Sadly it’s not just inflexibility of Universal Credit - the base rate of Universal Credit isn’t high enough anyway, but you’ve also particularly got elderly people on state pension only, people with disabilities and people with children.

Surprisingly, the majority of food bank food apparently goes to households with at least one person in work - though this might not be “old style” work where you have set hours and wages and rights, but instead “zero hours” or “flexi hours” or “our company considers you self employed” etc.

Huge increases in gas costs are one of the biggest contributors - children, the elderly and the ill couldn’t manage to just switch the heating off all winter. Ridiculous house price/rent increases are also a massive factor.

I’m also a little unsure about a nationalised supermarket - but there are probably some solutions in this direction that would work.

It’s not the fairest assessment - It has delays as “trains more than three minutes late”. Not ideal, especially when you’re changing trains, but 3 minutes rarely makes a difference, compared to the 10/20/30/40 minutes late ones.

A few years back, when working in places “two trains away”, I was getting trains 10-20 minutes late every day, which normally meant missing the connection.

By my own experience, Northern and Transpennine have had fewer cancellations and fewer noticeably latest.

However, Northern are still shit at sending a two-carriage Sprinter as a commuter train that needs 3-4 carriages for everyone waiting to actually get on.

That can’t be true because he’s medically unable to sweat.

Not, as he likes to say, because of something something Falklands or whatever.

It’s because he’s a lizard-man in a human suit.

Prince Andrew is a lizard nonce.

It’s the good way round.

A Tory had pressured a local school to ban a few books because they showed white-on-black racism as a negative thing, and this fact hurt his racist Tory feelings.

A comparatively large group of anti-racist parents complained, and got the anti-racist book unbanned.

At their heart, most distros are approximately “made of the same stuff”. There’s differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the “software centre” works), but essentially the difference between a “gaming distro”, “normal distro” and “creative distro” is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.

Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.

There’s a sort of order from least to most destructive:

Exactly correct driver >
using an elastic band or other thin piece of rubber, between driver and screw, for grip >
different screwdriver that fits differently (e.g. a small flat driver in any cross-headed screw) >
again, with elastic/rubber >
other, unlikely drivers >
other grippy options, like steel wool >
superglue the driver to the screw >
epoxy resin a driver to the screw >
cut a new flat-head into the screw head with a dremel >
use a screw extracting bit >
drill out the screw head >
cut or drill out the plastic surround

I’m sure there’s other options I’ve not remembered. A lot of it depends on which screw is stuck, and how accessible it is.

Cool. Put controls and regulation on the stock exchange, investment banking “venture capitalism”.

Oh, you didn’t mean that? Do you just mean “poor people gambling”, where people gamble with their own money?

Looks like between £80 and £110 for each one near me.

It’s good to know the “free market” is keeping costs down and making things cheaper and better for everyone /s

All solid advice. May also have an ingredient sensitivity to something like “sodium laureth sulphate”, which can cause dry skin and flaking, or massively inflame existing psoriasis or dry skin.

“The baddies”

Almost none of these abbreviation based etymologies are true - they’re made up years later, normally as a joke, and somehow you end up with people spreading them about as facts.

Nice in theory, but I phoned my GP four years ago and I’m still on hold. I’m number 23,641 in the queue. My call is very important to them.

This may save you a click:

It’s just an AI thing. The UK is not, I repeat not, building a Stargate.

• Just some AI thing ✅️
• Gateway to desert planet Abydos ❌️

Turns out it’s the Welsh.

I miss Mock the Week :(

I think that all went out the window during the Tory era, with things such as replacing the head of the BBC with a Tory, threatening to pull all funding unless they started promoting the government’s right-wing perspective and caving into Rupert Murdoch’s pressure that he is poor and starving because the evil BBC is taking all his rightful TV money and viewers.

BBC comedy show and dramas are still on the whole centrist or a bit left leaning, but the news skewed heavily to the right about 10-15 years ago.

Anything less than “Grent” will be disappointing.

Basically, though they’re traditionally considered to be left wing, and people were expecting them to be slightly-right-wing, they’ve enacted all the Tory (very right wing) policies that were in the pipeline, and in an attempt to appeal to the far right, have jumped from “a little right of centre” into a government more right wing than David Cameron’s Tories were. They’re probably still to the left of where we’d be if we’d actually got Tories or UKIP.

For example (I have paraphrased and sensationalised the descriptions, because I am sad and angry):

• Starving the elderly and disabled
• Banning trans people from being allowed to use public toilets
• Implemented a ban on any website which could ever potentially contain a picture of a boob, or offer things like “quitting smoking support”, unless you upload your name/passport/3d scan of your face, postal address and email address to a dodgy company in Cypress or the USA
• Come out in complete support of a genocide
• Banned peace protesting and arrested hundreds of innocent people
• Come out in complete support of the other year’s Tory/UKIP rioting
• Come out in support of far-right nationalist flag-shagging
• Come out in support of killing refugees
• Various other atrocities. I’m sure you get the idea

I’ve used slightly loaded language and twisted a few specifics, but I’m sure you get the general idea.

Loud and surprising. I wasn’t expecting it.

[Edit] It was like someone set off a tiny fire alarm in my pocket.

Those are bellends.