As a Brit who has moved overseas, this is extremely obvious when driving in other countries, including other ex-British Empire colony countries.

Its insanely easy to get a license down here in NZ, and it shows with the quality of driving on the road.

"Motorways rarely have hard shoulders".

Yeah, going to have to disagree with this - most motorways have hard shoulders, while the situation of no hard shoulder is much rarer and always called out by signage.

The stance which has completely removed all protections for women.

Because the shit hole you have created for yourselves is now seeing states not only criminalising abortion within their own jurisdiction, they are also criminalising going to another state for an abortion, or doctors in other states assisting people to have abortions.

As a traveller, theres plenty of reasons why I might end up in a hospital in a state which criminalises abortions and any treatment which may act as an abortion - I do not want my wife to die because we happened to be in a car accident and were taken to the wrong states hospital (its difficult to say "dont go there, go here" when unconscious), where she bled out because the doctors were too afraid to carry out a hysterectomy or something similar, purely because it *might* violate state law.

So dont you try and hide behind the "its the states responsibility" stance, you pathetic piece of shit. Your current regime has made it so much more than that and people are literally dying because of it.

My wife refuses to go to the US while the current anti-women stance exists in healthcare provision over there - imagine being refused medical treatment because that treatment might affect an unborn child, despite the fact that shes not pregnant. The mere fact that she is of child bearing age is enough for some states medical professionals to refuse certain types of life saving treatments, simply because it may induce an abortion.

So while we were planning on visiting next year for AdeptiCon and then do some touring, thats now completely off our radar.

Which didn't take into account all the services other countries buy from US companies.

All that software.

All that cloud.

All those apps.

All the financial services.

Conveniently left out of the equation.

The aircraft in question is a Dassault Falcon 900LX owned and operated by Luxaviation Belgium.

In other words, the aircraft in question is a private charter jet owned by a private company - its not a dedicated aircraft, its not a military aircraft, its not owned by the EU.

London is not representative of the rest of the UK.

We all wish it was.

You guys get orders of magnitude more investment than we do elsewhere in the UK.

Only ridiculous if you are fucking stupid.

Cars can be parked on the street, but because the car is longer than the house is wide that means that theres no guaranteed parking outside your house. And often no guaranteed parking on your street

Lamp posts? Perhaps 1 every 100 metres, so sure that solves everything, especially when every other car is vying for the same socket

People like you really dont understand the problem - Im not against EVs, but its going to take a lot of work to make some towns compatible with them. A *lot*.

Ive never been an EV hater, and Ive always seen the issue that EV adoption is going to have when you dont have a single family home with a garage.

You simply just have to step outside North America and into Europe to find situations where most of a towns homes arent suitable at all for EVs - terraced housing where the homes width is shorter than a cars length, no off street parking, no assigned parking, a pedestrian walkway between the house and the roadway where are the chargers going to go?

Europe has massive infrastructure issues to overcome before EVs can be considered by a huge part of the population.

Because people with phones may not be around at convenient times when you need to make a call. And the lack of public pay phones is precisely the issue being addressed here - most people moved over to cell phones, so either they dont carry change for the few public pay phones which do still exist, or the phone companies either removed them or stopped fixing them after they were last vandalised.

This guy said he set the phones up because he lost cell phone reception during his drive to work - he may work antisocial hours, so he cant just knock on someones door when he gets a flat at 3am.

And lots of people would be concerned about their own safety knocking on random strangers doors - especially in society today.

So this guy is giving people the option to make calls in cell phone dead zones, because thats what *he* saw as missing. Good on him.

Yes its an anecdote, and you get 1Gb/s now, sure.

This was 8 years ago - and gigabit fibre to the premises was not new in NZ when I moved here.

And in the UK I lived in a large city, while in NZ I live in a rural town.

But its good to hear that you are finally catching up with NZ.

Yup, moved to NZ from the UK and I went from 80Mbit fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK (and only getting around 50MBit to the house in reality) to getting gigabit fibre to the premises in NZ - and the NZ offering had no caps, got on average 950MBit plus sustained, and was half the price of the UK offering.

Other countries have solved these problems.

In the UK, most people dont have to file taxes - there are no deductions for the vast majority of people, you dont get to deduct your mortgage costs, healthcare costs or anything else. You pay your tax in monthly instalments taken from your wage by your employer, based on well known tax codes and your level of earning, and at the end of the year you get a piece of paper saying how much you paid. If you switched jobs and earned more but underpaid tax, your tax code is adjusted for the next financial year and you pay more tax per month to cover both the previous years shortfall and your new tax requirement.

If you run a business, then the business does file returns, and does have deductions - so that covers your business, Uber driver, travel expenses and everything else. People travelling for business claim expenses through the company, and the company deals with the tax implications.

A businesses accounts and the accounts of the business owner are very very strictly separate - the business owner does not get to dip into the business for their own usage, they get paid a wage or dividend, which is taxed like everyone else as income.

Don’t unsubscribe, mark it as junk. And if it gives you the option to block the sender, do it.

Gmail has such an inconsistent behaviour here it’s unbelievable - how the web ui works is very different to the apps.

Gmail also is terrible at spotting obvious spam, and im regularly marking actual spam as such.

You joke but a lot of suppliers to the US government, including the military, works on a two-contract basis - the initial acquisition of the item, and then the support contract for the item.

A lot of suppliers bid low on the initial acquisition contract, because they know they can make up losses on the support side later on. The supplier is also more willing to take on more risk as part of the supply, again because they can make money back on the support.

If the support contract becomes uncertain because the military can go elsewhere to support the item, then expect the supply contracts to get a lot more expensive, and a lot fewer contractors willing to undertake fixed price deliveries for anything.

The US government did try something similar to this in the late 1980s and early 1990s - they split the procurement of new items into two contracts, the first being the development of the item, and the second being the delivery of the item. Whomever won the development contract had to hand over everything needed to produce the item to whomever won the delivery contract. The problem is, all the risk exists in the development contract, and all the profit exists in the delivery contract.

It did not go well and after a couple of very bad outcomes for development contract winners, they stopped bidding. So the approach was dropped.