Still looking for a place to stay in Crete.

But it looks like there's no rush. Still plenty of places available on Booking.com. I'm going from June 25th to July 5th.

The price for my flight including luggage has just gone up. I paid £306 last week, and now the identical flight is back up to £382.

My work is having a grand opening event for our new building next door, and we want all our customers to click a link for tickets, just so we know how many people to expect. I just found out that they want us to apply for tickets too, even though we work there. I find this excessively bureaucratic. However, I cannot wait to go in with my ticket, then check the tickets of all my colleagues, and send away anyone who doesn’t have a ticket. That’ll show them.

There's a new search on for Maddie.

>>470672

Well I know just when to break in and steal all your Dire Straits CDs now.

>>470675

Help yourself to my dad's old Gary Glitter LPs as well, while you're at it.

Happy pride month to all our bumder brethren, ladybrethren, and somewhereinbetweenbrethren.

However, one of you will have to explain to me what the fuck you are doing with this "LGBTQIAA2S+" acronym. I'm not being funny but people were already taking the piss by the time you had added the Q. It's really getting out of hand now.

>>470677
>However, one of you will have to explain to me what the fuck you are doing with this "LGBTQIAA2S+"
What year is this?

>>470677
The main one, that's as long as you can reasonably go but which is often shortened because people can't remember it, is LGBTQIA+: lesbian, gay, bisexual, evangelist christian korean youtuber, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual, and anything else not covered already.

There was a notorious tweet from Justin Trudeau where he expanded it to 2SLGBTQQIA+, which gave two Qs for both queer and questioning, and also included the indigenous Canadian notion of two-spirit (2S), which is when a Canadian Eskimo is sitting in an igloo while having both male and female spirits, so it's basically nonbinary-ism. But 2SLGBTQQIA+ was roundly mocked for being a step too far.

Of course, if the "+" in LGBTQIA+ represents anything not otherwise specified, then surely you could just call them the L+ community and let the plus handle all the others.

>>470677

I've heard some people call it LG HDTV just to take the piss out of the endlessly incremental concatenation of seemingly random letters of the alphabet.

I've got nothing against anybody who identifies as different from the mainstream in that way. But before long, if it continues, we'll end up with that acronym spanning all 26 letters of the alphabet. And once we've run out of those, they'll probably use German umlauts as well. Or the Danish "ø".

>>470677
Next you'll start asking why the pride flag has race stuff in it and we'll be back to our usual discussion.

>>470678
>>470681

Oh shut up you pair. You no longer have a point with these remarks when the acronym literally does get longer every time I hear it and is starting to resemble a PC monitor model number.

It's daft, and I'm not some kind of raging mail reading homophobe for saying it's daft.

>>470682
Ok, boomer.

>>470682
I can't relate, brother. I'm out in the world saying stuff like "not to be gender essentialist" to 22 year olds, I was woke scolding street preachers on Monday. I'm so far beyond your world you're seeing me twice like I was faster than light.

If I don't win the EuroMillions on Friday someone else has to. The syndicate at work is getting out of hand.

Alarmy on the weekday thread? We've got to see this for the next 3 months at least.

>>470681

Speaking of which, am I OK to fly last year's pride flag, or have they added another bit?

Just booked my hire car for my holiday in Crete. £165 for a Nissan Juke with insurance. I think that's very reasonable.

I'm a bit unsettled by the £1,500 deductible in case of theft or accidents, but I'm a careful driver and my last claim here at home was probably more than ten years ago.

>>470687
Just fly a Palestinian flag instead and don’t get into any discussions about how they actually feel about the gays over there. You’ll be fine.

>>470686
Someone should have done the deed two months ago then, stupid cat.

>>470688
You ought not to expect a Juke. They definitely do exist in rental fleets but those comparison sites are adverts for a category of car, not a specific model. Make sure to document the paint and alloys. You say you've not made a claim, but have you kerbed a wheel in the last ten years? Either way, don't do it that week.

I rented cars for four months in the UK this year before leasing a new car. I liked to pay around £10 per day but the price definitely significantly fluctuated based on supply and demand and the time booked in advance. You see lots of horror stories in the reviews for cheap car rentals but I never had a problem.

>>470691

>You ought not to expect a Juke.

That's a given. You rent the vehicle class, not a particular make and model. Which is fine with me, I don't have any preference with small SUVs like a juke. I just want something that gets me around and up and down some of Crete's mountainous back roads. That's all I want.

Hold on lads I've sussed it.

Why don't we lay a load of those power induction things, you know like what charges your phone without p[lugging it in, underneath the roads? Then we could have electric vehicles that don't even need batteries. They would just be a chassis with wheels.

Get me on the phone with Kier Starmer or somebody, I deserve to be a millionare MBE and all that for this idea.

I've noticed that when the sun is out I end up walking for hours but when it's grey and miserable I might not even walk 3k in a day if I'm working from home. I know that's obvious but I'm surprised at how consciously unaware I can be of the impact of a little sunshine on my activity or how I managed to spend so many summers playing on the computer growing up.

Also debating finding a creative hobby like a painting class or maybe sculpture. Like all men I don't express myself well and I bet there's lots of chances to be silly. But I'm not sure what I'd draw/paint/make because I'm also an adult so I've had my imagination and sense of wonder beaten out of me long ago. Do you two do anything creative?

>>470693
So would we dig up all the roads first or just never really do it like we did for rail electrification?

>>470694

No, it's much simpler than that, we just lay it out on top of the existing roads then tarmac over that.

>>470693
Other people have already had the idea of putting solar panels under the roads, and this was nixed because they would be damaged by cars constantly driving over them. I assume your idea would have the same issues. Furthermore, you would also need to get every other country in the world to do the same thing, because car manufacturers won’t make a better type of car just for us. And, you’d also have to run these power thingies under driveways so that people can park outside their houses rather than just leaving their cars in the middle of the street (which would also block everyone else on the road, because they wouldn’t be able to drive round). You would also need to do the same for private car parks, which would eat into their profit margins and therefore bring down the wrath of shareholders and newspapers upon your political party.

Why, yes, I do indeed belong to what Liz Truss called the anti-growth coalition. I just hate good ideas and I have no imagination. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I am.

>>470694

I dabbled in drawing when I was yougner and I was pretty good at it for the standards of your average teenlad, if I had kept it up I could probably have made a decent amount of money on the side drawing questionable hentai and furry porn.

But my main creative outlet for most of my adult life has always been music. The beauty of music is that if you go for instrumental stuff, as most bedroom hobbyists probably do because it's easier, you can allow it to be a lot more abstract- You can hide behind that, you can express your feelings without the vulnerability that usually goes along with that. You can pour your feelings into it and nobody will really be able to say with certainty what exactly those feelings were. Writing lyrics is where it's hard not to cringe yourself to death trying to be earnest. While I have gotten better at that over the years, and I can write songs with much more sincerity and real feeling in them now without hiding it behind layers of innuendo or tongue-in-cheek humour, even my most personal stuff still has that layer of metaphor and indirectness.

But let's be honest, lyrics are always far better that way too- When lyrics are too blunt and direct, it comes off childish; I am always reminded of a song one of my mates wrote when we were about 16-17, about breaking up with his highschool sweetheart who was never even into him to start with so he had really made it all up in his head and it was all so direct and literal, it was painful.

The greatest songs ever written are always extremely vague when you actually look at the lyrics, and it's that vagueness that makes them so universally appealing. People can project their own meaning, and that's a good thing. Go read the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven. They make absolutely no sense, but holy fuck if the lines "and if you listen very hard, the truth will come to you at last, when all is one and one is all, to be a rock and not to roll" don't resonate within my very soul.

>>470693
I can't be bothered to type out the entire extended slow build-up for the joke but the punchline is electric trains.

It must have been a fever dream, but I could have sworn Dancing on My Own was a cover by Robyn and the original version was from the 80s.

>>470700
There’s another version of Dancing on My Own which is a slow ballad version by a male singer whose name I have forgotten. Are you thinking of that?

I also remember another song by Robyn called Keep This Fire Burning which in my opinion was originally by Beverley Knight, but I looked that up a few years ago and I think the Robyn one was the original and I just heard it second.

>>470697

>and it was all so direct and literal, it was painful.

Some people would probably just call it "raw". It reminds me of Ever Fallen In Love by The Buzzcocks. Which was also a quite juvenile song.

Another example of absolutely genius ambiguous lyrics from near enough around the time of Stairway was Strawberry Fields Forever. On the face of it, it's some roundabout way of John Lennon processing a particular childhood memory, but the way it can both mean anything and nothing still stands out as brilliant songcraft even after close to 60 years.

I once accidentally gave an acquaintance his big break in our industry by buying him twitter followers as a joke. I came clean and he had them removed but by that point his account was blowing up with real followers as the algorithm favoured him, and that lead to minor fame that he could have pursued if he wanted.
It's taken me six months but I followed enough people on one of the more popular twitter clones that tens of thousands followed back. That only took a month, I waited and slowly unfollowed them all. Now I have tens of thousands of followers but am following fewer than five hundred. The algorithm doesn't work the same way but I figure if I wait a bit longer they'll forget why they followed me and crowd psychology will have at least a small effect in my favour.
It doesn't feel totally ethical, it's a very small social contract I've broken many many times. But it's cheaper than buying ads. They can always unfollow me if they choose.

>>470701
It was definitely an 80s song with a male singer, it had that navel gazing sort of sound rather than a ballad with strong vocals, that I listened to in my car. Must have imagined the entire thing.

>>470694
>Do you two do anything creative?
Outside of painting miniatures, would you believe I've never once noticed this come up before in the years I've been visiting this place?

As with the jist with otherlad, I used draw to but never developed it into a hobby. Last month I dug out my drawing tablet for the PC, did a few shitty sketches for a week then filed away and slowly forgot about them.

I mentioned it around the time but didn't garner any interest, probably for the trash image I'd attached. It didn't get much better but it was fun while it lasted.

The most interesting part was coming to terms with the technical side of things and that how electronic drawing allows a great range of tools and techniques that would otherwise feel like cheating. Whether that's layers, cloning and copying or isolating pixels, it's all very compartmentalised whereas physical mediums allow for fewer mistakes and much greater holistic 'artistic journey'.
On paper your work becomes a description of art, whereas on screen it's almost a direct snapshot of a static image from your imagination (image-imagination, interesting).
Maybe that's just the creative process in general that I never learned. I got an E in art studies at school, dickheads gave me a fucking medal. I'm sure I've complained about that before.

I attach these scraps for the sake only of anchoring the post. Appart from the dark squiggle there's not much here I'm that pleased with, they're basically the early stages of building up images that I never bothered to continue. This is ultimately the fruit of 2 weeks playing with a sketching tablet. E in Art, bitches.

>>470702
>Some people would probably just call it "raw".
This reminds me of hearing some kid talking about why he liked screamo music so much because of its 'raw emotion'. So fucking cringe, man. I can't seperate the music from the listener as they're invariably angsty teenagers. It's similar to how my submissive, timid younger sister discovered "oh I think I might want to learn the drums" - yeah no shit, you want to be heard.

I hate recalling my teenage years, god.

Just held in explosive diarrhea for over two hours in an important in-person meeting.

>>470694
>Do you two do anything creative?
I have a wide range of creative skills and interests that are as diverse as they are useless.

I believe that my chief creative talent lies in my ability to write limericks. I'm pretty good at those, and terrible at everything else.

>>470709
Write one about Britfags then.

>>470710
A graduate and two school-leavers
And zero religious believers
Went into their shed
To turn this domain red
We're communists, and there are three of us

It's not my best work, but it's probably somewhere in the middle so you can judge me on it anyway.

A fit Turkish lass I know just dyed her hair blonde and it instantly reduced her shaggability. Makes her look very incongruous, but not in a cool artsy way. If you don't have the facial features for it, just don't it.

In more important news, I bought a pair of used Blundstone Chelsea boots two months ago and the soles just disintegrated in the middle of my daily constitutional. When it comes to certain kinds of soles, "barely used" on ebay is probably a bad thing, despite the shoes or boots looking new. There's this PU hydrolysis thing where the bonds in the rubber don't adhere to each other when they're not used regularly, but I'm certain it's also very much down to how much the manufacturer shelled out for Chinese slave labour and how jewy they wanted to be in terms of planned obsolescence. I've had bball trainers from Adidas that still last after six years despite only using them occasionally in summerd, Nike bball shoes that fell apart in six months, and Asics running shoes that went kaput after a couple of years, despite me being a two year champion in the sport of unfulfilled new years resolutions.

(A good day to you Sir!)

I drove past Flamingo Land today. Looked like it was shut. It had been fucking down with rain half the afternoon and it is a weekday, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was just dead, but really I can't imagine the place still doing a lot of business.

I've had potato waffle sandwiches for breakfast. In my opinion, it's superior to a chip butty.

>>470713
Last time I went to Flamingo Land was about 8 or 9 years ago. It was horribly tired and dated then, I can't imagine it's much better now.

I've had a look online and if I wanted to book for next week it'd be £51.50 a ticket. I could book Alton Towers for £34.

>>470712
Oy vey m8.

As unfashionably 4chanish as it is to invoke those anti-semitic tropes, I very rarely see bans handed out around here for anti-shamanism. Bit of a double standard, just saying.

>>470716

Are you joking? Why do you think we have the word filters?

>>470717

Aren't they a bit watered down nowadays.

There was a time when even the words "word filter" were filtered to "genuinely hilarious joke".

Is there a proper name for the taste group that includes aniseed things? I refuse to believe that liquorice and fennel and so on can all be such different plants and yet so similar.

>>470719

Anethole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anethole

>>470720

What did you just call me?

Asda have rejected my refund request after they delivered mouldy sweet potatoes yesterday. Shower of bastards.

>>470763

Serves you right, we only use Ocado on this website.

It's amazing how often the answer to being stuck in a state of decision paralysis is "have a wank". I don't think it would work in a war, but in my personal life it's great.

>>470763
I'll never forget all the rotten peppers I saw in Asda once. Covered in blue mould and the packets were full of vile water. Bad supermarket, bad place; they tried to warn us by making the logo that awful colour, I suppose.

If I'm going to a pub then I'll usually order a pint of something like Peroni, Birra Moretti or Madri. Maybe if the likes of Carling had a Mediterranean name I'd drink them.

In other news, I wish they'd stop trying to make crisps healthier.

What did we agree on coffee again, were the filter coffee machines worth buying compared to just using having instant? I know a lot of people have big fancy machines these days that will make all sorts and lick your arse in the morning.

>>470771

They are nice, but realistically speaking if you're a dedicated full time caffeine addict, you'll end up still buying instant. Otherwise it's like being a full time smoker without switching to roll-ups. Either you're loaded, or just love to piss money away.

>>470772
What if I just like a cup of coffee? I can't say that filter has ever struck me as better than instant but it might be a matter of taste.

I went over 15 years without breaking a phone, but in the past 5 years I've managed to drop and completely fuck up 2.

>>470774

Seconded. I've had mobile phones for 26 years and never broke a single one, but just a couple of weeks ago my current phone got the Spiderman app as the screen cracked when I dropped it.

It's only in the bottom right corner a bit, so I haven't bought a new phone yet.

>>470774
I was thinking just yesterday that I haven't heard about people dropping their phones in the toilet or sink for a few years now. Either people have improved their grip strength and reduced their carelessness, or the increased water risistance of modern phones has meant people no longer need to cop to their mistakes.

>>470776
Get a screen protector. My phone would have had a shattered screen years ago if not for that. I replaced my iPhone 5 screen probably about four times before it finally died properly, but I'm a little annoyed at how much time and effort I could have saved if I'd spent a fiver on a sheet of sticky plastic.

>>470777

I normally get a screen protector right away for every new phone, but with this one, I couldn't find the right protector when it came out because it was still a brand new model, and then when the first few nicks and scratches appeared, it was sort of like, I won't need one now.

I've cursorily been looking at new phones, but haven't decided. I've got a lot of legacy audio hardware that isn't Bluetooth capable, so it absolutely needs a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is rare now, as phone makers have figured out how to sell you more expensive phones with less features every year.

>>470774
Are they iPhones? I broke my old Motorola when I was in bed and dropped it behind the radiator, and I took that cue to switch to an iPhone to see how they were. Not only have I repeatedly had the conversation with people that they are notoriously slippery, but other iPhone users have expressed anxiety that my phone is “naked” because i haven’t got a phone case. And it is indeed quite slippery, so perhaps there has been a recent development in phone manufacturing that makes phones more droppable.

>>470779
>because i
Its autocorrect is abysmal too.

>>470779

Get a rubber phone case. That should take care of any slipperiness.

Most other phones are also very slippery right out of the box, so that's not just an iPhone problem.

The last good phone I remember that didn't have that problem was my Samsung Galaxy II mini, which had a detachable plastic cover on the back with sort of a non-slip finish. But most newer phones have had Gorilla glass backs for ages now.

I've got piss poor download speeds lately in my back garden both on my laptop and my phone, and both on my wi-fi and the LTE mobile network. It tends to be better inside the house, but it's still not as fast as I've been used to.

Could there be any interference from some sort of radio transmitters nearby? All I can think of is that my neighbour installed a new CCTV camera above his front door a few weeks ago, but it appears to be connected via RJ45/ethernet cable and it's at the front, not in the back where I've got the bad bandwidth.

Fuck, what was I gonna do today? I'm sure there was something. I got up at 7, had a shit, went back to bed until about 12, and I've been reading about Spanish pike and shot formations on Wikipedia.

The postman has brought a parcel for next door, but I think next door have moved out, I haven't seen them in months. So that's probably going to sit in my hallway for a few weeks until I decide to do something about it. I'm going to have to go somewhere and talk to someone to sort that out aren't I, fucking hell. Why do these things happen to me.

>>470779
The first phone I broke was a Huawei, which fell out of my pocket while I was sat down during the first week I had it; the case I'd ordered hadn't even arrived by the time it happened. The crack only got worse over time. That phone had no grip whatsoever.

The second phone was a Motorola. That came with its own plastic case but I dropped it so many times it cracked in one corner, which led to part of the screen turning black. Since yesterday the entire screen flashes various shades of green. I never used to be careless with phones but that one fell on the floor quite a few times.

That's reminded me I had one of those half-awake dream moments this morning where I was upset because I'd taken a chunk out of the top of my phone, which I have only had about 6 months. And also I was late for work.

Then I woke up and was relieved that my phone is fine and it's my day off.

>>470786
I'm going to dream I'm late for school again and struggle to recollect my adult life on waking now, aren't I? Thanks for that, arsehole.

>>470783

Wifi and LTE are on completely different frequency bands. If something is interfering with both, then it's almost certainly a big bit of electrical equipment that has started making a lot of sparks, most commonly a dying electrical motor or transformer. Old petrol engines with a magneto ignition system are notorious for this, but it's pretty unlikely that a neighbour is running their classic car or an old petrol mower 24/7.

If that is happening, then the simplest thing you can use to try and track down the source of interference is an AM radio. Tune it between stations, listen out for a repetitive buzzing or tapping noise and see if it's louder in any particular direction.

Nitzer Ebb's frontman just passed away. Please make sure your local goths are able to cope at this time.

Barely slept at all last night because my sacroiliac joint was acting up again and I had no more painkillers in the house besides some Voltarol gel which turned out to be almost no help at all, and I only had a teacup of petrol left in the tank to go to an out of hours pharmacy at 3am, and I wouldn't have been ok to drive anyway because I had just taken my mirtazapine.

A sprained sacroiliac joint is absolute torture and pretty much every position you assume in bed is constantly painful, and turning over in any direction even more so. I get it occasionally after strenuous physical work or exercise. My orthopedist told me a while ago that there's nothing generally wrong with it, just that it appears to be a bit "tender".

The Home Office has gone too far this time.

>>470791
I can't remember the last time I saw a goth.

>>470793
What have they done? Based purely on your tone, I worry they might have deported a fat woman.

>>470795
Plane crash in India.

>>470796

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c8d1r3m8z92t

>London-bound plane carrying 242 people crashes after take-off in India

I guess that's one way you can limit immigration.

I think I've got a bit of heatstroke from being outside with minimal shade for about five hours yesterday without putting on any suncream, like a dafty.

I've just had a shower on the coldest setting but the water felt warm on my body. That can't be good.

Went to watch sports day. If they allowed gambling I'd have made an absolute killing with an accumulator on the sole black kid winning every single race.

>>470798

Stay out of the sun for now, put some ice or one of those cooling gel packs on your forehead, get plenty of fluids and electrolytes, and a good bit of rest.

I had pretty bad sunstroke once on our first evening on holiday, where I'd literally spent the entire day floating on the water on an air mattress. I didn't even remember most of it later on, but apparently around dinner time I got up from my bed in our hotel room and was mumbling all kinds of incoherent things. My parents then put me back in my bed and let me sleep it off. The next thing I did remember was waking up the next morning with very severe sunburn on my back.

Jeremy Clarkson's childhood home is up for sale.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/162858752

>>470803

It looks like he sold it ten years ago. So whoever buys it does not get to meet Jeremy Clarkson in any shape or form.

But maybe that's a plus.

>>470803

That's his childhood home? He's always been a posho, then? I was under the impression he was a class traitor but at least had humble roots.

Then again he is a journalist. Has there ever been a time journos weren't an exclusively nepotist PMC clique.

>>470805
>Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson was born on 11 April 1960 in Sprotbrough, then part of West Riding of Yorkshire.[5][6] He is the son of Shirley Gabrielle Clarkson (née Ward), a teacher,[7] and Edward Grenville Clarkson, a travelling salesman.[8] His parents, who ran a business selling tea cosies, put their son's name down in advance for private schools, with no idea how they were going to pay the fees. However, shortly before his admission, when he was 13, his parents made two Paddington Bear stuffed toys for Clarkson and his sister Joanna.[9] These proved so popular that they started selling them through the business.[10] Because they were manufacturing and selling the bears without regard to intellectual property rights, upon his becoming aware of the bears Michael Bond took action through his solicitors. Edward Clarkson travelled to London to meet Bond's lawyer. By coincidence, he met Bond in the lift, and the two struck up an immediate rapport. Consequently, Bond awarded the Clarksons the licensing of the bear rights throughout the world, with the family eventually selling to Britain's then leading toystore, Hamleys.[11] The income from this success enabled the Clarksons to be able to pay the fees for Jeremy to attend Hill House School, Doncaster, and later Repton School.[10]

>>470805

Speaking from the viewpoint of me actually being an estate agent, I don't think it's very posh. As rural buildings go, it even looks a bit plain. In good nick, yes, and I like the interiors that are also modern and up to scratch. This isn't somebody's converted barn on a budget. It's just that nowadays, in this market, virtually any well looked after larger property even somewhere in the sticks of East Bumfuck will command a high price which will at least seem like a lot on paper. And you're probably paying an extra 300 grand just because it's where a sometimes controversial TV personality shat his first nappies. So if you were to buy a similar compound property in a similar location from somebody who is a completely private individual, just north of £1M wouldn't seem that steep for what you get.

>>470807

A property worth a million quid is very definitely posh. Remember median household income is £36k, putting the average family's mortgage affordability as somewhere around £200k, being very generous. Maybe it wasn't worth a million quid in the 70s when they bought it, but it still won't have been three year's wages for a factory worker, will it.

This is why we end up with this weird schism where people see farmers and pensioners as poor hard done by under appreciated groups, but they are in very straightforward terms the wealthiest groups of people in the country by asset ownership.

>>470806

>Because they were manufacturing and selling the bears without regard to intellectual property rights, upon his becoming aware of the bears Michael Bond took action through his solicitors. Edward Clarkson travelled to London to meet Bond's lawyer. By coincidence, he met Bond in the lift, and the two struck up an immediate rapport. Consequently, Bond awarded the Clarksons the licensing of the bear rights throughout the world, with the family eventually selling to Britain's then leading toystore, Hamleys.

Well, that explains a lot. And to think, nowdays you can't even train your AI model on an extensive dataset of copyrighted IP and sell its regurgitated output at a profit without being arrested and sent to jail (metaphorically, by hysterical Twitter using types).

>>470808

£1M is definitely an absolute ton of money for the average young family looking for a place to raise their kids. Unless you've got rich parents ore are an upwardly mobile executive or entrepreneur, it's not realistic. But then, as the median earning young family, you probably wouldn't be looking for a five bedroom with 5000 square feet, like Clarkson's childhood home. Even three to four bedrooms above 2000 square feet would be pushing it, when the nation's average is about 1500.


>This is why we end up with this weird schism where people see farmers and pensioners as poor hard done by under appreciated groups, but they are in very straightforward terms the wealthiest groups of people in the country by asset ownership.

It often happens that people live in homes that are paid off and which are now worth a tidy sum if they were to be sold, but that's almost the only assets they've got. Yes, in theory, they are rich, but in order to free up that wealth, they would have to sell their home, which they have often lived in all of their lives. That's not something many of them are prepared to do, so they'd rather live in a deteriorating property with loads of backlogged repairs and eat spaghetti and tinned soup all week.

It's what is called house poor. More precisely it's when a much lager portion of your income is spent on your house than would be healthy in your financial situation, but that term is also used when people have little more than their house and the shirt on their back.

I actually had one elderly client just recently, a widower whose pension and savings after his wife's death just weren't enough anymore to pay for upkeep, utility and all the other things. So he very sadly decided to sell. It took some convincing, but he eventually agreed to about a £100K markdown from what could have been £400K and more if the house had been in good condition. He has now moved into assisted living, where a touch over £300K will go some way for his twilight years, but he was still quite sad to sell his house that he'd lived in and raised a family for over 50 years.

I guess my point is, don't judge people who are asset rich on paper but who really aren't rich in any way that you and I would think of as rich. Their struggle is very often real.

>>470805

He used to be very obviously posh, but he toned it down for the telly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-X222bpiFw

>>470807
Remember that you are replying to a poster who just said, presumably in complete earnest, that getting a job as a TV presenter instead of heading down t'pit at 14 makes you a "class traitor". You're pretty much speaking to Pol Pot, I suspect. Of course, if he is our usual friendly neighbourhood Maoist, then the undeniable fact that even many affluent people with comfortable lives have zero hope of ever paying that much for a house just proves his usual point that we all need to rise up and overthrow those who can afford such mediocre opulence.

How do you get to sell so many celebrity houses, anyway? Are celebrities constantly moving? Are you a specialist in celebrity residences? What's the worst celebrity house you've sold? I bet Kerry Katona's lived in some right shitholes.

>>470812
Getting a job as a TV presenter instead of heading down t'pit at 14 doesn't make you a "class traitor" but being Jeremy Clarkson does.

>>470812

>How do you get to sell so many celebrity houses, anyway? Are celebrities constantly moving? Are you a specialist in celebrity residences?

I don't know where you got that, but I sell bog standard residential family homes to ordinary people like you and me. And occasionally buy to let flats.

I could tell loads of stories and anecdotes about ordinary people, but they're probably not that interesting.

Although, I once had a potential buyer looking at a property who told me he was some sort of lower level TV executive who was about to be moved to another regional office and needed a new home for himself and his family, but that was about it. He told me he'd worked on some well known TV programmes in the past, but they weren't ones I normally watch.

>>470814
Has the job made you a bit racist? All estate agents I know hate dealing with Asians.

>>470815

I wouldn't say that. I've more come to loathe certain types of people, both sellers and buyers, and I've found that you can be dealing both with absolutely insufferable white British cunts, and on the other hand with very endearing people from different parts of Asia.

With one caveat, and that is that a lot of buyers from eastern Europe as well as the Middle East are still looking to buy loads of properties with illegal money. It could cost me my entire existence if I knowingly, and in many cases even unknowingly facilitate money laundering that way, so as an estate agent you normally want to not come within a mile of anything dodgy like that, but it can be very difficult to dissuade people like that from buying. I normally know what's up after about five minutes of talking to them on the phone and asking standard AML catalogue questions, but if you're unlucky, they'll just keep calling, and if you're really unlucky, they will figure out where exactly a property is and then they'll come and pressure the owner into selling to them. Which is where things can get really dicey.

It hasn't made me racist, again, although I now treat those two kinds of nationalities and ethnicities with absolute caution when they show up and want to buy property. I'd say well over 70 percent of them are into shady stuff that you just don't want anything to do with.

I've been suggesting that my mum to use an LLM to support her in everyday life. She's always been a bit loopy and it would be a useful tool to support her in the sunset years rather than using facey and the people around her. Unfortunately when I said today that she should ask Gemini about whether a product will help her health issues before buying it she responded that 'AI's are just for saddos' to talk to.

I think I get it that she has no frame of reference for this technology other than what she sees on the news but it's still very annoying and I suspect will lead to messes I'll have to clean up.

>>470816
What's up with them lot buying up all the seaside towns anyway? Do they know something we don't or is it just easy to find determined sellers on the coast?

>>470817
>I've been suggesting that my mum to use an LLM to support her in everyday life. She's always been a bit loopy
This strikes me as a fucking terrible idea.
https://futurism.com/chatgpt-users-delusions
https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/clinical-and-forensic-dimensions-of-psychiatry/202412/when-ai-connects-the-wrong-dots-chatbots

>>470812

Your first mistake is presuming I was being entirely earnest. Your second is that I don't think being a TV presenter makes you a class traitor, the point was that I thought Jeremy Clarkson started off working class and then started LARPing as a posho; but if it turns out he has really been a posho all his life then it's not a LARP is it.

You flatter me with the Pol Pot comparison though.

>>470817
She's correct and "support her in the sunset years rather than using facey and the people around her" is a dystopian statement if I ever heard one.

Sage because ut was such a miserable idea it might be bait.

>>470817

>What's up with them lot buying up all the seaside towns anyway? Do they know something we don't or is it just easy to find determined sellers on the coast?

Seaside towns and properties within them were booming especially during the pandemic when most people spent their holidays domestically. And that's where you saw an incredible surge in property values. A friend's parents live in Worthing near Brighton, and he has told me that some beachfront properties in Brighton doubled or nearly tripled in market price during that time. For now the craze seems to be over, but it's still an attractive location especially for Londoners with enough money who want that money to go further, in an area that's not that far away. And because a lot of wealthy Londoners are foreigners (cue jokes about Londonistan), that's why you've got many of them buying those properties.

I'm not sure those properties will see another increase of the kind we saw the last five years though. Not without inflation and wages keeping up anyway. And I'm no marxist, but I tend to be very critical of the property market surge. Yes, it means more commission for me, but at the end of the day, a house should be somebody's home, not an investment asset for speculators and house flippers. Which is what the price increase has largely been driven by, and not just by sheer demand for rooves over people's heads. The latter is largely about the same as it was in 2019. And no real value or fitness for use is added by a house suddenly costing £500K instead of £300K. You could argue that one day when you sell your house you get to cash in on a property boom and that it benefits you that way, but there is still a limit. And it adds no value-for-money at all for new homebuyers who buy that house from you at that price.

A Moonpig card has arrived in the post today, but half of the envelope is torn open at the bottom. I wonder if someone at Royal Mail thought there might be cash or a voucher inside.

>>470823

>And no real value or fitness for use is added by a house suddenly costing £500K instead of £300K. You could argue that one day when you sell your house you get to cash in on a property boom and that it benefits you that way, but there is still a limit.

That's why I called it a "rentier elite" in the Labour thread, because although a large amount of the speculation is driven by and supported by "ordinary people", ie the grey haired mob, the ordinary person doesn't benefit that much out of it. Sure their house is worth twice what they bought it for, but they will still have to put the money they gain straight back into buying another equally over-inflated property.

The only people who benefit from it are those who own multiple properties as part of a portfolio of rentals (who are just as often semi-retired baby boomers as they are multi-national pension funds etc) or those who make their entire living by buying and selling, adding a couple of coats of magnolia paint, and skimming off the fat. "Ordinary" people support it and will vote NIMBY over it, because they think they are truly enriched by their house value, but the people whose interests it really serves are our modern day landed gentry. They are the people who can chuck all their money at politicians and butter up local councils to make sure the situation doesn't change.