Welcome to the UK where the same rental would be twice the price without any security or rights to your place.

Renting is fucked basically everywhere, but in Germany it’s less fucked than most places, if you can believe it.

I Moved from Germany to the UK a little over a year ago.

The UK (at least London) is soooooooo much worse as far as renting goes. I rented a few places in Germany in a couple different cities and every place had some annoyances, but I just wasn’t prepared for what a free-for-all shitshow it is in the UK.

Literally hundreds of people coming to viewings for a single place. Landlords can basically raise rents whenever they feel like it and force you out. The places are generally absolutely terrible quality with very little incentive to improve things. I had places trying to force 3+ year contracts with no break clause. I’ve never experienced so many colleagues constantly having issues with “the landlord raising rents by 30% and when we refused or tried to negotiate we got forced out”. Then you have to scramble to find a place in a month.

They price everything based on number of bedrooms rather than size, so landlords are incentivized to subdivide flats into multiple units and minimise space. A 4-bed flat-share with no living room? Fairly standard, even for working professionals.

Plus, after you pay the extortionate rents the TENANT pays the taxes (council tax).

I encountered issues in Germany with renting (particularly when I first moved there) but the German situation would be a HUGE improvement for most of the UK

Yeah, I kind of intentionally avoided saying AFPS because unfortunately these days that tends to mean (like with diabotical) games which are desperate to be the most hypercompetitive aspects of quake. Duels or FFA aren’t really my thing, give me teams and objectives!

Perhaps unsurprisingly UT2k4 is one of my favorite of all time

Valorant I can’t speak to, since I can’t play it on Linux.

CS I’ve played a lot of and it’s fantastic just a bit too slow paced/tactical for me. Your right though that it’s a fantastically designed game and a really good shout.

Overwatch I strongly disagree with. The maps have clean lines, but with the character design, abilities, and UI they clearly prioritise being flashy over anything else. It’s really visually loud for the sake of it and too much for me.

I’d like multiplayer shooters that put emphasis on clean visuals designed to transmit information as well as more emphasis on movement.

Even with all the hats, visibility in TF2 is a masterpiece compared to 90% of games. One team always bright red, one team is always bright blue. The maps aren’t full of noisy scenery and still look great.

Thing is, those who are against immigration are much more motivated. This is generally how politics goes, that a motivated minority can eventually get their way against a less-interested majority. As great as it is, that was largely what happened in the other direction with issues such as gay marriage.

For those who are anti-immigration this is often the only topic they care about, or they care much more about this than anything else. On the other hand, those who are pro-immigration are largely either mildly-favorable towards it or they care much more about other issues.

Personally I think that left-leaning parties in Europe basically have two options currently:

-Fight against anti-immigration stances and then lose power.

-Focus on other topics while getting tougher on immigration.

It might not be the smartest move to be anti-immigration, but unfortunately in a democracy feelings are usually more important than facts and one of the biggest issues with the left is not being able to accept that.----

For me it’s less about bandwidth and more about not having to worry about building/ maintaining ratio. It’s just one less thing to think about.

I love seeding so I thought private trackers would be for me, but it’s so hard to go positive when EVERYONE is trying to. Yeah, there is freeleach but then I was downloading a bunch of stuff that I didn’t want, just for the sake of it.

I used to use US international, but a few years back switched to Eurkey which is essentially just an upgraded/turbocharged version.

Might be too much for you, but I can’t live without it nowadays!

I know a few people who live in Amsterdam and they all said basically the same thing: as it currently is, most locals don’t really go there because it’s miserable due to all the poorly behaved tourists. I’m sure that there are plenty of locals that may disagree, but it seems to be mostly an area for tourists.

Like any situation there are going to be winners and losers, but I feel that this is most likely a fairly large net positive for most residents.

Hmmm I’m a data scientist and regularly run/train various deep learning models for my job using a 3gb 1060.

Not saying that more than 4gb isn’t necessary for many applications, but it’s far from useless!

This is about Singapore though?

I’m actually in the process of leaving!

Moving to London recently was an eye-opening experience. I came from Frankfurt (one of the most expensive German cities), yet finding a place was astronomically harder and in the end we pay around twice what we did for a similarly located (but smaller!) flat.

In general most housing seems to be much worse quality as well. Our current place is actually quite nice and feels very solid/well insulated, but many places that I viewed (or briefly lived in) were really run-down, poorly insulated, or clearly just poorly-built.

I’m not sure if it is one of the causes, but we were also looking into buying a place here and found that owning (and presumably building) anything other than single-family houses is a bit of a clusterfuck (here in England at least, I’ve heard it’s better in Scotland) with the whole “leasehold” system.

Having looked at this, they have a few things that aren’t quite right. But that’s not surprising given how tough it is to compare countries that define things differently.

I’ve only lived recently in Germany and the UK, so I can speak for those, but for example the “maternity” comparison is very skewed because of the (admittedly confusing) way that Germany defines “paid time with your child after they are born”. There are basically two phases to it, with different names and conditions. The first is the 14 weeks of 100% pay which is listed on the website, but afterwards there is what’s called Elternzeit (“parents time”) which is partially paid (starts at 65% if I remember right) and is at least 14 months, but can be extended with slightly different conditions.

So the vast majority of the benefit is not being included in this comparison.

The only time i ever got overtime back as holiday leave was in Germany. That was great!

I think I had something stupid like 43 days off that year (including the base 6-weeks)

Another reason it can be tough is that certain metrics are defined differently between counties.

Many metrics will list the UK a having one of the highest holiday allowances in Europe since legally full-time workers are entitles to 28 days off, however the UK includes Bank Holidays (8-9 days) in this total. For comparison, a country like Austria has a minimum of 5 weeks holiday (25 days) but this is IN ADDITION TO state holidays (of which there are 13, but some will be on weekends so the absolute amount varies year to year). Centrally this end up with everyone in Austria having something like 33-34 days off.

I’ve yet to see a list that accounts for this, so most have the UK right near the top. I would bet that this metric is no different.

Yeah, we moved from Germany to the UK a year or so ago and are about to move back pretty much specifically because of this.

Maybe it’s just London, but here there is a really prevalent “hustle culture” and everyone is doing things like joining work calls during their holidays or not having a lunch break and then working 9 hours anyways.

Not to mention you get less holidays and things like being sick or maternity leave are terrible headaches in comparison.

So all in all, for us at least its been a shock! Ib would be interested to know what metrics they are using for work-life balance, because it likely doesn’t match what I would choose.

Honestly, I agree with this completely. I got into private trackers earlier this year and after a couple months just quit. On public torrents I have a seed ratio over 5.0, since I have gigabit upload and just like giving back, but private trackers just ended up being a pain.

Having to manage ratios was a pain. Having to build your ratio with freeleech was a pain. I never had a single torrent get a positive ratio. To top it off, I didn’t even find the selection to be much better than public trackers.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I tried 3-4 and then just gave up. Too many rules and not enough reason to use it.

I actually think the opposite. Moves like this are part of a slow transition towards one of the awkward “basically a non-voting member but the population takes pride in not being a member” situations like we see with Norway or Switzerland

3 million is gigantic! The country I’m in currently barely has that many people

You can do car-free at any size if its planned right.