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TheEmpireStrikesDak
TheEmpireStrikesDak @ DakRalter @thelemmy.club
Posts
4
Comments
286
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I said it's a start, not the whole answer to the housing problem.

    Also, just as examples:

    Long-term empty homes To be classed as ‘long-term empty’ a home has to be liable for council tax and to have been unfurnished and not lived in for over 6 months. This figure is increasing all the time, but as at October 2023, it was 261,189.

    Holiday lets These are an extension of second homes - homes not used as primary residences but used to make profit for their owners, short-let for several weeks or months of each year, blocking them from becoming anybody’s home. In many cases owners ‘flip’ to business rates which are often cheaper than paying council tax. As at March 2024, there were believed to be at least 85,000 of these such dwellings, flipped to business rates.

    https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/facts-and-figures

    I'm not against building more homes. We need more council homes for sure. Housing should be seen as a human need, not a commodity to trade.

  • I wouldn't recommend it for touchscreens tbh. Having the common letters close to each other just causes problems. And autocorrect doesn't seem to understand I'm using a Dvorak layout. I'm just used to it now and like to have my keyboards matching. It's great for physical keyboards though.

  • Fellow Dvorak. It's great for typos on touchscreens. Too many times I've mistyped whole and all.

  • I had that problem at first, but it wasn't too hard to adapt.

  • I guess I'm just a jammy dodger, I've never seen one!

  • As a Dvorak user, shift+ins, ctrl+del and ctrl+ins are my friends.

  • I've started taking photos of wherever I've put something important away for "safety", because I always end up forgetting otherwise. I have a special folder in my gallery for this.

  • For some reason I read is as gambling too and didn't notice till I read your comment. Weird.

  • I've been using em dashes for years. I learnt the alt code for them, because using hyphens for dashes looks awful (before that I'd do the double hyphen for an em dash). Also, like me, I notice you put spaces around the em dashes, which is apparently incorrect, but also according to me is the right way to do it.

  • We don't have that brand here, so whenever people would quote that slogan online, I thought it seemed kind of sinister, like a quote from a horror film/game. I was so disappointed to find out it's just a snack brand :(

  • I've never got one of those! And I'm just using my browser's built in ad blocker. Are they still doing it?

  • Here in the UK, I used to read about Americans having free local calls in the computing mags. We had to pay local rate for our dial up. We had to wait till weekends and evenings to get off peak call rates. Freeserve was the first ISP here that gave no subscription charges for dial up.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeserve

    They later brought in something called Freeserve Hometime, which iirc was freephone dial up during off peak. I renamed the icon to Freeserve Downtime, because we used to get connection issues. No one in my family thought it was funny.

    "Sorry, got d/c'd" "Gotta go, my mum wants to use the phone"

    Good times. I miss old school Internet.

  • If you were fleeing war or persecution, would you not prefer to go to a country where you could speak the language and/or had family? Being able to speak the language would also mean you can start working as soon as your claim is processed. Yes, if I was fleeing war, I would want to go to the first safe place. But after safety, the next thing is being able to actually get on with your life and provide for yourself and family.

    For instance I can't speak Turkish, I find it a very hard language to learn. So if I could choose between settling there and going somewhere like France, Portugal or Spain where I have some proficiency in the languages, I would try to get there, because I'd be able to get into work a lot quicker and become part of a community if my application got approved. And even more so if I knew people there. It's not a case of being greedy or picky, these people are still humans who need to get on with their lives.

  • But how is any of this the fault of immigrants? My dad wants to kick me out. If I tell the council I'm being made homeless, I will get sent to a hostel in Luton. According to my tory-loving colleague, this is the fault of asylum seekers.

    The actual truth is this is the fault of Thatcher and successive governments selling off council homes. Rich foreign scalpers buy up property and sit on it until it makes them money. There are thousands of empty residential properties gathering dust so they can build up in value for these wealthy scalpers. Flats where £200k can buy you a 25% share of a studio is what's shown as affordable housing in London. Housing has become a commodity for the rich to trade and profit off, rather than a human need. I'm working class, on a little above minimum wage and soon losing my job again (because of the council, not immigrants. First job I lost was because of Philip Green and his wife being greedy pigs).

    Tell me how immigrants are making my life worse, but the wealthy get a pass. Immigrants are keeping a lot of businesses going (just see the Brexit farm debacle).

    So you can look for the easy scapegoat if you want, or you can actually look at what's causing these issues. As People vs Elon showed in their poster, they tell you to blame immigrants so you don't blame billionaires.

  • Please do explain for us unenlightened plebs.

  • Nah, the correct answer is "You don't LOOK autistic."

  • I'm having the exact same issue. Never taught me any life skills. My mum was told by the GP to get me tested for aspergers (as it was then) when I was 15, and she sat on that for over 10 years. Meanwhile I grew up hating myself for not being able to do things that my peers could. Things got worse when I had to get a job and I didn't have the social knowledge to pass interviews. My self esteem got worse, my anxiety ruled my life. I would keep attracting men who treated me like dirt and I couldn't let go because I was so desperate for someone to love and accept me.

    She passed away three months ago and now my dad wants to kick me out and I have no freaking idea how to survive in the adult world. I don't know how to go about renting or setting up utilities, I struggle with navigation so my fear of getting lost stops me going places. I'm going to have to leave London because I can't afford a place here. All I get is, when are you moving out? Dad wants to sell the house. It's not fair to deprive your sisters of their share of the house. No offers of help. No acknowledgement that decades of my mum wrapping me in cotton wool and controlling me has left me dysfunctional.

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