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Cerv posted:i think it'd be nice if they just went for "The United Kingdom" Aren't the Dutch also a United Kingdom? That might be enough to set them over the edge and raid the Medway again. (Although admittedly hauling back a Poundstretcher isn't quite as impressive as capturing the Royal Charles)
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Sep 1, 2014 15:03
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ReV VAdAUL posted:Yes, life in London is just peachy: It's worth pointing out that Enfield is one of the cheaper boroughs to live in in Greater London and they have at least some space to build new housing and a fairly solid revenue base. Now imagine what it's like in the centre of town, with much less space and way, way less money available because social housing expenditure was one of the few areas not equalised across London after the Poplar Rates Rebellion. There is some central government spending, and the GLA puts in a bit more, but it's mostly splashed on big showy bullshit like Thames "No really this time we will build it!" Gateway and the Olympic Park fiasco. There needs to be a post-WW2-type massive centralised building programme - at a (very, very high) average of £50k a dwelling we could have 120k new homes for the cost just of what loving Vodafone fiddled HMRC out of. It's so loving simple and it will literally never, ever happen.
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Sep 1, 2014 19:07
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feedmegin posted:You might be thinking of the United Provinces, which a) weren't a Kingdom and b) don't exist any more. Wikipedia informs me they were a United Kingdom for a while, in the midst of more rebrandings than Blackwater.
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Sep 1, 2014 20:01
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Gum posted:Are they seriously planning on teaching 5 year olds how to code? They were teaching me LOGO and BASIC from the age of about 7, as part of possibly the only good thing the Thatcher years ever bought us. To be honest I'm surprised to learn that they *don't* teach very basic coding at school outside of IT lessons nowadays - if nothing else it's a useful and interesting alternative way to look at problem-solving. We sneer at "Silicon Roundabout" and the like but the British software industry is absolutely massive compared to the size of our economy and it's all thanks to the 80s computer boom and the pretty cheap, but surprisingly comprehensive, computer education my generation received.
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Sep 1, 2014 20:57
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Gum posted:My main issue was that typically programming languages require a lot of precision- mistyping a single character can prevent a program compiling or cause it to behave in a way that isn't intended. I just don't see a typical 5 year old being able to write even a simple program without making a ton of errors that they wont be able to fix themselves. A drag-and-drop style interface could definitely alleviate a lot of that though. The Raspberry Pi comes preinstalled with Scratch which seems to be in use in some schools already. I've no idea if they're already using the Pi but given one of it's stated roles is to be a BBC Model B for the new generation I don't see why not.
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Sep 2, 2014 07:23
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TinTower posted:Under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, the dissolution of Parliament is fourteen days after a vote of no confidence. The only way the government is coming down is if the Lib Dems switch over. That's always been a bit of a canard in the Fixed Term act because constitutionally there is no way at all the current Government could continue after a loss of supply or confidence. Obviously though the Privy Council have a lot of wiggle room depending on the exact circumstances of the outcome of a vote. However a Yes vote is still looking unlikely, and it's probable the Lib Dems would stay in line on a confidence vote simply because they'd want the extra six months of fundraising in a vague attempt to remain relevant after the 2015 election. A Yes vote is more interesting for the complete meltdown it's likely to cause in the Tories, who are of course staunchly Unionist (it's in the full name of the party, even) and Cameron and most of his front bench are loving toast if it happens.
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Sep 4, 2014 07:42
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IceAgeComing posted:They're saying a year and a half, but you'd imagine with the various things that they want to sort out (currency unions, trident etc.) that in practical terms, it'll take longer than that... If it happens I think it'll take a lot longer than that to sort out. Just unpicking the last 300 years of the weird patchwork of the comingled legal systems will take years, and then someone will discover that due to a cockup murder is suddenly legal if you do it on Ash Wednesday in the rain or something. It's nothing impossible but I think people have some pretty unrealistic expectations of how quick and easy the process will be.
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Sep 4, 2014 09:48
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Cerv posted:there's two separate (but related) questions that I think people talk at cross purposes over. Oh yeah, I was pointing it out more for people who think it's just a matter of splitting up the marital possessions and handing over the keys. Ironically allowing Scotland the small amount of independence it's had since the Union (maintaining their own legal system, etc) is now one of the bigger headaches about independence. Wales could split in a much more painless way from a legal standpoint because they could just do a search and replace on their legislation, but Scotland's situation is much more complex - some laws were passed separately in England and Scotlan, some laws apply to the UK as a whole, and some are unique to either, and all have had to have been hammered into shape around Scotland's different legal system (which in turn has been bent into weird shapes by the relationship. There are phalanxes of legal officers across Government whose job it is to look out for this sort of thing and even then they occasionally trip up.
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Sep 4, 2014 13:26
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Sad Rhino posted:So much of the fretting about the possible consequences of independence is based on the presumption that nothing else would change. It wasn't actually doing well though? It was part of a massive speculative bubble, so while numbers that economists love to drool over like GDP were shooting up, conditions for the majority were still fairly poo poo, and (of course) they've got way, way more poo poo since the bubble burst. Saying Ireland was "doing well" in the Celtic Tiger days is like saying Enron was doing well right up to 2001.
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Sep 4, 2014 13:29
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Whitefish posted:I don't have any polling data to support this, but my impression is that this isn't a hugely important issue for the rUK electorate. I know there are Tory voters who are really pro-Union, but aren't most of the rUK public fairly laid-back about it? My impression is that most non-Scots see it as an issue for Scotland - Most of the English people I know who aren't especially politically engaged think Scotland should stay, but if the Scots want to go, fair enough and good luck to them. I mean, Scottish independence is an important issue for rUK, but I don't know if it's really viewed that way by most voters here. I could be wrong though. While the electorate at large are fairly apathetic the Tory power base are very staunchly Unionist and it will fracture the party in a way that will make gay marriage, the metric martyrs (yes they still care about that poo poo) and Maastricht look like a tea party.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:24
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Jack the Lad posted:What a great guy. Those are from the Alternative Queens Speech the swivel-eyed back-benchers proposed two or three years ago. If ever you wanted to know just how out-of-touch the Tory heartland is (in a tweedy, harrumphing, Mail-reading way, as opposed to the braying, Etonian, bank-fellating out-of-touchness of the front bench), there it is. out of the EU, bring back National Service, and LOCK EM ALL UP!). I did a fairly long effort post about it in the long-long-ago, I'll see if I can find it, because it's kind of a fascinating look into the psyche of the rank-and-file Tory.
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Sep 5, 2014 21:33
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ukle posted:Cameron has just announced they are making the second carrier under construction (HMS Prince of Wales) operational. It was going to be moth balled, guess Russia being dicks has forced them to spend the Billions making it operational. Actually the RN didn't really reduce numbers that much after the old carriers were decomissioned, and as both of them together need barely more crew than a single Invincible-class (air wing excepted), they won't need that much of a boost. Besides, Jolly Jack Tars are a tiny fraction of the budget compared to the hardware they sail around in, even if you factor in the cost of liver transplants and clap clinics. Of course we still won't have anything to fly off them until the mid 22nd century at this point so it's all a bit moot - we're unlikely to be terrifying the Russian Bear with a couple of helicopters with pea-shooters on them.
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Sep 5, 2014 21:38
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Prince John posted:A friend of mine working at Rolls Royce (who provide our naval nuclear power plants) said the nuclear option would have been eye-wateringly expensive by comparison. Apparently if you care about cost, it's not much of a contest between the two. Yeah, the only real advantage of nuclear compared to gas turbines is range without refuelling, and given you still need to take on food and other consumables that's not as much as an advantage as you'd think. You also run into issues with ships having to return to their home ports or other specialised facilities for repair and maintenance, whereas turbines are much simpler. (Well nuclear does give you excess steam for the catapults but linear accelerators are now cheaper, more flexible, and more reliable than steam catapults and even the Yanks are starting to take them up)
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Sep 6, 2014 09:24
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big scary monsters posted:I'm hoping that as the Queen starts thinking about her "retirement" she will do the decent thing and start backing a British republic. For most monarchists I've met their best argument for keeping the royals in power is "the Queen does a pretty good job", and in fairness it seems to me that she probably does. But surely even she doesn't have much faith in her heirs' abilities to do the same. Rumour has it that Charles has actually thought that way for quite a while, and would be willing to stand for election as President.
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Sep 8, 2014 13:42
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Zephro posted:Bush->Clinton->Bush->Obama->Quite Possibly Clinton. They were grooming Jeb to replace Dubya before they realised how badly the economy was hosed up and let the black guy carry the can for it, and Neil Bush is said to be thinking about running for Governor of Texas. (You did't think The Thousand Year Old Man and Romney-bot 2000 were serious candidates, do you?)
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Sep 8, 2014 18:52
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ReV VAdAUL posted:Jeb sat out 2008 because post Katrina and after Iraq went awry the Bush name was utterly toxic. The idea the Bush family or the GOP let Obama win, especially in 2012, is laughable. I know, but I prefer my conspiracy theory version. (Also the one about Chelsea Clinton being groomed to take over from Hillary in 2024)
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Sep 8, 2014 20:09
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Adrianics posted:UKMT hivemind: What kind of effect does being turned down for car insurance have on a potential quote? I had that whole messy business where a misunderstanding on my part led to Hastings turning me down, and my current insurance runs out in a couple of months. It depends on the reason why you were refused. If it was a formal refusal for falsifying an application or claim, or failing to disclose prior convictions or claims, or other fraud, then you have to disclose it (the MIB have a list of formal refusals that the insurers check), failing to do so will result in the insurance being cancelled and you losing whatever % of your premium is for an early cancellation. If it was simply refused because you're too young/old/addled or because they don't want to insure your particular vehicle then you don't have to disclose it. Some insurers will ask for an increased excess, some for a higher premium, and some will outright refuse to insure you with a prior refusal, but some don't really care as long as it's not for a fraudulent claim. However almost none will offer a quote online so look forward to listening to a shitload of bad hold music for the next couple of weeks.
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Sep 9, 2014 21:41
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Zephro posted:Four-in-a-row-posting gogo Most ISPs (and almost all BT exchanges) have only 4 hours worth of diesel for their generators, and in the case of BT exchanges the UPS covers only the voice lines and associated network equipment, not DSL equipment. I've no idea what the backup situation for the mobile providers is but I'd presume it would be something similar as they're only legally obliged to provide 999 cover, everything else is up for grabs. Dropping the frequency is the first-line defence on overloads - this will have interesting effects on some network equipment, and most data centres are designed to trip and go to backup if the frequency drops below 49.5Hz - this makes sense in all directions because the frequency dropping that much (.2Hz is considered a *big* drop) is an indicator that things are going titsup big time and you may as well sit it out on your own diesels, and of course it frees up power for the rest of the network. The most likely big problem this winter is going to be if there's a big, early freeze then a *lot* of places will be out of diesel pretty quickly (because of the aforementioned early-trip behaviour) just as the demand for diesel is hitting its peak *and* the roads are hosed by the cold weather. So while brownouts may not happen this year on the domestic market you may well see some pretty massive internet outages by Christmas, if we are bouncing off the load limit. The only real thing most of us will notice from a reduction in frequency or voltage is that kettles and electric cookers will take longer to come to temperature. So Internet, tea, and Christmas dinner may all be hosed up - a recipe for revolution if ever there was one. I wouldn't worry so much about Drax going offline - worry instead about the HVDC lines to France. They only have 98% uptime and supply 5% of our power. One of those going at the wrong time and poo poo's gonna get serious.
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Sep 11, 2014 17:18
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Zephro posted:They also only supply 2GW of power at max, so they just squeak in under the single-point-of-failure threshold. Drax supplies 4GW, so it's big enough to cause blackouts by itself if something goes wrong. And power stations do trip out, too. In fact that's what caused the big blackout a couple of years ago. Sizewell B and some other power station (I forget which) tripped out within a few minutes of each other, and that was that. Sizewell is a nuclear station and they will occasionally have unplanned downtime because obviously there's loads and loads of failsafes in place. Coal stations are pretty much bulletproof. The unplanned downtime either of Drax or it's surrounding infrastructure is pretty close to zero, which is what I meant by not worrying about it going offline. The HVDC lines have stupendously poor uptime for critical infrastructure (which is just the nature of the beast unfortunately - HVDC inverters are just flaky), and it's pure luck that we haven't had both go at once.
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Sep 11, 2014 23:20
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Zephro posted:Wasn't Longannet (ie a coal plant) the other plant that went down, though? Frequency and voltage variation are a shitload less damaging to the network than shedding load - it's something that happens all the time because about the only things that even use AC directly are electric motors, light bulbs and heating elements, everything else is rectified to DC. Maybe if you have a particularly ancient TV that uses the AC signal as a clock reference then maybe you'll have an issue. Dropping the frequency 0.1Hz decreases load by 2% (give or take), that's a far easier decision to make to liberate a couple of GW than knocking Luton off the grid. Voltage drops are slightly less desirable - they can cause problems for all sorts of systems, particularly lighting, but anything sold in the EU for the last decade or so has had to be capable of continuing operation at 220v, and of course we've been steadily dropping voltage from 240 to 220v for a few years now, with nobody really caring. The only reason they don't like to drop voltage rather than frequency is that it's more damaging to their equipment and less efficient. Shedding optional load is second-line (well strictly third-line), if they can't keep the frequency stable - in fact the frequency drop is what signals some interruptible customers (data centres and exchanges as already mentioned, quite a few factories, and even some large office buildings) to go to backups, which helps to buffer the system considerably. Bear in mind that lots of customers on interruptible contracts (and glass factories, along with smelters and foundries, anything using arc furnaces, are perfect examples of this) don't just get cut off at no notice unless poo poo really hits the fan, because a loss of power means a total loss of the current production run and there's just no way to have sufficient backup power to complete that run. Load shedding on that scale is normally planned at least a few hours in advance to cover evening peaks. I say shedding load is third line rather than second because for known loads, like TV pickup, they have whole mountains full of water to keep the kettles boiling - http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatimebritain.shtml shows that in action and also shows the frequency variation I was talking about, including a dip to 49.7Hz because the HVDC line from France went down at the wrong moment, as I also mentioned.
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Sep 12, 2014 12:24
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Cerv posted:are you calling all of them "illegal" immigrants? guilty until proven innocent? Given that it's illegal to enter the country other than through a port of entry, yes, unless there's a significant proportion of them who jump out of the lorry and wander over to passport control at Dover.
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Sep 12, 2014 16:07
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Spangly A posted:It is in fact way cool, and yet managers prefer FM, which is numbers made up in a database by a selection of people that includes SA posters in their freetime. I'll be eagerly awaiting the call after my mate snuck me into an Irish lower-league team as a hard-tackling right-back with 170 potential. Slightly more seriously it's astonishing how good the FM database and modelling is sometimes - I keep meaning to run an AI-only season and use the results as the basis for a cheeky accumulator, it's generally better at predicting league outcomes than most pundits.
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Sep 13, 2014 13:39
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Alecto posted:There should be a huge prize just for anyone who gets remotely close to an accurate seat prediction for 2015. There are political betting sites, and if I wasn't too much of a coward I could have probably made a fair chunk of money selling on Tory seats at the last one (even though my prediction was wrong, it turns out the spread market - which was predicting a ~40 seat outright Tory majority - was way more wrong). Once it gets closer to time maybe we should run a book like the World Cup sweeps for charity?
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Sep 14, 2014 18:54
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HortonNash posted:Currency union without a clear mandate from a referendum in England, Wales and Northern Ireland would be outrageous. In what way? If anything it's advantageous to rUK, the threat to withdraw the pound was despite, not because, of what continuing a currency union would do to the Bank of England and the rUK economy. (If it comes to it there's nothing at all the BoE or Westminster can do to stop the Scottish banks continuing their current arrangement of issuing pounds secured on 100% reserve of BoE notes, other than making it a bit more difficult on both sides)
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Sep 14, 2014 18:57
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HortonNash posted:I don't think so. There's absolutely no risk in a currency union based on the same basis as the current one. If anything the risk is slightly lowered because the BoE would no longer be lender of last resort for Scottish banks, taking a huge chunk of their potential liability off the books immediately. The benefits of a union are immediately obvious - having our new largest single trade partner and one with which we now share the UK's largest land border, using the same currency would be of huge benefit, as would having a fair chunk of European petrochemical business continuing to be done done in Sterling.
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Sep 14, 2014 19:01
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HortonNash posted:Issuing notes based on reserve BoE notes isn't currency union though. The Scottish banks would still have to purchase the BoE notes to hold, they also wouldn't have a central bank to resort to should they run into difficulties. There's no reason at all why a currency union would have to include the BoE being the lender of last resort for Scottish banks, this is a result of the current political union. The Bank of England is lender of last resort for banks chartered in the UK - the Scots would have to set up their own central banking authority as part of independence regardless of the currency they use. And issuing notes on BoE commercial paper is exactly what the Scottish banks do now - it's a bit hard to claim that's not currency union. A transitional Scottish government would almost certainly have to continue the current arrangement for some time (and then continue to peg the Scottish pound to the BoE pound or Euro for quite a bit longer) to have even the vaguest chance at a succesful transition.
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Sep 14, 2014 19:22
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Pissflaps posted:The whole point of the proposed currency union would be to retain the BOE as Scotland's lender of last resort. It's not the whole point (but it is probably the biggest point), and it's possible that they could drop that in negotiation or at least phase it out. Like I say that hardly represents a new risk to the BoE even if it is kept in place.
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Sep 14, 2014 19:24
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Pissflaps posted:It does because right now there is a political union that keeps the economies of the two countries in lockstep. Independence breaks that. Currency union is not the same as the other functions of a central bank such as bank regulation and acting as a lender of last resort, those functions have tended to be unified in one institution but we've already seen with the Eurozone that central banks do not have to be the currency-issuing authority. (Alright admittedly that's not the happiest example)
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Sep 14, 2014 22:16
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Guavanaut posted:I'm in agreement with UKIP on something. I feel dirty. Stopped clock, etc. The fact that we're still in there after two of the most blatantly corrupt and crooked events in the history of international sport (the selection of Russia and Qatar to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups even though neither are even vaguely suitable, and whose only qualifications are truly stupendous amounts of money to throw about, is proof though that the FA are as up to their necks in it as everyone else. I say let's go back to the Home Internationals, there'll be a little extra edge after September no matter how it goes after all.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:20
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Pissflaps posted:Then what do you think the proposed currency union would actually involve? Those are both the initial postures and I'm sure if Westminster hadn't decided to get all stupid with the "NO UK NO POUNDS BITCHES" stance something could - and should - have been worked out that would be advantageous to all sides. I don't think long-term currency union would have been in Scotland's best interests (and I'm sure the Scottish realise this too) because if we've learned anything over the last few years it's letting someone else have control of your currency is a really loving bad idea. However for a decade or two (and I think it'll take at least that long for all the entanglements of a split to be sorted out) it would have been best for everyone for a limited form of currency union, perhaps phased out over time, to have been in place, as happened with the breakup of Czechoslovakia.
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Sep 14, 2014 22:28
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Antti posted:Maybe it sounds better than "promise" or "pledge" which have a nasty history of being broken. It's also quite a few characters shorter, for the headline and particularly the sidebar. The sub-editor's art in condensing an entire story into as few characters as possible is one of the few things that has translated from a print world into the online world (although most newspapers have got rid of subs now because we've all got spellcheckers and online layup why should we pay some weirdo who likes the word "rumpus"?
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Sep 16, 2014 12:05
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LemonDrizzle posted:How important is inheritance as a mechanism of wealth transfer these days anyway? Life expectancy in the UK is something like 80 (and will be substantially higher for people with meaningful assets to transfer), so people will be pretty close to retirement age before they are likely to inherit from their parents. For that matter, they'd probably be well into their thirties before they inherited from their grandparents. By that point, the inheritor is likely to be already set up and professionally established. Transfers of wealth from the living to the living are probably more important than those due to inheritance. Pretty unimportant at the top because they've been using trusts and other mechanisms to get round the inheritance tax pretty much since it was implemented. However with housing taking up such a huge proportion of income for many families in lower brackets it's suddenly becoming a pretty major method of wealth transfer lower down the scale.
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Sep 17, 2014 09:33
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ronya posted:no, oddly enough the dynamic is the other way around. there aren't enough houses being developed to meet a demand for letting relative to the cost of buying, but the private rented sector is curiously devoid of institutional investors, which gives rise to small-scale investors filling the void by buying from developers to let. Hence buy-to-let. It would be difficult to credit these landlords with any political heft since (1) landlords are popular pretty much never, and (2) in this case many are additionally foreigners You say that institutional investors aren't in the market, but where do you think the landlords are getting the mortgages to pay for the houses? Banks and financial institutions are profiting massively from the market, without having to do any of that fiddly poo poo with magnolia paint, an ideal situation for them.
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Sep 17, 2014 18:27
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ronya posted:My impression is that much (maybe half?) of the so-called "small-scale private rented sector" are not funding these via mortgage purchases, but are instead fully funded; many are foreign and are buying fully-paid with savings. No, most of those are going into larger developments rather than buying up for buy-to-let - I'm sure someone will have exact figures but IIRC the ratio is about 70% private landlords doing buy-to-let with mortgages and only 30% not doing so. A lot of those are retirees letting out the family home to provide an income. The thinking is that even if you have the cash sitting around, with cheap credit and the current tax structure, you're still better off getting a mortgage to go buy-to-let and use the cash elsewhere. ronya posted:Mortgage-funded buy-to-let is a bit of an oddity in the sense that the dynamic is of a bank being willing to trust in the income stream of a landlord, who trusts in the income stream of a tenant, whose own income isn't trusted by the bank. Obviously, either the bank or the landlord has to be wrong in their assessment; neither does the 'fiddly poo poo', since the lettings agents do that. The landlords seem to be getting by on the whole, so the obvious question is why institutions bother with intermediaries. Except the bank's risk is much lower than the landlord's (or letting agent's) because ultimately they still come out of it with the property and for as long as there's still a massive housing shortage they will always be able to flog it on to the next fool. It's not just mortgages of course - have you not noticed that adverts for landlord insurance are almost as prevalent as those for normal household insurance? It's a massive, and growing, market which again has the lovely *appearance* of being a lower-risk than conventional insurance. I say appearance because of course there is still a massive risk involved to the insurers, and the lenders, but when has financial institutions massively underestimating risk ever been an issue? ronya posted:A refusal to plan for rented accommodation in the housing market seems insensible, but it fits poorly with the way housing allocation is devolved onto local authorities, who (naturally) prioritize longer-term occupants. One dysfunctional outcome (sadly familiar to UK politics) is where the left attempts to hold its provision hostage for an increase in affordable housing that will never materialize, the right merrily shoots the hostage because they don't like redevelopment either, and ultimately less accommodation is provided. I don't know about the rest of the country but in London almost all of the "affordable" housing being mandated to be built alongside new developments is as rented accommodation. Of course the developers aren't the ones doing the renting - they want to sell the properties off as soon as possible and get their cash, because they all learned their lessons in the 80s and 90s and really don't want to be left holding the bag this time. It's yet another example of how market forces completely skew a market away from a desirable outcome and fucks people over all down the line, as allegedly non-profit housing trusts buy up the stock and rent it back to the councils who don't have the cash (or political will) to either buy or build their own properties.
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Sep 18, 2014 07:21
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Serotonin posted:We already do this via the Motor Insurers Bureau, which a percentage of car insurance payments goes towards. Which is a shitload more equitable than putting it on the fuel, because the amount of fuel a vehicle burns has almost no relation to it's risk to third parties. Of course the MIB are even bigger bastards than the sum of their parts when it comes to actually claiming from them.
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Sep 19, 2014 07:10
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Metrication posted:It seems the tories are serious about having English MPs sit on separate days to vote on English laws at Westminster, fronted by some kind of English first minister. Which will present such ludicrous situations as there being a tory administration for the English days and a Labour one for the UK days. No regional assemblies or devolution away from Westminster, or even a separate English parliament, but a good old fashioned half way house sit-on-the fence total hatchet job. Why is that more ludicrous than a Tory Prime Minister and an SNP First Minister?
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Sep 20, 2014 00:07
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Gum posted:There are people who say whiplash isn't a thing? Yeah, because it can be hard to diagnose (and hard to definitively pin to a specific incident) and so insurers try everything they can to get out of paying it. Those two factors also make it a favourite of people looking to pad out insurance claims too, of course.
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Sep 20, 2014 13:41
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Mega Comrade posted:Chiropractic is an odd one, there is some Science to the practice and it has been shown to positively help neck and back pains but the field is full of quakes and completely ungoverned or properly scrutinized. My girlfriend goes every few months and she says it helps but I refuse, even though her chiropractor seems like one of the more sensible ones. I have a strange spine and I wouldn't trust someone without a medical degree manipulating it. Yeah, there are proper physios that use elements of chiropractic in their work but it's a bit of a stopped clock thing - turns out chiropractic-style adjustments happen to be good for certain conditions purely by coincidence. The underlying philosophy is every bit as quacky (quackish?) as reiki or faith healing.
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Sep 20, 2014 15:39
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hookerbot 5000 posted:Is it not more to do with the kind of bread you get? If I make my own bread it goes stale quickly, whereas my loaf of cheap white bread goes mouldy. That'll have more to do with the shop-bought bread being in a fully airtight plastic bag than anything else. Shop bread goes stale when left out in the open air just as quick as home-made (because that's caused by moisture evaporating out of the bread). The plastic bag stops that but provides a handy environment for mould to grow. (I think there's also something about the different types of flour between mass-produced bread and home-made bread that makes it slightly easier for mould to grow on it but buggered if I can remember what)
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Sep 23, 2014 21:04
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Zero Gravitas posted:What the gently caress is with you people faffing about cutting your toast? Just bite chunks out of the square it comes in jesus christ Exactly this. Although I like to eat the crust first so I get the best centre bit with all the butter last.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:07
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