PKMN.NET Forums
Misc => Random Randomness => Topic started by: The name master on March 18, 2016, 19:13
-
Today, I bought a galaxy (my first one!) it was nice (but dairy milk will always kick galaxy's ass!) but it was very thin. It cost 65P (0.94 dollars) and, before, it was probably the same price, and was thicker. So for a of things, we're paying more for less.
PS: you all wanted a productive thread that encourages discussion, well, you got one! Now stop complaining!
-
i hate the subtle shrinkage of chocolate bars. i worked in a supermarket for ~5 years and we couldn't put out a new shipment of mars bars until the old ones had sold cos you could verifiably see they made them ever so slightly noticeably smaller. i mean i woulda cared if the job hadn't killed me on the inside in the 2nd year i guess
ive got a kind of reverse ridic Price Concern about milk? its getting a little too cheap for my liking and kinda depressing me a lot cos someone is eatin that reduction and it aint the supermarkets (its the farmers)
(i deliberately didn't go for freddo bars cos i wanna leave that for someone else)
-
(i deliberately didn't go for freddo bars cos i wanna leave that for someone else)
lol how did you know I was going to go there
Back in my day Freddos (and their superior caramel filled brother the Taz bar) were five; yes, FIVE; pence. Penny sweeties actually only cost a penny. And 5p crisps!! Johnny's Onion Rings, Space Raiders, Tangy Toms... I could go to the shop with 50p and make myself sick on crisps and sweets... now I think I'd struggle to get even one bar of chocolate for that money. Jesus Christ I miss the 90s. I'm showing my age now.
Part of my staple diet is tinned tuna but I refuse to buy it because it's so expensive. Fortunately my mum always buys me tins when she and my dad go out of town for shopping so I never go without.
-
I remember when cans of coke were 50p then they went up to 55p then 65p!
-
But at least video games are cheap right! (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/an-inconvenient-truth-game-prices-have-come-down-with-time/) Which is kind of an odd thing, considering it seems like food prices are inflating. But then again currency is going down in value continuously so I guess they have to keep adjusting prices to keep pace.
-
reeses cups are so much smaller than they used to be... :(
i feel like prices here in europe are extra stupid though? i don't know if a lot of places here have tax included or what but in my home state we have no tax... wah
-
it seems like food prices are inflating
You don't need to tell me! LOL! :D
-
i feel like prices here in europe are extra stupid though? i don't know if a lot of places here have tax included or what but in my home state we have no tax... wah
I think they include their sales tax in their prices, but people in Europe also have way more benefits than us anyway. I feel like the "higher prices" in Europe compared to the US are looked upon as better for adults than it is for children, since children often don't have to pay for their own insurance and as adults you do.
-
reeses cups are so much smaller than they used to be... :(
i feel like prices here in europe are extra stupid though? i don't know if a lot of places here have tax included or what but in my home state we have no tax... wah
I dunno about in Italy but here in the UK certainly prices are inclusive of the 20% vat we pay on everything ;m; though tbh I think I'd rather that than thinking things were mega cheap then discovering I forgot to factor in tax when I get to the checkout, haha. (Or worse, be expected to *gasp* work out tax for myself...)
-
in maryland our sales tax is only 6%
(in tucson, arizona it's 8%, which I know cause I live here)
so it's not like it's suddenly gone from super cheap to somewhat expensive. We also don't tax food.
-
Ohio's is either 6% or 6.5%. We don't pay on groceries but we do at places like Subway and Domino's. It's not too terribly much so i'm not as worried, probably will be more worried when I get a job.
-
Well groceries are different than Subway and Dominos. Restaurants are considered a service rather than a food, which is why you are taxed. If you bought dough, cheese, sauce, and some other stuff individually to make your own pizza at home, that's not taxed, but since you're paying someone else to prepare it, it is taxed.
-
It makes sense to be honest. You can make your own damn pizza at home, so asking someone like that to do it should be counted as a service.
-
The price of train tickets from my town to the city go up by about 10 or 20p every few months then stall then keep going up.
It wouldn't be so bad if we were paying to have First trains but the price goes up and we get crappy 2-carriage Ariva trains at rush hour so everyone has to stand because a bunch of nobs decide "IMMA BOOK THE TABLE SEAT BY MYSELF SO ME, MY BAG, MY LAPTOP, AND MY SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT HAVE A SEAT" so yeah. (I really hate it when singles book the table seat then spill their crap everywhere so nobody can sit). They're almost as bad as the people who'll place their bags on the seat next to them when the bus is packed so you have to stand.
The train services get worse and worse and the prices go up and up. Soon our trains will be like those trains you see in pictures of India with people standing on the roof and stuff (they're so packed see) and the tickets will be like £10.
-
our food tax in NH is 9%. people who travel from other states lose their shizznit over that all the time when they go out to eat.
italy isn't REALLY expensive, i don't know what the tax situation is like. from the guys ive been talking to, they say it really comes out of your paycheck... i went to the netherlands though and WOW everthing was so expensive! 6 euro for a pint of ben and jerry's??? what??? 2 euro for a bottle of water??? what????
-
i hate the subtle shrinkage of chocolate bars.
I guess they did it because cocoa beans are really expensive now (that's what I was told)
-
chiming in w the 'everything used to be 5p' brigade... id get £1 and buy enough sugar to last me a week of tuck and then some but nowadays my broke ass is like £1 can get me 2 bags of space raiders maybe. or maybe just one! i dont know! they raise the price every goddamn day ill be at the corner shop looking at them, look down at my phone at a text i just got, then look back up and the price has changed as they slowly build a cute little indie chic cafe around me at an alarming rate in an attempt to make my scheme more welcoming. AAAAAH!!!!!
-
Used to love going to the wee shop in my scheme for like a 20p mixture where you'd actually get 20 sweets. It's closed now but if ever I feel like getting a mixture from the paper shop or w/e it's like 50p and you get like 4 massive sweets, just not the same :(
Notice it at work a lot, esp when I did reductions and have had each price memorised and then they'd make it a weird number like 73p like????
-
literally everything seems so expensive now, even shipping seems to have gone up recently, like I've ordered some t-shirts from America and the one I ended up paying more on shipping than the actual t-shirt. Or maybe I didn't even realise how expensive it was, I don't know any more haha
italy isn't REALLY expensive, i don't know what the tax situation is like. from the guys ive been talking to, they say it really comes out of your paycheck... i went to the netherlands though and WOW everthing was so expensive! 6 euro for a pint of ben and jerry's??? what??? 2 euro for a bottle of water??? what????
where did you go in Italy? Rome was quite expensive when I went but that's due to it being a big city, I presume if you went Amsterdam in the Netherlands it'd be the same kind of thing
-
The price of train tickets from my town to the city go up by about 10 or 20p every few months then stall then keep going up.
When I first moved back to the Black Country it was £1.40 to go to Birmingham on the bus. It's now £2.20 after five years.
Train tickets have remained the same, oddly.
-
If you poke around online before you make an online purchase, you can usually find some very good coupons. It just takes a bit of digging.
-
kerou, i live in florence right now. it's not all super cheap (spain was considerably cheaper) but i'd say the prices are very similar to what i pay at home in new hampshire.
-
There was a Nidorina plush i wanted that cost about £20, luckily, I found one for about £12! v_v
So sometimes it's a good idea to look around before you buy something!
-
Ohhh the joys of inflation. Simple fact is that the purchasing power of our currencies has gone down, so while it feels like we have more money, in reality we don't. I could get into the economic reasoning behind it but that's long and it's too late in the day for that.
Train tickets have remained the same, oddly.
Train tickets are always extortionately expensive for what you get anyway. But it depends where you go. It seems that anywhere through London jacks up the price, but I can get from Portsmouth to Gatwick Airport, off peak single, for £8.50.
-
damn dude what is this feeling of having more money you speak of? technically speaking some random dude begging for change on the street is fiscally richer than me ahaha
train prices are crazy, i've just been bussing everywhere as a result. it cost me 70 euro to take a train from florence to rome which just blew my mind. the train didn't even have free wifi and most buses that travel far have wifi...
-
But it depends where you go. It seems that anywhere through London jacks up the price, but I can get from Portsmouth to Gatwick Airport, off peak single, for £8.50.
Walsall to Birmingham New Street is £4.10 on peak I think, but Spalding to Peterborough which is about the same journey will cost you at least ten. But I guess it's down to demand/frequency as opposed to distance.
-
Walsall to Birmingham New Street is £4.10 on peak I think, but Spalding to Peterborough which is about the same journey will cost you at least ten. But I guess it's down to demand/frequency as opposed to distance.
That seems to make sense, I mean the trains I have to get are often nearly empty. I still think we're being ripped off with train tickets though but what can you do.
-
damn dude what is this feeling of having more money you speak of? technically speaking some random dude begging for change on the street is fiscally richer than me ahaha
no matter how much money you dont have, chances are you are technically richer than kanye west rn atm so thats something at least.
-
I've heard of this, but I'm not quite sure exactly what it is. What is tax?
-
Tax is just something the government likes to use to screw you over #politics.
There's different forms of it. We have Value Added Tax (VAT) which is essentially a 20% markup (was 17.5% but I think it's going down again) on items. So if an item costs £20 it actually costs £16.67 but the extra £3.33 goes to the government.
Then there's income tax (Pay As You Earn or PAYE) which is what the government takes off your pay every month. The starting rate is 20% after £10,400 a year.
National insurance contributions. Another type of income tax is national insurance contributions, which are based on a similar principle of taking a certain percentage of income.
Excise duties on alcohol, tobacco
Corporation tax – tax on company profit (the worst of them all as if you're even a penny above or under with the accounts they send a man round)
The RIDICULOUS tax on fuel. Petrol should cost about 80p a litre but the government has put a stupid amount of fuel duty on. We're at 105.9p a litre in the Black Country.
-
taxes can fund some good things though. for example, when you pay taxes it goes to paying the salary of your town's firefighters, social workers, and other public servants as well as making sure people less fortunate than you get food. i also get the impression that you live somewhere in the UK, so that also helps to pay for your health services. at the same time though, it does pay for things like the ever growing salaries of politicians and wars.
being in the USA, things are a bit different. i don't mind paying taxes for the social good of everyone, but you look at the breakdown of how we pay taxes...
(https://static.nationalpriorities.org/images/charts/2015/discretionary-desk.png)
... really make me think we need to stop shooting people that live overseas... maybe stop giving as much money to the few people in our government and give more to the veterans which we don't seem to care too much about once they're out of that big blue hunk of the circle... i digress...
-
incoming boring lefto pinky post comin in
I've heard of this, but I'm not quite sure exactly what it is. What is tax?
its a certain amount of money that the government "collects" off money that you as an individual either make, or spend, so that the government can do stuff like offer what are called Public Services. i,e, police, ambulances, your local citizens advice bureau, surfacing and tarmacing/aslphalting the roads etc. etc. since the government/public owned stuff doesn't really do stuff For Profit and doesn't really have much other funding other than Charitable Donations (other than the mess that is currently Privatisation of Public things but thats a discussion for another day)
it comes in different forms but mostly
a) on the money you earn as "income tax" and
b) on the products you buy as "sales tax".
in theory it is sound cos for most of your life you are directly dependant on the govt for where you live, the police, the ambulance, the fire service, unemployment welfare, certain Medical Stuff, the roads you drive on, etc etc so you are effectively "paying them back" for it kinda. stuff that is done with govt money is considered "public" money, whereas stuff by non-governmental companies is "private".
its a tricky balance. people who believe in No Tax and No Government are often a thing called Libertarians and should probably be ignored cos they are naive and dont quite get what goes into it all and believe in No Health and Sanitation Committee stopping them from not dying when they go out to eat/drink either, apparently.
people who believe in taxes and them funding the public err towards being Socialist, i.e. "its ok that i get slightly less money if my money goes to help others who aren't in the health/mindset/ability to make money at all.". sadly, socalism is a bit of a Bad Word in the USA currently where its seen as Communism partly cos "i dont want to give my money to a bunch of lazy welfare queens, they should pull themselves up by the bootstraps etc. etc. people want free handouts argle bargle"
there are issues with how its spent and who pays it tho:
1) how its spent:
as liz said, the Central Government (in the case of the UK and the US especially) keep saying we barely have any money to invest for our people or their health or their support oh its so sad we've got to cut Public Services cos theres no money going around. but suddenly when we need to invade yet another middle eastern country we suddenly got all the cash in the world. the F35 plane is basically a brilliant example of the "military complex" as they call it and how you can bleed the govt for so much cash and essentially deliver so very little and get away with it. its partly cos all the Higher Ups are all buddy-buddy with each other for the most part.
2) rich people and various companies you know and love using Tax Evasion Schemes:
The more you earn, the more tax you are supposed to pay, cos as a richer person you can afford to put a bit more money in the govt, so to speak. however, rich people are greedy and want to keep even more money and as it turns out you can get Tricky with the law and essentially not pay stuff like Cororpoation Tax (companies are supposed to pay tax on their massive earnings) due to various Laws and Legal Loopholes. there are acutal private companies you can go to to get advice on how to avoid paying tax, as the recent Panama Papers scandal in the UK is showing.
there is a sad thing about Charity, i.e. if you donate to a charity you can "write off" that amount from your tax bill. so large comapnies "donate to charity" only to get that money back by not paying it as tax. which is a Shame but honest to god i do think that the way some of this rich people are they wouldn't even pay it unless there was something in it for them, cos if it weren't for this loophole i dont know if a bunch of the charities would even exist.
another sad thing is the people in charge of the Tax Collecting thing often are buddies with the corporations, hence why amazon, apple, uber, etc etc all use Tax Trickery and get away with not putting money in. there was a big profile case with HMRC (the uk's govt tax body) and Vodafone a while back where vodafone didn't pay several million quid of tax and the HRMC ''forgot'' about it. which is usally buddy buddy favours being done between rich white blokes.
this is happening on a local level in San Francisco. in the tech industry where a lot of big Tech companies (apple, google) use Legal Loopholes to not pay any tax to their local government despite making stupid amounts of money. so the local govt ends up with barely any cash or welfare for people while the tech companies make yet ANOTHER cool several million, and so you have ridiculous numbers of homeless people who the SF govt can't afford to help literally pooping in the street, while the Google bus full of rich manchild employees drives up the road to One Infinite Loop.
being a pinko lefty i have paid tax throughout my working life and will continue to do so when i get back into work, despite everything cos even if the system is a bit screwed im sure at least some of my money is helping fund someone half-dying in a hospital somewhere to not die so much. i should be on jobseekers while im not in a job but ugh its such a mess (deliberately, of course) and ive already missed the deadline for Income Based Contributions and i already got enough Shame bout the dole from my family bout it.
the only Tax Break i get is that i am VAT Exempt (VAT is a type of tax on various products you buy in the UK) for Certain Disability Stuff cos it turns out in the uk if you purchase medical stuff w/ ur own money for certain disabilities and its to be privately used by yourself you are Tax Exempt. its a long story but VAT/sales tax is mostly on things which are seen as "luxuries" and "non-essentials", so to speak, and if you're having to buy these its not exactly a non-essential luxury lmao.
which kind of helps a teensy bit and i weigh it up as a net benefit cos i could be making the NHS shell out £60+ every month and a half for me cos of my body's inability to work right so
-
when you pay taxes it goes to paying the salary of your town's firefighters
I can never get round that your schools, police, firefighters are run by the town. Maybe it's because I'm so used to the police/ambulance/fire being county-run rather than by the town. West Midlands Police, Yorkshire Police, Staffordshire Fire and Rescue etc.
F35 plane is basically a brilliant example of the "military complex"
And the Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers that will transport them. For £6.2bn we could have painted "Get stuffed, Germany" onto the moon.
-
on the topic of government, one of the questions on a disability thing my aunt filled in recently had a question that asked if she could lift an empty box.
what kind of job consists of only sitting in a chair all day while holding an empty box?????
but yeah you have to pretty much literally jump through the most ridiculous of fire hoops to get anything you actually need from the government. in short, they hate us. they want all the money they can get at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society - whether thats the kids, the disabled, the pensioners, or anyone else. pretty much anyone who isn't a brown nosing rich white dude that looks vaguely like david cameron or donald trump i guess
i hate this planets greed oh my god
EDIT: also it specifically asked CARDBOARD BOX on the question. what the hell, what the h-
-
Aye we've probably already had a train ticket debate on this thread but tl;dr.
For me to get a return from Chelts to Sheff at the start of June it's gonna cost me just shy of £75 what is this
Would usually cost about £45 if you booked it nicely in advance but I guess not. Travel links from Chelt to N-Hampton or from Sheff to N-Hampton are also terrible and it costs a bomb because you have to make like 2/3 changes.
I hate sitting on trains and just looking around at the number of people even in one carriage and thinking "in this carriage there about 50 people who all paid £45, more or less, and there are three more carriages on this train, including first class who will have paid closer to £80, and this route runs at least 15 times a day every day"
Like honestly what are they even doing with all that money they're rolling in because it's not like the state of the trains are improving
-
The last few times I've bought a Dairy Milk, I've noticed it feels thinner. Last time I asked "is it just me, or is it thinner?" yes, it was! Big dairy milks cost £1 and whole nut dairy milk costs £1.49(???) why?