Yeah that’s why I was making the parallel

Ok I don’t know enough about this political system to contribute on that, there are some political systems built like that, like the US.

I will argue that the UK doesn't have a Constitution and that's because of this one thing: No parliament can bind a future parliament. A Constitution is exactly this: a contract binding all future Parliaments to a specific set of axioms that must be respected.

Anyone know why news.ycombinator.com hasn't fallen foul of this legislation?

> childcare vouchers before tax

I wasn't aware of this, I'll take a look and see if it applies thanks.

The pension route is the way I've gone to deal with it, but it doesn't fix the issue of "my bills are going up while my income can't". I'm sure retired me will be glad for it if it makes it that far, and we don't somehow end up being taxed to the hilt on _that_ too when we eventually get there.

EDIT: does > doesn't

London? London has 13 major railroad stations and they're all dead ends.[1] Crossrail, with expensive tunnels, now provides some east-west through services.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Major_railway_stations_...

> The low density of Charlotte means a transport network like Munich’s is not viable, but the city could take its pre-existing light rail network and join it up to the extensive network of railroad lines around the city that are currently used only for moving freight.

This is not a feasible option due to the vast difference in crashworthiness standards between US freight rail and other system types such as light rail. The FRA actually prohibits allowing these two types on the same network of tracks at the same time. However, they could use a line along the right-of-way were it big enough to accommodate another set of tracks.

To be clear first: The parent is being a little unreasonable.

However.

There's no need to resort to insults, nor to use a single person as an example, which doesn't make sense, regardless of whether it's their "only hobby".

Average novel reading speed is an impossible metric. E.g. WPM measurements are irrelevant to long-form reading, are irrelevant to literary reading, and don't account for processing, tangential thought, or re-reading, which are of course highly variable. And "reading time" (the subset of free time conducive to literary reading) is also basically impossible to quantify broadly. It's also difficult to categorize people by how much they are trying to read. Some people are only a little interested, some not at all. Further, this is one of those fields where the super-humans aren't actually that rare, so you get a situation where the average person reads 8 books per year despite half of all people reading half a book per year (made up numbers).

Point of all that being, "novels a year" is one of the most culturally acceptable brags, because there is no "expected" value for people broadly. It's a hidden value, so we can say things like "yeah, I read 12 books a year, not a lot I know", and people generally won't roll their eyes at risk of appearing stupid.

Look at how many people on otherwise-rational HN are saying "I used to read 30 novels a year," "I used to read a novel a week," as if that means it must be easy to accomplish in Western work and life culture. We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.

I think it's an easy thing to do, and we shouldn't. It's not classy.

the single takeaway from this book ad of a post: the CEO of Stripe claims to have read 10 novels/yr. Which is either a boast of how much free time he has or how he skimmed through some major novels. Third option: a lie.

As far as I know there are still some things you have to post in the UK, like sending your cut up old driver's licence to the DVLA and maybe you still have to post your V5 when you sell a car. OP might not own a car or drive, though, so who knows?