This is disgusting. PIP is designed to help with additional costs incurred due to an illness or disability but there are loads of people who are too sick to work who don’t need it, and many others who do need it but don’t qualify.

Cold weather payments should be extended to everyone who is reliant on benefits to survive (which would mean almost every benefit other than PIP being a qualifying benefit).

who the fuck keeps receipts for stamps?

They’re charging (fining) the recipients £5 to collect the post so the people they’re robbing couldn’t possibly have the relevant receipt anyway.

They better have some very good evidence that the problem is not with their stamps given the decades-long saga with the Post Office (which started years before Royal Mail was sold off as a separate entity).

The age of consent in Washington is 16.

The Crown Estate is public money. The Private Estate is larger and they’re extremely secretive about it. And some of it rightfully belongs to us: royals took more than £1bn income from controversial estates

The Private Estate is larger than the Crown Estate. And the Crown Estate is public property.

Next year, the sovereign grant will remain unchanged at £86.3m. However, in 2025, the king’s public funding will increase by a projected £38.5m, giving the monarchy an annual stipend of £124.8m. In 2026, it will be £126m.

When was the last time you got a 50% pay rise for doing fuck all? Those boots must be really fucking tasty.

Catch a grip.

Lord Turnbull, a former cabinet secretary, Whitehall’s most senior civil servant, who was involved in official discussions over royal financing, accused the Treasury of seeking to obfuscate how the monarchy was funded.

He said that linking the royal finances to the profits of the crown estate was “silly” and was motivated by a desire to promote the idea that the king was paying for himself and was reducing the burden on the taxpayer.

“You get people writing in saying: ‘Isn’t it a good thing that the king is so sensitive to public opinion that he has waived some of the money he could have had?’ I think it’s bollocks. It is deliberate – that’s really what makes me so cross about it. It is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate how the thing works.”

Read it again. Properly this time.

We don’t need to stop doing them (we need way more). We do need to stop incentivising lowball cost estimates at the bidding stage and then complaining that the cost is so much more than expected.

And we need to stop outsourcing all the big jobs. There’s no need for anyone to make a profit out of infrastructure that is absolutely necessary for the economy to function properly. Govt needs to relearn how to project manage and regain the institutional expertise required to do it well.

She wanted your number for work purposes because phones are how we contact people in the modern era. There is absolutely no reason to think she is interested and absolutely no upside to thinking she is.

Do not make her working life difficult and do not get yourself on a disciplinary. Forget about it.

Stop turning this into something it is not. This is work. She is not interested in you, she’s just good at her job.

She’s senior to you. Stop turning this into a sackable offence, for one or both of you.

Yes. But politics.

I don’t know whether this is real or Cameron going off half-cocked again. I can’t see this government (or the next) doing any such thing (sad to say). Although it is pretty obvious that Cameron’s plan does not include allowing the Palestinians to elect their own government. Installing some technocratic version of the PA without any real independent statehood is not going to cut it.

Pretty sure this is just words. To what purpose is unclear.

The word was coined as satire. Brain-dead liberals centrists took it seriously and, here we are.

I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair.

The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033.

Down with meritocracy

Edited because too many people don’t know what liberal means.

It’s been 45 years of Tories because we do not have an opposition, just a party that thinks the best it can do is keep the Tories’ seats warm for them.

A Labour party which will not stand up to the right-wing media might as well not be in office.

Because it is not yet an authoritarian state. Liberal democracies rarely live up to the high-minded ideals that underpin their political system but if the government excludes itself from the rule of law, it is no longer a liberal democracy.

They count. And I know exactly what you mean about the blue.

My computer gives me notification pop-ups but it doesn’t do it when I’m sharing my screen because context matters.

Some things are easy to standardise. But walking into a wall, or a lamp post, or into the road or a parked car, or barging into someone else, or going a long way around because there’s a big group of them mostly on the side you’ve decided to robotically choose, or any number of other complications, really aren’t worth it for the almost non-existent computational expense involved in choosing the best path forwards, like we all do all the time almost every single day of our lives.

But how are they connected? My country drives on the left, so should I move left to avoid oncoming traffic and to the right to overtake? If the connection was so strong then we should have different instincts depending on the context, not one single direction we always choose.

I am not convinced by this argument at all. For me, anyway, it depends on the the space available, where they are, which way I’m headed, which way they’re headed, etc.

Patriarchy chicken

expensive clothing brands

Buying designer gear from outlets is something you should definitely cheap out on. ‘Fast fashion’ prices with designer quality. I’m not at all convinced the designer gear was ever worth the official price tag but I am very sure that it’ll last longer because you can’t sell a pair of leggings for £75 if they’re going to fall apart or bag out instantly (or at least, you won’t get away with it for very long). Getting those same leggings for a tenner is the way to go.

Sad to say, they still use the same sweatshops as fast fashion brands, they just pay more for the quality control. So you still need to care about how the brands conduct themselves.

Physical and Mental Effects of Bathing: A Randomized Intervention Study

Suggests a hot bath is more effective than a hot shower.

But finishing up with a cold shower might boost your immune system (or make you less likely to pull sickie):

The Effect of Cold Showering on Health and Work: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Both crappy trials but at least I looked for them. Instead of deciding that medical science is unlikely to have made any progress in a century. Wut?