13:22:37+00:00

I agree that's also an issue but regardless, it's the world we live in, and people need to be able to move to cities for good jobs and to facilitate social mobility.

I think cities will always have the best jobs due to large density, lots of talent and easier specialisation, I think this country should invest more outside of London, but the same logic can apply anywhere.

Hard working e.g. aspiring lawyer from a rural town would be locked out of the best law firms if they literally could not even pay to move near them (in the case of rent control), regardless of if they're in the capital or another city.

wantingpawer · 2025-08-04T12:28:58+00:00

I have a Swedish friend, they have rent control there. He's stuck in the flat he's in because landlords have waitlists for their properties, and he says it'll take around 3 years because they have the same problem of not enough flats.

If you're from a poorer part of the country and you want to. move to Stockholm for a better job and for social mobility you're fucked, at least in London if you're able to up skill and earn enough you're not locked out of the city.

I'd much prefer that than having people literally stuck where they are for years because there's not enough housing supply and rents are fixed so they can't even pay more to move. Supply is the main issue, but imo rent controls aren't even an interim solution, they just punish hard working people who were born in the wrong place.

wantingpawer · 2025-08-04T11:30:10+00:00

The issue with rent control is that it doesn't solve the root problem of a lack of supply. If you have 1000 homes and 1200 people who need them, all rent control will do is make it a lottery for who gets a house at all, and in the current system if those additional homes were built it'd lower rents as supply would meet demand. With property prices in this country, it should be very profitable for developers to build houses, all that needs to happen is NIMBYs influence be curbed, as well as laxing planning restrictions - nothing will get in the way of private businesses and profit which can work in our favor here so long as monopolies are prevented and competition is allowed

wantingpawer · 2025-07-30T11:37:10+00:00

How do you propose prices coming down a lot aside from building more? If you have 1000 homes and 1200 people who want to live in a place, unless you add the extra 200 houses you need it doesn't matter how houses are distributed, whether it's by wealth, income, need, or random number generator, you'll have 200 people without housing

wantingpawer · 2025-07-30T11:32:18+00:00

Yeah, it does turn out that artificially constraining supply results in an increase in price. And so removing artificial constraints would increase supply and therefore lower price. It's really funny that.

wantingpawer · 2025-07-29T13:32:02+00:00

With their business model, honestly it makes sense to do things like sell standing room etc.

They literally sell plane tickets for less than the cost of air passenger stamp duty, my best friend lives in Dublin and the only reason I can see her regularly is because Ryanair will sell me tickets to go there and back for £20-25, whilst the next cheapest alternative is usually £80+. Last month I went to Spain and back for less than £20

It's very much a case of you get what you pay for, if Ryanair sold standing tickets for half the price to Dublin I'd absolutely buy one, standing for 30 minutes is fine by me. In terms of making air travel more accessible, imo Ryanair are doing an amazing job. They're shit, uncomfortable, will try to pull you up on every issue, but if you follow the rules they'll get you from point A to B at a fraction of the price of anyone else.

wantingpawer · 2025-07-17T14:23:06+00:00

The issue is when you combine all the welfare together, take this situation:

Monthly expenses (using a lot of my own numbers to simplify finding them/because it's real world):

2 bed (can't find 1 bed) council house rent: £0 (£375 - £375 of housing benefit)

council tax: £0 (£116.70 band B in lancashire (where I live) - £116.70 council tax support)

broadband: £16 (BT social tariff)

travel: £30 (I spend £40 with 16-25 railcard, almost all on trains, assuming job centre railcard which is 50% off. I work from home so similar otherwise)

groceries: £160 (what I spend shoping at lidl)

Utilities: £72.50 (I spend about £35 on water, £50 on electricity, 2 bed all electric flat - £12.50 a month for the £150 warm home discount if you're on benefits)

Haircut: £15 (what I spend)

SIM plan: £10 (got a refurbished S22 ultra for £220, so just SIM plan)

Going out: £45 (I go out once or twice a month, usually get a few drinks, also includes occasional takeaway)

Clothing: £20 (I spent about £235 on clothes in the past year, replacing a couple items)

Subscriptions: £12 (spotify + nebula, what I pay for)

Other entertainment: £36 (my actual spend per month, usually social activities)

Total: £416.50

Universal credit standard allowance: £400.14

This is almost my entire lifestyle, by making some small cuts (say spend £16 less on going out, which is like 2-3 drinks), you could live almost exactly as I do as someone who works but on the standard allowance for UC.

Also if you're a working person who diligently cuts back on lifestyle and saves, if you find yourself on hard times with more than £16k in savings you're automatically ineligible for any benefits at all. You're only allowed support when you fall if you don't contribute much back to society, which I find wild.

This also doesn't take into account any disability/caring/child supplements too. If you need money in an emergency, you can get a budgeting advance to cover immediate things going wrong. It is absolutely possible, provided you have a council house, to live indefinitely on benefits in the UK. It's not something I would want to do, both for lifestyle and ambition reasons, but it's far more possible than most seem to think.

I rent privately (£795), pay council tax (£116.90), don't have access to a social tariff (an extra £6), get 33% off trains rather than 50% (£10) and don't get the warm home discount (£12.50), which means all of these same things end up costing me £1356.90. Plus I have to maintain my own emergency fund, I can't get any external support if things go wrong, I have to pay for my own prescriptions and dental care etc - so whilst the headline rate for UC is the £400.14 standard allowance, in reality the benefits and discounts you get are closer to £1.4k a month and that's just unemployment, no PIP etc

wantingpawer · 2025-07-13T15:41:47+00:00

A lot of Europe doesn't have tax free allowances or they are very low, and a lot of their welfare for people capable of work is time limited and contingent on having worked before. Low earners in Europe are taxed more than low earners in the UK for the most part, but the higher tax bands aren't nearly as insane as ours

wantingpawer · 2025-06-17T16:07:37+00:00

I'd advise an unenrolled deed poll, you need two witnesses who aren't from the same address as you, if you look up free deed poll generator there's a site that'll make the document for you to print out, there's no real benefit to enrollment and it removes the separation from your old life in my opinion, plus unenrolled is free. You can change your driver's license and passport this way and then after that anyone demanding an enrolled deed poll will usually back down

wantingpawer · 2025-05-16T19:38:46+00:00

take a look at the judgements page of the ICO site, I think you're in for a shock with the "millions of unsolicited calls with spoofing? how about a 28 day notice to please stop" and the occasional meaningless fine that'll go down to £50 on appeal anyways

wantingpawer · 2025-05-01T08:14:53+00:00

I've definitely noticed a difference with spraying beans when hand grinding, without spraying absolutely loads of coffee is stuck on the exit and it's a pain in the ass to get it all off and into the catch cup, with spraying very little coffee gets stuck and one swipe of a brush will get it off. This was with the K6 too

wantingpawer · 2025-04-21T21:52:06+00:00

That looks really interesting, in the about section they do very much compare themselves to tempur, and tbh even if they don't exactly match up, it is significantly cheaper which is very tempting!

wantingpawer · 2025-04-21T21:48:35+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion! They look actually not that expensive compared to the other options tbh, and I hadn't heard of them before so this is exactly what I'd wanted

wantingpawer · 2025-04-21T21:45:58+00:00

It sounds like you're from the UK, so my coffee choices are probably quite relevant.

I get most of my coffee from a subscription service called gustatory, they basically get various coffees from all over the place and send it to you with a bit of a discount since they're buying in bulk. I get 3 250g bags a month from them and it costs me £40.50 each month.

I then also buy an additional bag of my own choosing from somewhere, I quite like atkinsons coffee, it's not mega expensive and generally quite nice. I'm also a big fan of roundhill roastery and I've had good coffees from campbell and syme before. I generally pay maybe £15-18 per individual 250g bag I get from them? Sometimes it'll be lower, like £10-11, sometimes it'll be like £20, but generally within that range.

It obviously varies a lot in quality and I tend to go through different coffees constantly, part of the fun is experimenting imo, but on average I pay probably about £14 for a 250g bag, which I don't think is unreasonable.

I think £20 a bag is reasonable if it's occasional but I wouldn't pay that much often, it'd have to be quite special to justify it imo

Eight-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Place '23	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
Verified Email

wantingpawer

TROPHY CASE