I’m in my 40s, work a low-risk job, live in a low-risk area, have 12+ years no claims, a clean license. Ignoring the points at which everyone’s insurance gets cheaper as they age, my premiums has gone up constantly. Coincidentally, so have insurance underwriter’s profits. I definitely could have got cheaper insurance if I’d have compromised on cover, or gone with a worse-rated provider, but that’s not my point. The base cost of insurance is set by the underwriters, and that has increased year on year for just about everyone

Are they hell. Has anyone, ever, known their insurance premium to go down? It’s a racket. If they 20 limits are cutting costs, that cost is being turned into further profit, not savings for the customer

There’s always one

Mario Shart

I started watching last time he got in with a kind of amused schadenfreude, mistakenly thinking that while he was obviously going to be a disaster for the US, he might be less terrible than Hillary for the rest of us.

When he was replaced by a grown-up, I breathed a sigh of relief - I’d not realised how mentally taxing it is to have someone so quixotic and deranged in that position, even from a continent away. This time he’s not even in office yet, and I’m already over the tension that his deranged little outbursts instil in me. Seeing his (and Elon’s) attention focus more over here is unnerving too, neither of them should be making decisions that affect anyone else, let alone in another country!

Ha ha, no, of course not.

So only Linux then?

Space capybara

Hardly a joke considering that they have a population of 1.4m. That’s a medium-sized city…

I went to buy a Christmas tree the other day, and the guy asked me if I was going to put it up myself. I told him “no, that’s disgusting, it’s going in the living room you pervert”

Also, your export market is pretty low, a lot of American stuff doesn’t meet eu/uk standards, or is just plain too big for over here. You can get Toyotas, and parts for them, pretty much everywhere outside of Antarctica

Chips always lie

They’re not poor people, they’re immigrants and all that entails. When I worked in the can in Calais, the fast would turn up and start fights and abuse people, and the police just watched. It’s not a great environment round there

Disappointing image, no standard scale reference

Not even a little Nazi gold tax?

Ha, yeah, to be fair, I didn’t read the article, I just looked at the research paper it was based on. I’ve given up on a lot of science reporting, it sensationalises things from otherwise sensible studies far too often

P.I.C.N.I.C.

The last paragraph of the synopsis above kinda details why this might matter - areas of the brain don’t have such defined and limited purposes as musculature.

A recent similar study found that the area of the brain responsible for spatial location is smaller in people who rely on sat-nav exclusively. That might not seem like much of a problem, as everyone has one in their pocket now, so so what? Well, it turns out that that area is also responsible for mapping our social landscape too, and if it shrinks, our ability to maintain larger and more complex social groups suffers. The ability to read is quite a specific skill, but strongly linked to the kind of imagination used to create these complex worlds and characters in your imagination - how would loosing that ability affect designers/artists/architects etc?

It forgot “carry on with the shooting of morally bankrupt CEOs”, but I suppose you can’t blame it for not being bang up to date

Poor little bastards going to school with their mum’s second name, like Derek Camwhore and Abigail Onlyfans