Paul_S

"The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead." (Douglas Adams)

If you want to achieve great things, take his advice. If you want to be happy consider the price he paid for it first.

Not tea ceremony, normal tea rooms. Doesn't have to be traditional either, just a place that serves a wide variety of high quality loose leaf tea. I am interested in recommendations, I hope I can visit again some time.

I used Google but also just walked in from the street.

I've not been to Taiwan but I've been to China and Chinese tea rooms are amazing but also people at home drink good tea. I was expecting similar in Japan, except with green tea in place of puerh. I hope to visit Taiwan sometime in the future so looking forward to experiencing their tea culture.

When I visited Japan I had whiplash from the disappointment at the state of tea drinking.

While the visit was the best holiday in my entire life and I had the opposite of Paris syndrome the one thing I was particularly looking forward to was visiting Japanese tea rooms. But except for tourist traps and museums all the tea rooms I found were Western style tea rooms and English afternoon tea was all the range apparently.

Same thing happened when I moved to the UK and discovered that 99.9% of people drink tea bags most of which are terrible, they brew it with no care and then add half a cup of milk and heap of sugar into it.

And yet in both cases the mystique around tea, tea accessories and tea aesthetics remained. The actual tea part of it atrophied or maybe was never there to begin with, I don't know. Tea sets serve as decoration while they drink a mug of builders tea.

Not if they hatch them from eggs there isn't. And it's not like they're going to keep them outdoors.

Why can't they keep chicken??? Chicken need water and layers pellets (which store fine). You get fresh eggs every day and free manure to use in your greenhouse! I really don't understand why they don't do it.

How do we stop AI from being evil? Maybe we should be asking how do we stop people from being evil. Haven't really made a dent in this so far. Doubt we can do so for AI either. Especially if it grows smarter than us.

We can just hope that if it indeed becomes more intelligent than humans it will also be more virtuous as one causes the other.

Thanks. Now it makes sense to me to make a small run first before printing more. Doesn't explain why they immediately paid the author so much money. Are best sellers made by publishers by investing money in marketing it (like what this article is doing)?

"When her literary agent, Douglas Stewart, sent out the manuscript in January 2021, he felt in some ways as if he were introducing her for the first time. “Despite the fact that Gabrielle had several big successes before, there are people who had never heard of her before this,” he said. A frenzied bidding war with 10 publishers broke out, and Knopf won, paying a seven-figure advance. Shortly after, an auction for screen rights drew 25 bidders, and Paramount Pictures bought them for $2 million."

How does this work? An unknown author suddenly gets bid on for loads of money before anyone bought the book?

"Knopf, which initially printed 60,000 copies, has reprinted the book 21 times to keep up with runaway sales. "

Company paid more than a million and prints only 60000 copies? How do they intend to make the money back?

This makes no sense to me.

Also, nowadays I don't believe in grass roots anything, what I believe in is clever marketing on social media.

Edit: Maybe I shouldn't be doxing myself.

I don't know what matter wants to be either.

Try not paying alimony and see what happens. Go to jail AND continue having to pay them. No difference here.

If you remember the 90s you remember the panic over encryption. We still have legislation today because of that idiocy.

Except wait, we still have panic over encryption today.

I have watched the whole series and it is an amazing experience to watch someone's whole life. Most people will never see lives of people of different class, here you can see orphans, working class, privileged.

You can see how society works and how rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor. If you're poor and work really, really hard then maybe you'll become middle-class if you're lucky. If you're rich it really doesn't matter what you do, you'll be fine.

In my city there's very little point in having an expensive bike (like all electric ones are) because you are either limited to only going places where you can stay with the bike (parks, etc) or it will inevitably be stolen. Any bike over a 1000 is guaranteed to be stolen no matter the amount of locks or cameras. Police in my city has an online form you can use to to report it to get the case number so you can claim on your insurance but they do not prosecute or investigate bike theft as policy.

What I want to know is what kind of bread costs 4 pounds?

For people not in the UK: bread at a supermarket costs a quarter of that.

If that's true those people have been maintaining a joke for literal years, and spending substantial amounts of time producing software. Do you expect them at the end of their lives to crack a smile and say "ha! got you!"?

If you read the whole thread it becomes obvious it sadly is not a joke.

How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available? And how can someone be clever enough to be a software engineer and not clever enough to figure out crystals in bags taped to cables do not affect music quality.

Just some nuggets from that thread:

"Sounds awesome, the previous version had a slight tendency to defuse the treble, but with VS2012 compile it is a much more complete sound with absolutely no digital harshness, some 16/44 albums I could hardly play before without getting a headache are now rendered in their full glory."

"It's just lazyness on the part of the player developers that they rely on the old methods, I guess they think bits are bits."

"Goto also sounds better than anything else I have tried." - the "Goto" in the quote means a goto in C used to replace a loop.

"also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."

Not the best time to be turned into a tv show but some books end up being filmed many times so maybe no harm here. I hope they don't update the setting and keep it retro future.

If you live in the UK and have similar goals I created a telegram group to share research on how to move to the countryside without a million pounds: t.me/uk_rural_life

I looked around telegram for groups like this but the only ones I found were full of people with rather extreme views (5G mind control etc.).

I created a group. If you want to join and discuss ways you found to achieve a comfortable rural life:

t.me/uk_rural_life

There's a couple of those companies doing this, I urge you to read carefully what they provide you and what the restrictions are. You might find that the benefits they provide are nothing you can't do yourself cheaper and the restrictions mean you are practically a tenant.

Hey, glad to see there's more people like that. Do you know of any communities where people share info on how to do it without signing up with a commune? (I am very happy for people who join them, it's just not for me and I don't want to pretend as that would be unfair to those good people.)

I hope that the current climate change legislation will have a happy side effect of easing the draconian zoning laws.

My current plan is legal loopholes which I am researching. I want to know the odds I'm against.

There are plenty of loopholes if you just Google it but most of them are absolute nonsense and clickbait. There's one guy I know of who managed it through wood management building gray area. Looks most promising as it doesn't require 12 acres of land.

Yes, I know Wales has some low impact development legislation but look at the history of many of those projects, years of court cases and several tens of thousands of pounds in fees. The successful ones (that I know of) are the ones that incorporated themselves or garnered enough media attention to stop the demolition. I know it sounds lazy but I don't want to start a movement, just build a house. I don't want to cut wheat with a scythe and live in a tipi (can't remember which one but it was one in England that did get permission).

Thanks for the website, I'm amazed how cheap plots are in Ireland. It does look like Ireland has what I'm looking for: reasonably priced house/plot with a couple of acres of land. Those villages even have most of the grid!

But see, that's the problem - all good advice boils down to "move out of England".

The crucial detail is "in England". I could do this in America no problem, I know. I'm surprised more Americans don't take advantage of this freedom they have.

Zoning. There are exceptions for rich people (no joke, Paragraph 79) and commercial farmers (arduous 3+ year journey). Everyone else is limited to existing tiny plots (even in villages) which cost at minimum 200K. Any detached house with more than quarter of an acre land will cost you a million. Contrast that with many European countries where for a small fee you can convert some agricultural land and build a house yourself.

I keep thinking those communities must exist but I never heard of any. Maybe they keep it very quiet, which I could understand.

We considered it for a couple of minutes but we want some land for crops and animals both for their entertainment value and keeping costs down (this is something we already do in our garden and allotment).