The ridiculousness of the license fee is only highlighted in the modern world.

Tesco do not come hounding me because I’ve not been shopping in there. Yet routinely for the last 20 years I’ve been hounded by collectors from Capita about the license fee. Intimidating letters, bouncers at the door trying to barge in, demanding they can see my TV through the windows. The bullying tactics of this are the exact reason I refuse to pay for it.

Move to a better model, put all the old back catalogue on iPlayer and charge a monthly subscription like Netflix. Use the profits from that to subsidise the over the airwaves stuff. Bill me because I use it, don’t threaten me because I don’t.

I guarantee you the person that was tasked with building the system knew this was unacceptable and was told to get on with it by laters of middle management.

Something trucking has, that non-trucking does not, is enforced rest stops and breaks.

If you don’t sit in a random layby, you rest at a charging point, the “waiting around” to charge isn’t a detriment. Because as a trucker you have to sit around and wait for <x> amount of time anyway.

*I can’t be arsed getting into arguments and different countries and their waiting times. I just know around europe mandatory rests are necessary.

Have places in town that people want to go to, for things they can’t get online.

I don’t want a TV shop in town, how the fuck do I get a TV home anyway? Carry my new TV through the high street? I might want to see a few TVs in a large store outside town, but TBH all TVs now are a thin black rectangle and some software. So I can research the software online.

I want a good cafe, different types of pub, arcade cabinets. Experiences that I can’t get in my living room. Sitting areas and third spaces as you’ve said. Libraries holding talks/conferences. Local bands, during the day.

Make me want to be in town, don’t tell me I have to “save the highstreet” while bemoaning the shops I don’t want to go into are failing.

Which will effectively mean the end of street photography CCTV.

Silver linings and all that

I’d like to see more of a breakdown.

• How many of these injuries are the driver/rider/captain and how many are other people?
• How many are the fault of the driver, and how many are a 3rd party?

The stats on helmets etc. are interesting, but they only tell a part of the story.

The issue with these things being illegal, is the decent people who follow common sense rules and safety stay away. Because they’re illegal. This means the only people who are riding them, are assholes or asshole related. By definition. They’re already breaking the illegal rule, just by using the device. They are not likely to be people who will wear helmets, or be people who will honour (or teach their sprogs to honour) highway code or any other code of common sense. So of course, the accident to user ratio is quite high. Decent users, are not users at all.

I agree with other commenters, these can/could/should be positive devices. Allowing all electric “green” transportation in a tiny footprint. This would work, if we had the cycle/safe-space infrastructure to allow it and if we had a population that would enforce a level of common sense safety.

I agree with the sentiment of trying to ease the cost of housing.

But… building shitty little barely houses, just so the cost of bigger property can justify staying high, isn’t the way forward. Housing needs to be made affordable to people again, and it needs to do that by property prices coming closer to peoples income. If we get there and people are happy with small cheap housing, then great.

I’m seeing similar with holidays. In the 1990s going on a family holiday somewhere abroad and enjoying it wasn’t uncommon. Now we’re glamorising staying in a shed, in some farmers field, with no running water. “Off grid, shepherds hut” my arse, we’re being conditioned that a shite holiday that we can barely afford is a step up.

I don’t want to go back to the waste of before, the masses of international travel and burned cheap fuel. But … we need to call a spade a spade here. Selling cheap, at high prices is just more ripping people off, and leaving people in emotional austerity is damaging to wellness and social being.

American dream

…

And how many “minimum wage” jobs nowadays are actually full time?

Most of them that I see advertised are pro-rata advertised. Under houred or zero contract. But of course if you take two jobs you’ll eventually end up with rota clashes and lose one of those jobs. So good luck there.

Starmer wont condem it …

Still fucking better than actively supporting. Shameful politics in the UK right now. Absolutely disgusting.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-older-and-younger-driver-factsheets-2023/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-older-driver-factsheet-2023

Just plonking this here for ease of conversation.

Reading the article it seems more that Labour and Cons are both more scared of OEUK (offshore energies UK) than anything else.

A cursory search and I couldn’t find anything. I might have to go digging. But…

I’m sure during the COVID lockdown years, as I was reading more into pandemics, there was a scientific conclusion that we’d not yet seen a major worldwide pandemic event that started in the Americas.

Is demand that high? Is there a lack of supply?

Looking at some homeless charities research (potentially biased, sure). There are ~1million empty properties in England. Only a 3rd of them are needed to “solve” the housing crisis. Which would imply there are currently 600,000 (ish) properties in England empty even if we ended homelessness. (naive and overstated … but yeah).

[edit: added some sources] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g840ydlzvo https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/ https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/about-homelessness/how-many-empty-homes-are-there-in-the-uk/

From what I can see, people buying up properties as (monthly, not even over the lifetime of the mortgage) profitable holiday lets, people able to charge rent which is higher than the mortgage on the property. This is the fundamental problem.

Rent should be cheaper than the mortgage. The landowner should be paying something towards the property. I’ve often had people argue that “[landlords] don’t make much money” (200quid a month), ignoring that at the end of the mortgage the landlord still owns the whole value of that appreciating asset.

I kinda see some of the argument about state letting not being perfect. But at least if someone is paying the state a nominal amount each month for the property, they have the space to save for a home of their own. If someone is paying a private landlord more than the monthly cost of the mortgage, they have no space to save.

A lot of the farming and hunting community are annoyed at the current state of gun laws. People who do actually use the limited range of guns in the UK for legitimate uses have to wade through paperwork, fees, wasted time and inconsistent rules to continue owning a gun. It’s also hard to be sure that you are actually complying with the law, because it’s so inconsistently applied to people.

For those that care about gun ownership, “cutting the red tape” is an easy win. Cutting the red tape and not making a complete hash of it all, that is going to be hard.

Not only that … the site isn’t up to scratch really. It’s not finished and just been pushed.

What does “concessionary member” actually mean. Is there any policing of this? Why does the link in the emails sent out “https://api.secondstreetapp.com/m_c_t/<x>” not work? It could just be that secondstreetapp have been overloaded? Why is that link not just to the membership portal?

Why does the main page and portal not link together to show they’re valid.

I get what others here are saying. I’m not sure this is a scam, I’m also not sure this is not a scam site. But it’s not giving off vibes of quality and consistency.

If Zarah has seen some internal conflict. Making that part of releasing the site, rather than this blindsided approach seems more prudent. This is farsical right now.

Fuck sake.

This cannot be how piss poorly organised this party starts if it actually wants to make a serious change. Some of the voter may be thick as shit and willing to pour their money into scams. But, the people I know who want to support something like this are also all smart enough to avoid being caught up in it.

If I am wrong I’ll apologise and delete my posts. But it looks like the link in this post is actually a scam

Anyone who had paid through this link needs to cancel the direct debit, and contact their bank.

This needs had been sent out to people subscribed by email as well

It’s very true that what this party needs is clear, committed leadership. A direction to drive in that instills faith in the currently lost part of the voter pool.

One of the first orders of business is to choose a name for the party. It’ll be going to a vote of party members.