I do quite a bit of (and help organise) conservation volunteering. Think countryside and green space path maintenance and management. Woodland path clearing, step building. Just creating nice green space for people to be. Arranging litter picks, working with ecology teams to build habitats etc.

Sometimes even council publicised paths, walks and tourist areas are a scattered blanket of landownders and complications. Having open access to the land registry makes it much clearer who we can go to and ask about helping make our green spaces nicer.

The ridiculousness of the license fee is only highlighted in the modern world.

Tesco do not come hounding me because I've not been shopping in there. Yet routinely for the last 20 years I've been hounded by collectors from Capita about the license fee. Intimidating letters, bouncers at the door trying to barge in, demanding they can see my TV through the windows. The bullying tactics of this are the exact reason I refuse to pay for it.

Move to a better model, put all the old back catalogue on iPlayer and charge a monthly subscription like Netflix. Use the profits from that to subsidise the over the airwaves stuff. Bill me because I use it, don't threaten me because I don't.

I guarantee you the person that was tasked with building the system knew this was unacceptable and was told to get on with it by laters of middle management.

Something trucking has, that non-trucking does not, is enforced rest stops and breaks.

If you don't sit in a random layby, you rest at a charging point, the "waiting around" to charge isn't a detriment. Because as a trucker you have to sit around and wait for amount of time anyway.

*I can't be arsed getting into arguments and different countries and their waiting times. I just know around europe mandatory rests are necessary.

Have places in town that people want to go to, for things they can't get online.

I don't want a TV shop in town, how the fuck do I get a TV home anyway? Carry my new TV through the high street? I might want to see a few TVs in a large store outside town, but TBH all TVs now are a thin black rectangle and some software. So I can research the software online.

I want a good cafe, different types of pub, arcade cabinets. Experiences that I can't get in my living room. Sitting areas and third spaces as you've said. Libraries holding talks/conferences. Local bands, during the day.

Make me want to be in town, don't tell me I have to "save the highstreet" while bemoaning the shops I don't want to go into are failing.

Which will effectively mean the end of street photography CCTV.

Silver linings and all that

I agree with the sentiment of trying to ease the cost of housing.

But... building shitty little barely houses, just so the cost of bigger property can justify staying high, isn't the way forward. Housing needs to be made affordable to people again, and it needs to do that by property prices coming closer to peoples income. If we get there and people are happy with small cheap housing, then great.

I'm seeing similar with holidays. In the 1990s going on a family holiday somewhere abroad and enjoying it wasn't uncommon. Now we're glamorising staying in a shed, in some farmers field, with no running water. "Off grid, shepherds hut" my arse, we're being conditioned that a shite holiday that we can barely afford is a step up.

I don't want to go back to the waste of before, the masses of international travel and burned cheap fuel. But ... we need to call a spade a spade here. Selling cheap, at high prices is just more ripping people off, and leaving people in emotional austerity is damaging to wellness and social being.

American dream

...

And how many "minimum wage" jobs nowadays are actually full time?

Most of them that I see advertised are pro-rata advertised. Under houred or zero contract. But of course if you take two jobs you'll eventually end up with rota clashes and lose one of those jobs. So good luck there.

Starmer wont condem it ...

Still fucking better than actively supporting. Shameful politics in the UK right now. Absolutely disgusting.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-older-and-younger-driver-factsheets-2023/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-older-driver-factsheet-2023

Just plonking this here for ease of conversation.

Reading the article it seems more that Labour and Cons are both more scared of OEUK (offshore energies UK) than anything else.