mattyboy1973

I've noticed this before - "doer uppers" go for vastly more than they should when you account for the time and costs involved in fixing them up (for the average amateur, at least). People are terrible at estimating time and cost generally and likely look at the most optimistic estimate for both when they should be looking at the most pessimistic/realistic and adding another 50%. Everyone thinks they are the next Sarah Beeney but unless you are providing the labour yourself and able to keep to strict budgeting then the only way you can make money if is the market itself is rising hard - in which case you'd be better off flipping the house without doing any work on it. Must be very frustrating to see these idiots bid up renovations projects if you are a genuine renovator.

I guess most recent (how recent?) places have them, but plenty of others don't. My Dad still has a good old fashioned fuse box in the cellar, some of which I think you actually have to replace the wire itself. God only knows how much it would cost to bring a place like that up to code. I wonder how far these new regs go? Some older places might be up for ten grand's worth of complete rewire. Likewise the stricter insulation standards coming in for rentals (or are they already here?).

It's because they run on a battery whilst the electricity meter can obviously get mains. We got one but it now reverted to a "dumb" meter since we switched suppliers (yes, you can still switch suppliers with a smart meter). We still have the gadget that the original supplier gave us showing daily use etc which is pretty handy actually.

Or, as Peggy Mitchell once said when she was moving to Spain; "If you're going to be miserable, you might as well be miserable in a warm climate.".

They have sh!tloads in Australia - probably more than we do. And just as asinine.

Why not a 3-way vote with a second preference? Remain, "deal", no deal. Top two choices go through, and preferences from third place are assigned. That way we will know if people who want a deal would rather remain or crash out as second preference. It's rather likely that remain would win anyway IMO, given that it is the most painless solution and the one most likely to stop the endless Brexit news cycle the soonest. Can you imagine another 2-3 years of endless Brexit? It doesn't bear thinking about. Whatever happens, I don't think any result is going to last another 40 years before being revisited. Support for EU membership amongst the young is huge - 70% huge - with the opposite swing amongst the old.

We are now five years back in the UK after ten down under. I have tried to impress upon people, both on this forum and elsewhere, the sheer scale of the insanity down there. I know it can be hard to believe for someone who is familiar with the London property market, but the major cities in Australia knock London into a cocked hat when it comes to pricing and the relentless obsession with property. We left Sydney when we realised we wouldn't be able to afford anything nice, and thought the prices were crazy. They've since nearly doubled, so by my reckoning they could halve now and still be expensive. Who knows where the bottom is? My guess is that the RBA will throw what they can at it (although they have been sounding the alarm for a decade), and any drop in price there will have to be considered in AUD terms as well. By that metric, 60-70% down in GBP could be on the cards and then it might be tempting to move back (GBP problems not withstanding). This meltdown in Aus is well overdue and is going to be epic. It will be very interesting to see how it pans out.

Was going to say the same thing - they have absolutely no trouble these days in getting bikes down to the minimum weight. However I think the gist of the point - about Sky pioneering the use of incremental improvements to succeed - is true. They just don't apply it to reducing bike weight.

Hard not to feel some sympathy towards here, tbh. She's in an impossible situation (granted, she chose to be in it), but still.. And you're probably right - public don't know, don't really care any more and just something else on the bloody news. I know I do.

Would it help though? They'd need to win a GE with enough support to overturn the bill. Hard to imagine, and the various vox pops I've seen on the news over the past couple of days seem to indicate far more support for this deal amongst the public than within the house, so I don't that the promise to redo would be a massive vote winner.

As an outside bet, you never know! Maybe not first time round, but if she loses by a couple of dozen or less then maybe on a second go with a few tweaks? It would probably piss the hard brexiteers off more than anyone but there wouldn't be an awful lot they could do about it once it was through parliament.

Yeah. I mean, I could be completely wrong but my feeling is that there are enough Tory MPs against him to stop him even getting on the leadership ballot, although I think he would probably win it if he did and it went to a members' vote since that is the precise demographic that loves him. Not convinced he would be the people's choice in a GE now though, and also think that maybe the electorate has had just about enough of these Tories regardless of the alternative.

I think you are overstating this buffoons popularity. Granted, some of the Tory faithful love him but I think the novelty has worn off for the rest of us and frankly I think his star is well and truly on the wane. He has also demonstrated his incompetence at ministerial level as one of the worst foreign secretaries in living memory.

The question and the presented options would be major stumbling blocks and a massive point of contention. I think that, if they do it, they should present 3 options with a second preference - then take top two answers and add preferences from third place. Something like remain, soft (with details) and hard/no deal. Could work, and I think remain would win on that basis. As an aside, any sort of mandate that we currently have for Brexit is for soft, IMO, given 52% voted leave then only 1 in 10 of those voters would need to prefer "soft" to give a soft/remain coalition over 50%.

Second referendum and remain is the most likely outcome, IMO. Everything now is trying to drive us in that direction. It will be interesting to see, if Labour go for 2nd ref in manifesto, whether that will be enough to gather GE votes from the less politically aligned, on the basis of 1 term of Labour is better than a generation out of the EU. It could happen. Don't see Boris winning a TOry leadership contest, either. They'll go for someone dull if they do it.