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Comment by cangencer | Hacker News Reader

I think UK is only place where rents are advertised as per week, found it very weird when living there.

I think it only happens in areas of the UK where rents are very high, such that a monthly amount would look ridiculously high to almost anyone even if it's the going rate.

Rents are listed as per week here in Australia too.

As a French citizen, I've always assumed that Oz and US could be culturally close. Both are young countries with a lot of space, "unlimited" resources and a need to manage imigration. After living 3 years in Oz, I've noticed it has a lot of similarities with UK, for example the use of the metric system (or their schizophrenia about it), the per week/per month rents, the orthograph and vocabulary ("aluminium";) and down to the awesome simplicity of their tax forms and tax code. Actually the UK tax code is canonically simple and should be adopted by the whole world ;)

In Australia I head some anecdote that resonated that went something like;

Aussies and Brits believe they are culturally different until there's an American in the room.

> I've noticed it has a lot of similarities with UK, for example the use of the metric system

I'm not sure why you think this is worth pointing out, considering that Liberia, Myanmar, and the US are the only countries not using it.

A bunch of old British empire countries really half ass it.

He was referring to our 'schizophrenic' use of it. It's used differently among generations. Older people use purely imperial, whereas young people use a confusing mixture. For example, I measure long distances in miles, but short distances in meters and centimeters! I think of weights and volumes in a metric way, except when talking about the weight of a person, when I use stone (not pounds, mind you).

I might be an extreme example, but most people use an imperial-metric melange of some kind.

> and down to the awesome simplicity of their tax forms and tax code. Actually the UK tax code is canonically simple and should be adopted by the whole world ;)

I hope that wink means you're being sarcastic.[0] Yes, the majority of people are only in a single income tax bracket (20%). And the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system means that most people who earn wages or salaries don't have to file their taxes. But only looking at income tax doesn't take into account the whole picture. "National Insurance" is effectively just an income tax but it's far more complicated than the income tax system (it doesn't get ring-fenced for pensions or health care or social services, it goes into the same coffers as income tax receipts).

But consumption tax is a VAT, which is notoriously expensive to collect. Then there are tax credits on dividends, and various business tax rules. Oh yeah and property tax is paid by the occupier of a house or apartment, not the owner (council tax)! And then there is the City of London that pretty much gets to write it's own rules.

The UK's tax system is better than some, but it's possible to do _much_ better.

0 - https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-tax-si...

I wasn't being sarcastic. In France you also have the taxes you mention (VAT, CGT, property tax, inhabitation tax, ...). We don't have the PAYE (UK) / PAYG (OZ) form. Employers here have no less than 22 kinds of "NI" tax (old age, incapacity, complimentary incapacity, retirement, complimentary retirement, health 1, 2, 3 and 4, low income insurance, unemployment insurance, etc). And that's just for a salary. The company still has to pay land tax, local tax, dividends tax, etc. It is at such a point that I believe the complexity of the wage sheet (there are more than 96 mandatory mentions on the French salary sheet) is the reason we pay monthly instead of fortnightly.

I really assure you that the simple implementation of PAYE in France would improve our national gross product by 10%. It is huge, it does mean that way more than 5% of employees, public servants, accountants and consultants are dedicated to write, understand, advise, control and ombudsmaning salary sheets.

OK, I agree the PAYE system is great for those who earn wages/salaries. If you earn ~£43+/year you are in the 40% bracket and may have to file a tax return, however. That's in order to get things like the right amount of tax relief on your retirement savings contributions. The rest of the non-salary & non-income tax system aren't any better than any other country, IMO.

This trips many people up - £200 per week is not the same as £800 per month as most months are usually longer than 28 days. It is a way of (to many people, very sneakily) charging people more than they expect.

It's not sneaky if it's the prevailing norm.

Coming from Australia, I am accustomed to multiplying by 52 instead of 12.

It's different when you're used to it - a large amount of people here in London are from other countries/areas where this isn't prevalent and haven't worked out (or not really considered) the difference between the two.

Only in London - in the rest of the UK rents are usually monthly.

Australia too.

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