The whole point of the Lib Dems supporting an in-out referendum was that in the event they were actually elected to power and therefore able to enact their platform, the UK would be in a state where they would obviously support "in" because the only people who would ever vote for the Lib Dems were people who were EU maximalists.
The Tories were notably not a EU maximalist party and the only reason they added support for an in-out referendum was due to pressure from the side of the party who wanted "out".
The Tories are in fact not the same party as the Lib Dems, whose leader at the time, Nick Clegg, this thread is about. I'm not really sure why you're bringing them up.
> The Tories were notably not a EU maximalist party
funny, I distinctly remember the party spending a vast amount of money trying to get the British to vote Remain
> The Tories are in fact not the same party as the Lib Dems, whose leader at the time, Nick Clegg, this thread is about.
you're... the one responding to my sub-thread, where I mentioned them in my first post
the tory connection is obviously relevant to Clegg's political career, where his main accomplishment was working with them, destroying his own party in the process
I vouched this dead submission and voted yes as a support of the status quo, because you can trivially put "Elon" into search bar and find that they aren't a shortage of Elon political submissions.
Look, my highest rated comment on this site is asking Dang to unflag a certain thread on Jan 6, 2021. You need to understand there are plenty of people on this site who will flag anything political regardless of the content, because frankly that's not what this site is for. I understand that perspective, I don't get my news from here I actually go to news sites and read there. Hacker news is an entirely different compartment of my life and I assume I'm not the only one.
On the other hand, people flagging Elon isn't some new phenmoenon. People have spammed every single time he's been in the news for years. Like Taylor Swift, the guy is a bonafide superstar. Millions of people who both love him and hate him for years have hung on his every word and action.
Speaking for myself, I decided Elon was a piece of garbage when he called the submarine guy a Pedo, but I was still happy to get some Tesla stock when I thought it was a good deal. My real life friends of 10+ years, apropos of nothing, were taunting me in a more mean spirited than joking way in December 2022 that the value of the stock had fallen, boy aren't you sad you lost those thousands of dollars. Then at least a couple times a month since they want my opinion on the Elon outrage of the week, most of which aren't real outrages but shitty celebrity gossip they found out about because they spent all their curiousity about the world on r/all, where thousands of Elon haters were doing the same thing. This has been the temperature from a certain segment of the population for years.
I'm legitimately concerned about some of the stuff going on, but I do honestly think there quite a large component of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", even if there is also a component of "Don't Look Up". The fact of the matter is if you honestly believe there is an in-progress fascist takeover of the US Government, there are 50,000 better things you could be doing about it than debating the Hacker News current events flagging policy.
My dad and I both bought a 4a (5G) at the same time, ours both died within a week of each other. With mine at least I know the issue was that it just stopped charging entirely, no cable plugged in would fix it.
Unfortunately, the 5G variation doesn't appear to be part of this program.
I guess it's been over a year since the reddit blackouts, we were due for more ludicrous drama and laughably inflated moderator egos. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar posts in other subreddits, at least until Reddit swoops in at someone's behest and threatens to take their toys away.
Duolingo only has themselves to blame though, I'm struggling to name another non-social media app who has cultivated a fanbase with such a weird parasocial relationship with it.
Previously she was elected by a coalition of the center-left, center, and center-right. Due to major losses by the center, she made concessions to get the greens on board as well, which is why the vote count is up.
It's part of a broader trend in Europe where in most countries, since the share of the far-right grows and the share of everyone else shrinks, the absolute refusal to work with the far right is leading the remaining parties to attempt increasingly complex and discordant coalitions.
My take is doing this means that people who vote far-right never get any evidence that they should change their vote and people who are dissatisifed with what they vote for are left with increasingly few alternatives since the majority coalition sucks up more and more parties.
I think it will be interesting in a few years to compare the likes of France and Germany who are all in on the blockade, vs the Netherlands or Sweden where the far right is part of a governing coalition they don't have full control over.
I definitely feel a bit drained about my job lately, but then last night I was looking through my linkedin connections and basically everyone who left in the last 6+ months doesn't have a new job title, at least not one they care to share on linkedin.
No harm in keeping the resume up to date, but I'm not getting my hopes up at all.
We have this nonsense in Washington too, I made an effort last time I went to pick up takeout to bring one of my reusable bags with me to avoid the 8 cent bag fee, they had already bagged my order in a new one, the restaurant was like "Oh you have your own? We'll just take that one off your hands." Well, it wasn't one of the restaurants it was just a random grocery store one I had laying around, what are they going to do with it?
I wonder how many people even know those heavy bags ARE supposed to be reusable. I only know because I was bored and read my shopping bag.
We also have some kind of ban on fastfood giving you plastics without you asking for them first that as far as I can tell literally no one, except for a singular KFC near my house, actually abides by. It's all just ridiculous theater.
Funny to see this now. A couple days ago I was on vacation in San Diego and visited the San Diego Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park and a lot of the traffic flowing through my head about it are all points addressed in the above article:
"Almost everyone working here is quite old"
"The amount of space this takes up is incredible, I wonder how people get into this hobby, I've never lived anywhere where I'd have enough space to set up a model railway long term"
It's kind of a shame too, it was the first time I think I've ever really appreciated the large scale model train installations. When I was younger I'd see them at random historical museums and mostly just think "yeah choo-choo sure does go in a circle haha". I think the San Diego museum did a good job of conveying that it isn't really just about the trains as much as it's about modeling the landscapes and towns the trains actually go through. Viewing it from the perspective of a massive scale diorama of some region really raised my overall appreciation for the whole endeavour.
My father was an enthusiast. When we moved into their current house (1988), the builder had the option of a three-car garage or enclosing the third-car section, and that was intended as a railway room. He favoured the large German "LGB" trains, in part bought because they were among the more durable products on the market, so it would be child-resistant for the kids to use. He built the framework and a track plan but never really had the time he wanted to work on it.
I, in turn, moved on to smaller American (HO scale) and British (OO) trains, using the same room, but now find that the tables designed for big 1:22.5 trains have irregularities enough to make 1:87 trackwork unreliable. Will probably need to rework them.
The hobby itself has definitely changed though: Yes, today's modern models are higher quality than a lot of the old "Blue Box" Athearn kits, but they're also $50 instead of $7, and come ready-to-run, so the hobby aspect of building and customizing it is gone. Many models don't even come as an undecorated version anymore, if you wanted the classic "paint it for your own custom railway" narrative. You don't get the same "hours of fun per dollar" out of that side of the hobby anymore.
What's interesting is that there's definitely an opportunity for synergy with the rise of hobby electronics-- the trains have moved from "variable DC on the rails" to "AC with a command bus" and sometimes even Bluetooth, so there's a lot of interesting stuff you could do with computer or microcontroller interfacing. I bought a project for an automatic traffic-signal design using some 555 timers and capacitors, and thought "this is 10 lines of code on a $3 Arduino, for this generation of hobbyists."
Shops are closing-- I make it a point to try to find a model-railway shop and pick up something exotic when I go on holiday, but even pretty big cities don't have one, or it's a billion miles from anywhere. I was sort of saddened to get a note from Hattons (an excellent UK retailer-- surprisingly cheap shipping to the US) that they have started to wind down operations in the last month.
> Shops are closing-- I make it a point to try to find a model-railway shop and pick up something exotic when I go on holiday, but even pretty big cities don't have one, or it's a billion miles from anywhere.
Berlin has two or three big shops and some smaller ones.
>Shops are closing-- I make it a point to try to find a model-railway shop and pick up something exotic when I go on holiday, but even pretty big cities don't have one
Tokyo has tons of them. They're even in the big, new shopping malls, along with huge dioramas.
> "The amount of space this takes up is incredible, I wonder how people get into this hobby, I've never lived anywhere where I'd have enough space to set up a model railway long term"
So much "millenials killing X" discourse is just "property prices killing X" in disguise.
My maternal grandfather was a pipe fitter on the railroad, before becoming a defense contractor, and also before contracting mesothelioma and dying when I was 6.
He owned a sizable property in California which included a large home and some attached apartments. They ran a boarding-house for immigrants, and later, my widowed grandmother became a landlady.
I was raised with a fervent love for railroads of all types. I had little engineer togs as a toddler and a professional photoshoot to prove it. We rode around on a scale railroad in the park. But most of all, my grandfather's labor of love was building a model train set for me in an upstairs bedroom.
It was essentially a simple affair; grandpa had built a large plywood table topped with Astroturf. The rails themselves were in a large figure-eight, with not much landscaping or scenery around. We concentrated on the technical bits: a good AC/DC transformer with variable knob, some nice rolling stock with the traditional freight-train assortment of cars, and a locomotive that had that smokestack where you could insert a little tablet and it'd puff out "steam" while it ran.
My sister and I loved that whole setup, and it was like catnip to us in our youth, at least until the Atari 2600 took over. The railroad remained the centerpiece of that room and a focal point of our entertainment for years and years, even after grandpa passed away. It was really a cool thing for an authentic railroad guy to pass that on to his grandchildren.
I'm not sure how much of it is space, as I remember even 20-30 years ago the model railroad magazines always had a "how to fit a layout in the space you have" - up to and including elaborate folding layouts that would fit in something not much bigger than a briefcase.
If people really want to do something, they make space/time available for it, even if it involves clubs, etc.
The number of people who want to build models in general is down, I suspect, given that we have so many other things to do with "free time".
> If people really want to do something, they make space/time available for it
There's other space-saving solutions, like layouts that swing up against the wall (like a Murphy bed), or that can be pulled up against the ceiling. Some handiwork required.
The only time that museum was filled with kids was the yearly "LEGO Train" exhibit, which I partook of once or twice.
And the people I was with (setting up the exhibit) were mostly younger (at the time) ranging from the 10 or so year old kids of the people leading it to mid 20s - not counting the leaders who were middle aged.
Everyone loved it and the number of visitors in that two week period or whatever it was would rival the total number of visitors the rest of the year.
But LEGO trains are not model trains (my goodness), they're toy trains - a completely and unrespectable thing.
“ But LEGO trains are not model trains (my goodness), they're toy trains - a completely and unrespectable thing.”
I love this condescending sounding distinction, it’s actually very accurate! When I was 12 or 13 I had an uncle that was into model railroading and I thought it looked so fun and cool! Then I started looking into it more and it’s not really (at least to me at that age) because it’s not a toy you take out of the box and play with a 100 different ways. You build a very static and detailed landscape, put your rails down, start the train up, and just sit back and look at it. Where’s the fun in that?
I just got a Lego train set for me and my kids and we’ve already built several different ways, crashed the train and rebuilt parts of multiple tiles, discovered you can program it with the new PoweredUp system, put mini figures on the roof of the cars, etc.
Not only can you change the track around easily, my kids have proven again and again that the track is not necessary and that the train can keep going (and going and going…) without the track.
I also suspect that many of the young people who can afford and are interested in many of these sorts of hobbies have, at least incrementally, tended to shift more urban which makes them impractical absent some shared club/store space. When I first got an apartment after school--and pre-digital photography--I tried doing home processing in a half-bathroom and rapidly concluded that was for the birds. (Even after I got a house, there really wasn't a suitable space and then digital photography came in.)
Also I know a few people who are into model train and I would not call them old. Also they use quite modern tech (resin 3D priters and fully automated train control).
As for the space issue, they even sorta sved that as well via modular layouts - you build a certain part of a layout that conforms to an interface spec (rail placement at edges, electrical connections) and then you can join other enthusiasts at events where they build massive layouts from these modules in a rented hall somewhere for a couple days.
It's not just the space although you either have to belong to a club of some sort or have a house with a fair bit of extra room. But stamp and coin collecting is pretty much out of fashion as well.
This is where I'm at. I want very little more than to than to buy some permanent property that I can remodel to my taste at my leisure, but mortgage rates just keep going up. Why spend 3.6k+ a month on mortgage when I can spend 2.1k a month to stall. I really can't imagine going in on a house right now without at least a 20% down payment to skip out on PMI (and lowering the amount of the mortgage overall)
Because at the end of the year your assets line for home will be -$25,200. In the mortgage case it'd be -$36,000 for payments but probably like +$25,000 for home equity bought so if cash flow isn't a problem you're better off.
If your mortgage payment is $3100/mo let’s say that’s a $450k loan for 30yr at 7.5%, you are not looking at anywhere close to that much added equity after a year. Just about $4k after the first year. Less if the payment was to include taxes and insurance.
PMI IS a waste of money, but it's relatively negligible. if it helps you get your house years earlier, that could easily be worth it, not only financially but also happiness (if owning is emotionally important).
i paid 5% down on my house and my PMI is only 4% of my all in monthly payment (mortgage, PMI, prop tax, insurance). if i had to wait until i had saved 20% i'd probably still be saving & renting. instead i've already paid down another 5% of my mortgage plus getting the interest tax breaks each year.
The mortgage itself is a waste of money if you don't pay if off early. I wish people understood this better. There is almost no situation where owning a home makes sense if you don't pay it off before the term and we aren't in some wacky pandemic or financial bubble.
I'm in this situation with my car right now, I have the money to pay it off but why bother when I can make the monthly payment with savings account interest.
Depends... It would depend on the price to service the mortgage. I would do a quick model to see the timeline to "break even" on paying in full verses the total amount of interest paid to service the loan for duration of the term.
Presumably that £3.6K ish is repayment, not interest only.
Try working out how much you need to save over 30 years (while renting) to buy a home. Don't forget to account for inflation in any assumed investment return.
