Yep, if I was homeless with no prospects, especially in winter, a prison would be looking pretty attractive.

Maybe it’s different in your area. Where I live the local fishing spot is nearly all men.

Buy an extra rod and a headphone splitter :p

Oh OK. I’ve never watched it so that’s why I didn’t understand.

What’s the implication? Am I naïve? I just thought it was traditionally a man’s hobby with little interest from women, just as most men mostly aren’t very interested in crochet.

I like fishing, I just think it’s quite unpopular with women.

As long as it’s not fishing haha

Quick! Let’s shut the country down for a year, spend £250 billion on things that have no intrinsic value and then act surprised when we get a shit load of inflation and a cost of living crisis.

It’s not about the size of the number, it’s about presenting information in a way that the average reader can understand. The best way to do that is to present it in the way that they’re accustomed to and I don’t think I’ve ever seen scientific notation used to refer to a sum of money.

It’s great that you and I understand scientific notation, but it’s worthlesss when you’re trying to get the average person to understand what you’re writing if they don’t know it themselves.

To make myself clear, I’m not saying that scientific notation isn’t useful, I’m just saying that most people don’t understand it.

For extra credit, 74,500,000,000,000,000 aka seventy four quintillion, five hundred quadrillion.

Not really. Most people aren’t familiar with scientific or engineering notation. Writing £1,000,000, one million pounds or £1Million is a lot clearer than writing £1×10^6.

My cars odometer says 91,584, not 91.584×10^3

UK taxpayer is now liable for Thames Water’s £12bn debt.

How the fuck did we end up with a system that allows so called “investors” to not just pick our pockets, but the pockets of people that haven’t even been born yet?

All this to allow Thames to survive for at least one year.

Thames needs to be allowed to fail and investors need to take the hit, not the bill payer.

I keep hearing about all the tankies here, but I’ve never actually encountered one.

I wish I was wealthy and unemployed haha

I don’t think that liking the ideals of communism means that you want to bury all Putin related news or even that you support Putin at all. Russia hasn’t been communist for a very long time.

Why is this getting downvoted?

Ok, if you can find an unbiased source that says it costs the UK taxpayer more than 77p per person per year, I’ll read the rest of your comment.

https://news.stv.tv/scotland/how-much-does-the-royal-family-cost-a-breakdown-of-86-3m-in-key-figures

The royal family costs the UK tax payer 77p per year, most people aren’t outraged by that.

It can be argued that they attract a considerable amount of tourism, people that travel to the UK to see the Tower of London, the King’s guards, Buckingham palace and all the rest of it. There is also the “soft power”, people around the world are for some reason obsessed with the UK’s royal family and it does help with influence whether you’d argue that is for better or worse.

I understand that the obscene wealth they hold during a cost of living crisis is an image problem to say the least and I don’t defend that. Such obscene wealth is awful no matter who you are and according to the times rich list, there are at least 257 residents in the UK that are more wealthy than the Royals, some of them considerably so.

For the record, I’m not for or against the UK monarchy, I’m somewhere in-between and see validity in both sides of the argument.

I think everyone knows it’s ridiculous.

For some the monarchy is a living museum, they don’t have to like it, they just find it interesting.

I think it’s a fair point just not well made.

To paraphrase my first reply, to each their own, if someone truly enjoys gambling, they’ll find a way to do it, legal or not.

However, there is a lot of good that money could be doing, whether it is used to help your kids or anything else like that, rather than it being hoovered up by fat cat CEOs and people that hold shares in gambling businesses.

Why stop at online. The amount of pensioners and vulnerable people wasting their money on horses and fruit machines is pretty depressing.

On the one hand, I strongly believe in personal freedom (as long as you’re only harming yourself) and if people want to spend their money, that way it should be up to them. On the other hand, some people are vulnerable and need to be protected from themselves.