Kinda meta, but this is the first time in a long time where I've put only the first half of my postcode in expecting it not to work and been surprised. Most of these "find your nearest XYZ" site require the full postcode which is just unnecessary unless you're looking for a fairly precise location. A full postcode can narrow your location down to an individual street, so its nice not to give too much away if you can.
For anyone not in the know, UK postcodes are made up of two parts: a general area (the outward code) and then a more specific one (the inward code.) Generally speaking a postcode + house number will be good enough to get a letter delivered to the right place, though the sorting office might not be too happy with you...
The format [0] is roughly: AB12 3CD, though the number of letters/numbers on the left side can vary a bit. As far as I know the second set of numbers is always 1 digit though, so that's how you can easily split the two sides of it to format it nicely. There's a couple of special ones that break the rules though.
I agree with the bit about the having to enter a full postcode on some sites, I often use one nearby or, if they make me select a specific address for no valid reason I make sure I use a random address nearby. Apologies to some of my neighbours who might be bombarded with junk mail for services I’ve once been half interested in.
A full postcode is often much less than a single street.
Picking something at random stick “SW15 6DZ” into Google maps and you’ll see it only covers 6 buildings (most are individual houses but some are split into flats). According to the Royal Mail address finder site there are only 12 unique delivery addresses that share that postcode. The Western half of that road has 12 or so full postcodes for only 100 houses.
A full postcode and one other bit of information can often be enough to uniquely identify someone.
If a US 5 digit zipcode is roughly equivalent to the “general area” part of a UK postcode (94107 <=> SW15) then the full UK postcode is like the 9 digit US Zip+4 format where the extra 4 digits narrow location down to a block, part of a block or even a specific building.
A friend of mine who lived in a tent in a park got his own postcode. True story.
Details: election time. He went to the election folks and asked for his election papers. They said "sure, where do you live?" he said "the Bender, Eastville Park, Bristol", they said "that's not a valid address", he said "that's where I live, so that's where I'd like my registration to be, please". There was some back and forth. They caved, and duly entered his address on the electoral roll as such. Then he went to the Post Office and said "this is my address, as entered on the electoral roll, can I have my postcode please?". The Post Office kinda had no option, since this was now his official address. So they gave him a postcode and the postie had to walk through the park to drop off his mail.
The post office will attempt to deliver if you put an address on it.
There is guy living off grid in I believe Dorset on YouTube called "Maximus Ironthumper". The post office told him to try sending himself letters, eventually they started turning up. Then that became the address.
He has a whole series of videos about how he kinda managed to setup his off grid living situation, there is everything from how to avoid planning permission, to how he setup his solar power.
>The post office will attempt to deliver if you put an address on it.
I still find it fascinating that we developed this human system, with expectations that are still in play, even if some aspects become less and less relevant, it's still an important tool beyond being dependent on technology. Same with lending libraries. A few things we should cherish that have real ethics in this lets-monetize-everything world.
I believe similar has happened, whereby a seller of the Big Issue (a magazine sold by the homeless to raise money) had a postcode issued to a bench where they could pick up deliveries of the magazine.
"A full postcode is often much less than a single street."
My business has its own unique postcode and so does next door! Between us we cover roughly three acres. Our place is one building with parking and a fair bit of greenery.
How is that different from a mail from a local church asking me to donate, or a local bingo club opening a new location - it's all junk. If I didn't ask for it to be sent to my address, it's all junk.
One person's junk is another person's fuel for heating.
Throughout the year a friend of mine would collect any junk mail, but mostly many copies of the free daily newspapers (Metro, Evening Standard, etc) that litter the trains/underground in the evenings, soak them with water than use a briquette maker to press the paper into blocks. Once dried they provide an ample supply of fuel to heat his home for the 6-10 months of the year (depending on how poorly your home is insulated) that heating is required in the UK.
He definitely didn't have a "No junk mail" sticker on his letterbox.
Any communication received without explicit consent, after providing details, is junk, and would fall under GDPR as using that info for a different purpose than what was described.
Yep, locally where I am there’s one postcode for all the houses on one side of the street (all the even numbered houses) and another for the opposite side (all the odd numbers.)
Presumably it helps a lot with validating the address is correct, kinda like a checksum, and also probably helps with how deliveries are organised by the local office before the postie is sent out with them all.
In Ireland we were very late to the postcode game and when we introduced them a few years back they actually uniquely identifies a single address. We also continued our "interesting" habit of renaming everything to make them sound more Irish so they are called Eircodes. In theory you could just put the single 7 character Eircode on a letter and it would be enough although our postal service has said we can't do that.
By being late to computerized sorting, the postal service (An Post) never actually needed postcodes the way others did, as by the time they got computerized, fuzzy address lookups in the full address database was something that was available. It's mostly the third party couriers and marketing people pushed for post codes so they could apply techniques from other countries here.
Now asking An Post to overhaul their system to work on postcodes only is a bit like asking a postal service which requires postcodes to make them optional. It's technically possible, sure, but they're not going to want to spend the money.
_That said_, An Post's last resort routing department is pretty famous for getting the right address from pretty fragmentary information like "Mary down by the church, formerly of Kilnowhere", so I'm sure if a letter with just a eircode arrived there they'd sort it, but I imagine that An Post don't want to encourage people doing things that increases load on the labour intensive sorting.
This is delightfully referenced as the Blind Letter Office in Terry Pratchett's book "Making Money":
<Moist ran downstairs and Lord Vetinari was indeed sitting in the Blind Letter Office with his boots on a desk, a sheaf of letters in his hand and a smile on his face.
'Ah, Lipwig,' he said, waving the grubby envelopes. 'Wonderful stuff! Better than the crossword! I like this one: "Duzbuns Hopsit pfarmerrsc". I've put the correct address underneath.' He passed the letter over to Moist.
He had written: K. Whistler, Baker, 3 Pigsty Hill.
'There are three bakeries in the city that could be said to be opposite a pharmacy,' said Vetinari, 'but Whistler does those rather good curly buns that regrettably look as though a dog has just done his business on your plate and somehow managed to add a blob of icing.'>
There used to be a site "postcodeine" which would overlay the prefixes onto a map as you typed, so you could enter "SW" or "KY" etc and watch it narrow down the area by keystroke.
Fun fact: apart from the main office SW1 they're alphabetised by area, from SW2 Brixton to SW19 Wimbledon. All of the London postcode areas are like this.
SW2 to SW9 are in alphabetical order: Brixton, Chelsea, Clapham, Earls Court, Fulham, South Ken, South Lambeth, Stockwell.
But then it starts again and you have to squint a bit for SW10-SW20: Brompton, Battersea, Balham, Barnes, Mortlake, Putney, Streatham, Tooting, Wandsworth, Wimbledon, West Wimbledon.
Looking at a few others (SE, etc) I see that the first chunk of them are in alphabetical order, but then they've added some extra ones later that break the ordering (e.g. SE19 onwards) but they have tried to add the extra ones in mostly alphabetical order too.
Yeah, they've become a bit muddled over the years but generally alphabetical in the batches they're added. E was nice and clean before the Olympics, then they added E20 for Stratford after E18 Woodford.
Most people assume it's relative to how far out the area is from the centre
And a bit further to SW20 in Raynes Park (a.k.a. “West Wimbledon” in Estate Agent vernacular).
I’ve lived somewhere in SW18/SW15/SW19 for the last 30 years. Having not grown up in London I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Apparently many other bits of London (North, East, central, etc) are good too but I’m not ready for change.
Wow a fantastic independent pub near where I used to live in London is seeing its rateable value go up 480%! This website really puts the headlines in to a nice local perspective.
It seems like the taxes only go up while the services get worse in the UK, although I’ve been away for 5 years now so maybe things improved.
But if the landlord owns the pub (rare in the UK I know), but I believe it’s the case in this instance, then what are they getting from unrealised property price gains?
What does anyone gain from it really, except money in the bank for a handful of individuals, outsized property prices seem to be a hurdle for functional societies in basically every way.
It doesn't benefit a town if rent is so expensive that their businesses shut down.
When young I use to work in construction. (With diplomas) The wages for 18 year olds in the Netherlands at the time were such that I got 340 euro per month for 40 hour weeks. It's a truly shit salary but you could also see it as a wonderful formula to build cheap houses. As my boss billed the customers 28 euro per hour for my work and those houses cost roughly 35000 to buy(!) and it took roughly 80 hours of work each. (Very rough estimates but that oddly doesn't matter) You could say I build 6.4% of the houses. They roughly cost 350 000 euro today which seems 10 fold but since people can't afford that they need a mortgage and pay 3 times that amount over 30 years. That would mean my labor now costs 10 000 per month. At the time I tried to calculate the savings escape velocity and discovered that if I saved 100% of my income I would be able to buy my own house in never years. If I build 6.4% of a house in 2 weeks that would be 3.2% per week or 32 weeks to build 100%.
Say 64 weeks and the process produces one whole home for someone else. I get that there should be some people between the construction worker and the citizen eventho they never did anything useful to the result but the margins are so preposterous that the original salary is a mere rounding error.
Then I look at Amish barn raising videos and the laughter becomes uncontrollable. I would definitely go there and help out - for free of course. If I had to keep doing that I would look for some vegetables and uhh my own house? Even if they would never build it for me it would still be more enjoyable than the western extortion scheme.
The were making 8.5 per hour which above the 2026 youth wage.
They also are relating a story from their past and since they have had an account since 2015, I am assuming their youthful past was at least 1 decade ago if not nearly 20 years ago.
No, the 340 were per month, the 40 hours are per week. I usually do back-of-the-envelope calculations with 4.3 weeks per month, which would leave them below 2 EUR/h.
Edit: But you are of course right about inflation! According to this website[1] it would bump them to 3.2 EUR/h.
Minimum jeugdloon exists since 1974. Of course the numbers change but the ratio doesn't.
Look at it like this: if 18y minimum wage was €3 back then and would double to €6 at 21y, and you're a construction worker working for €8.50 at 18y, you're sure as shit going to demand a raise at 19, 20 and 21 because all the people making minimum wage are getting those raises too. Maybe not a doubling, but you wouldn't (shouldn't) gnash your teeth and still make €8.50 three years later.
This is more or less exactly Marx's argument about extracting the surplus from labour, and the alienation people feel when they cannot afford the products they themselves make.
As property prices increase, developers are more incentivized to build new properties and increase density.
The increase in supply then lowers prices.
The problem comes when local laws and the planning permission system make it hard or impossible to increase the supply of homes. Then there's no balancing force to bring prices down when they go up.
I certainly agree with your last paragraph, however whilst I believe you're not wrong about the first I don't believe that is the only option for increasing supply.
For example, if you look at some of the densest cities in the world they are still predominantly single standing homes, just much more tightly packed, and in homes we can't huild. So I believe zoning and planning are the key issues, and I think property developers would actually play a smaller role in solving the supply problem if you allowed individuals to solve this problem themselves with less strict zoning and planning.
Obviously big developments still play a role, but at the stage American cities are often at, NYC excluded, I think zoning being more favourable to medium density would go a long way.
Leverages and confidence from the credit agency (be it banks or private investments), and the higher possiblity of approving the borrowing, and thus getting more shitty debts to be made, and contribute more to the total Gee-Dee-Pee which is the holy grail those economists chase after
Basically better rates to go into more debt. More importantly (and part of the risk) is that they have a safety hatch if they really need to exit the business.
Nothing, but if market value of the land is going up, then that means the price for government services is going up (e.g. government employees need to be paid more, land acquisition or rent costs more, materials cost more, etc). Hence taxes collected have to go up.
This could all simply be due to a devaluation of the currency, rather than due to increased desirability or productivity.
The Lamb and Flag has faced previous financial challenges.
It in fact closed temporarily in the pandemic due to UK law preventing their then owner / operator, St John’s College, a charity, subsidising a loss making business, despite having the wherewithal to do so.
> On the way to an Inklings meeting, Lewis gave some money to a street beggar, and I made the usual objection: "Won't he just spend it on drink?" He answered, "Yes, but if I kept it, so would I."
The services have certainly not got better in the last 5 years. This Government is fiscally illiterate and has hit the top of the Laffer curve and is now trying to go down the other side.
This government have been in power for less than 2 years. Despite launching a lot of trial balloons on raising taxes they haven't actually raised the headline tax rates (other than allowing fiscal drag to do so).
Overall the tax burden in the UK is middling for western democracies. It's actually on the low side for low earners - which is probably a problem because the distribution is such that the majority pay very little.
The other problem being cliff edges and complexities which distinctive chasing pay rises and working more for a lot of people.
The biggest problem is that the tax on a median taxpayer is not just "middling", it's a bit over a third of what a median German taxpayer is paying. The rest of the fiscal problems (convoluted tax rules, cliff edges to try to claw something back, abrupt tax increases like the one on pubs) are downstream from that.
> the tax on a median taxpayer is not just "middling", it's a bit over a third of what a median German taxpayer is paying
Could you put the actual numbers in for that please, because to me that implies German tax rates of 120%? Is that across all forms of taxation, including local (the relevant one here!)
Apologies, brain glitch: it's half, not third. Also, I'm talking about the effective tax rate, not the marginal tax rate. Here are the numbers:
Median salary of a full time employee in the UK in 2023 (to match the German source): £34,963 [1]
Take home on that salary (after income tax and NI): £28,692 [2]
Effective tax rate on a median salary in the UK: ~18%
Median salary of a full time employee in Germany: €4,479 pm [3] or €53,748 per year
Take home: €34,281 [4]
Effective tax rate on a median salary in Germany: ~36%
Tax _rates_ are not that different, but the previous British governments really ramped up the tax-free allowance, which significantly reduces the effective tax rate.
Unfortunately, if an election were to be held today, the morons at Reform would have the greatest chance of winning, thanks to Starmer's ostrich syndrome, Corbyn dividing the Labour vote and the Tories being absolutely irrelevant after 15 years of continuous rule.
I'd be interested to know your view on how you think Britain should be governed and the extent to which you think others would agree. Serious question: can you offer a link to some such description?
Curtail immigration to pre-Brexit levels (with a strong focus on repatriating criminals and net tax non-contributing immigrant households), focus on the working class and devise a route for the UK to get back into the EU. Also refocus policing to focus on actual societal issues - child grooming and the rise of fundamentalist elements (as evidenced by the UAE banning their citizens from studying in the UK) - as opposed to elderly citizens tweets. Devalue the GBP to refund the NHS and roll back austerity while investing further into energy independence and removing bureaucratic red tape for consumer scale mitigation technologies.
Any party that does all of these will be guaranteed electoral wins for decades - I've seen the data back when I was a Tory. Problem is, these points are kryptonite to the very identity of either major party.
Thank you! I took a bet with myself on what you would say (if you did) and lost! Seems to me that the EU as presently constructed is a huge problem; on some other points I'd agree.
Disagree on being subsumed into the stagnating EU (far better to align with dynamic English-speaking economies with strong growth, like the US).
The EU customs union prevented the UK striking bilateral global free trade deals, and the legacy of EU over-regulation continues to curtail our innovation. The UK has a solid history of global trade and innovation, and it can acheive more if unshackled from the EU.
Austerity is absolutely necessary. If we keep giving the NHS above-inflation pay rises inline with what their staff demand, it would consume the entire annual excess wealth from the productive half of the economy in a matter of decades.
What we need are sensible and pragmatic policies like Reform's scaling back of net zero, for example. The cost of Ed Miliband's net zero measures are an estimated £4.5 trillion over the next 25 years, and a gross cost in excess of £7.6 trillion.
That's more than our entire GDP. Just one example is the 20 year wind farm contracts that Miliband has set up, with a guaranteed energy cost that's nearly double the market rate for gas power (and then on top of that we need to pay for wind curtailment, grid upgrades and expensive backup power plants to cover low wind days).
We were promised that renewables would reduce energy bills. That was a total fiction, and the politicians are to blame.
Green energy could be a massive success story, and it could make our bills cheaper, but inept politicians from the Tories and Labour have focussed instead on vanity metrics.
Y'all got any of those bilateral trade deals yet? Brexit was done and dusted by 2019, it's been 7 years now. Where are those deals you're talking about? Where's your trade deal with English-speaking economies like the US? Heck, not even CANZ want to deal with you guys now.
On the NHS, of course, gut the only thing that's keeping the country sane. I can literally not keep count anymore of the number of skilled doctors and talent who have left the UK after years of practice because the pay was becoming untenable with current living needs. Remove the NHS and you might as well call yourself a client state of the US.
On renewables and net-zero, yes, what we need is more reliance on conventional fuels so that we can be ever more reliant on Russia and the Middle East and the US right? Meanwhile economies like China, India and even your brethren in Australia are racing to put in more renewables capacity because it is just so much more cheaper and efficient now. Those guys are forging real paths to energy independence, unlike you lot.
Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note. Wake me up when Hinckley Point C comes online.
We’ve struck an incredible 71 trade deals since Brexit. And there are more in the pipeline. We genuinely have a better global position now than we did in the customs union.
You think the NHS is “keeping us sane”. Two of my family members have been close to death waiting for an ambulance that never arrived / waiting in a crowded emergency waiting room with internal bleeding for hours. I pay about £10K per year in tax to the NHS for a service that is inferior to the private care I receive for approx £1K a year. The whole system is a shambles and gets worse every year. It underpays and mistreats its staff. It is inefficient.
On your point about renewables, I never claimed we needed more reliance on fossil fuels. I think we should be building more nuclear plants. France is a shining example of how to generate electricity. And then, once we have affordable battery storage (in a few years) we will be able to expand wind/solar in a sensible fashion without our stupid politicians making our energy bills the highest in the developed world.
> Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note.
The UK is #1 in Europe for wind capacity and #2 globally for offshore wind (behind China). And we have the highest energy bills in the developed world
- A strong leader and a weak bureaucracy, so that your vote means something.
- A good constitution that puts hard limits on what they can do, no boiling the frog with freedom of speech restrictions like Canada, Australia, and The UK
So basically an elected dictator with a functioning kill switch. Not a parade of faceless, temporary, unimportant prime ministers and elections which don't matter.
> your vote means something. - A good constitution that puts hard limits on what they can do
Quite a lot of serious problems arise when voters want things that are ""unconstitutional"". What if the voters want speech restrictions? That's a big part of why they're implemented, public/media campaigning for them.
> freedom of speech restrictions like Canada, Australia, and The UK
Unlike in the USA, where speaking out to, or disagreeing with, the president will get you removed from positions of authority?
(If you haven't already gathered, such bogus claims of free speech restrictions in other countries are distracting you from the reality of what is happening in your own country.)
The actual soviets - they remained in operation for the first few years after the Bolshevik coup, and the revolutionary slogan "All power to the soviets!" gave Lenin a convenient figleaf for sidelining the elected Duma.
Of course, the soviets also proved unwilling to entirely subjugate themselves to Lenin's whims, and made a habit of choosing non-Bolshevik delegates. This culminated in the failed Kronstadt rebellion of 1921, after which any pretense at democracy was finally ended.
But - in theory - the soviet model sounds akin to what you're looking for. Being made up of delegates rather than representatives meant that the power of recall on demand was baked-in at every level, and power flowed upwards to a strong executive leadership.
In reality, it's hard to see how any sufficiently strong leader wouldn't be able to override or simply ignore any sort of kill switch or other constitutional arrangements that might happen to stand in their way - as has happened every time it's been tried in the past.
I think the person elected should hold a lot of powers. Because otherwise, what is the point of voting if they're just going to leak it all to the civil service?
By "kill switch", I just mean you need a way to stop a leader with a lot of powers in exceptional circumstances - such as violation of a constitution.
One striking feature in the UK is the number of pubs that 'went on fire'.
The business is no longer viable, planning constraints (and often listed building constraints, which is protection for historical buildings, many pubs are very old) won't let them do anything else with the building so they sit empty until they spontaneously combust. Soon after they get demolished and regrow as a supermarket or apartments.
Worth noting the circle of "pubs that light on fire" and "flat roofed 1970s slum pub" almost entirely overlap. Nobodies setting fire to their thatched-roof pub from 1650 because of pub rates. They just change hands through the breweries every 3-4 years now.
This is the hidden tragedy of the "listed building" process. It's actually a sizeable burden on a property, because suddenly there's all these compliance requirements on how you do repairs and upkeep.
_Not_ doing repairs and upkeep is free.
Arson is very difficult to prove.
So the listing process preserves a building exactly as it is, sometimes for decades past its usefulness, until it collapses or burns down.
My grandparents were publicans 70+ years ago. Even they they made very little on beer. All the profit was spirits and software drinks. Probably food as well now.
You could buy a bottle of Teachers and serve yourself 25ml for 70p. You could buy a bottle of 30-year aged Macallan matured in sherry oak, and serve yourself 25ml for £160.
In a pub, you should be able to get a shot of blended whisky for about £4-6, and mass-market single malts (the kind you also find in supermarkets) for about £5-£10.
If you don't ask for a specific whisky, they should ask you which one you want, and/or say "is name alright?" and give you one of the cheap ones.
Disclaimer - I don't drink at all. Still, when visiting London, I found going to Pubs (for the food mostly) a magical experience. When you enter such place, see that it's so so old, almost like a relic, like a monument, you really appreciate the place. My business trips led me to London centre so I saw the oldest ones.
Neither American nor from the UK, but I knew what this was about because it's possible to go online and seek out information. Neat.
What I didn't do was become some entitled see you next tuesday and complain that a .com should be reserved for the american audience and the site should use a .co.uk – As if american businesses don't utilise foreign TLDs to create cutesy URLs. Maybe now is a good time to note that the fashionable .AI TLD belongs to Anguilla, a British territory.
People only struggle because of a self-centered view that everything is supposed to be for them, and things that aren't for them are a weird exception. A reasonable person will realize that the fact that they don't understand any of what it's talking about means they're not the target audience, and move on (or poke around out of curiosity).
It's just basic communications skills, and honestly decency, to describe what a thing is and who it's for.
Maybe someone who isn't the target audience still wants to learn about the thing? Which this site provides no way of doing. That's the problem. Why choose to be inaccessible like that, when it's so easy to add a couple of works and links?
> or poke around out of curiosity
You mean like by following links that are supplied? Because that's my complaint: there are no links.
> it's self-centered to want to communicate well?
>
> It's just basic communications skills, and honestly decency, to describe what a thing is and who it's for
What is the main country where dying pubs is such a big subject?
For f**ks sake I am not from UK yet it is easy to understand what it is all about from context and language. And I wasn't even aware of that tax change.
> What is the main country where dying pubs is such a big subject?
How should I know? That's the point. It might as easily be Ireland for all I know. Or maybe pubs are dying in Boston or something?
> For f*ks sake I am not from UK yet it is easy to understand what it is all about from context and language.
I'm happy you're so smart. Not all of us are so lucky, I guess.
> Pure US arrogance.
Who said anything about the US? You know there are people from a lot of other countries who speak English too? If your concern is arrogance, it seems like it's your own that perhaps needs to be dialed back a little.
Suggesting that communication can be clearer isn't a form of arrogance. To the contrary, it's something that comes out of empathy, identifying how communication could help more readers/listeners.
If they're not American, then following their own logic they probably shouldn't be heavily implying that they are. It's misleading. They should give context in each and every comment so that we know.
It's self-centered to want others to communicate well to you when they aren't attempting to communicate with you in the first place.
You want to learn about the thing? You have the entire internet at your fingertips. Click search bar, type "pub rates," boom, thousands of news stories.
If you want to know what's going on, put in the bare minimum effort to find out. If you don't care then ignore it and move on.
> It's self-centered to want others to communicate well to you when they aren't attempting to communicate with you in the first place.
For private communication, of course.
For public communication? On a .com? It's simple politeness, courtesy, and respect. It's about not wasting other people's time unnecessarily. It's just decency. I'm amazed that you can be arguing against basic decency and respect here.
Basic decency and respect is either ignoring it or putting in the three seconds of effort it takes to understand it, instead of complaining to someone who isn't even attempting to talk to you.
Are you the sort of person who goes up to people in public and asks what they're talking about? Because that's what you're doing. Except you aren't even asking, you're just saying "if you're going to talk in public then you need to explain your topic so everyone can understand it."
Your time isn't being wasted. It doesn't take any more time to think "I don't know what this is talking about, oh well" than it does to think "this mentions England and Wales, I guess it's about some local issue there." Unless you're so self-centered that the very idea of a web site's purpose not being immediately comprehensible to you personally is such an affront that you have to put in time to complain about it.
This is just about elementary communication skills.
You're arguing that obfuscation is somehow a good thing. How does that make any sense?
When people communicate clearly, it makes the world a better place. People understand each other more easily. They don't have to waste as much time figuring things out. It's the golden rule, treating others the way you'd like to be treated.
If you don't understand that, I genuinely don't know what to tell you.
You're on a web site with a vague title and a bunch of random links, and zero explanation on the front page for what it's all about. Do you also complain about that?
This is not obfuscation, this is aiming at a particular audience that you aren't a part of. This web site doesn't need an introduction so that people browsing from Kazakhstan can understand what it's about, any more than a calculus lecture needs to start with basic arithmetic to cover attendees with no math background.
You're doing the internet equivalent of yelling at people to speak English when they're having a conversation in another language. It's as uncouth here as it is there.
Right! Which is why you should give that context when you create something for public consumption. Get it now?
> You're on a web site with a vague title and a bunch of random links, and zero explanation on the front page for what it's all about. Do you also complain about that?
Yes actually. HN has a terrible design for new visitors. Why would I defend that? HN is known for a lot of things, but its design is not one of them.
> You're doing the internet equivalent of yelling at people to speak English when they're having a conversation in another language. It's as uncouth here as it is there.
No, I'm doing the internet equivalent of criticizing where someone is giving a public lecture but refuses to give it a sufficiently meaningful title so people know whether or not they want to attend it.
This is a public website meant for public consumption. Not some private communication I'm trying to butt into.
You seem to be trying to defend some kind of gatekeeping-through-obscurity, where new potentially interested visitors ought to be made confused and have to "work" to figure things out. Why would anyone do that intentionally, or defend that? It's just rude and thoughtless.
You're acting as though you're being kept out, because you expect everything you see to cater to you. You're not being kept out, you're just not being explicitly invited in.
"...meant for public consumption." Which public? Not one which includes you! But you insist that you must be part of the group it's meant for.
> Maybe someone who isn't the target audience still wants to learn about the thing
This is fair enough, but they don't make it too hard -- there's an About page, where the first line mentions England and Wales and the rest of the page makes it clear that the issue is about rate increases. Googling something like "england pub rate increases" will get you the rest of the way if you're interested.
(I think us non-Americans sometimes go a bit far with the whole "finally you're tasting some of your own medicine, Yanks!" thing, and I'm sorry some people are being aggressive. But I don't think this site is as opaque as you're suggesting, nor that it makes any more assumptions about its audience than lots of US-based sites do. They're targeting locals, and I think it's fine for a home page to start talking to its intended audience immediately rather than wasting space on an introduction for outsiders.)
International shipping is an entirely different subject. You can assume that .com is American unless otherwise indicated, and that you'll need to check shipping policies. Just like as an American, when I go to a .co.uk ecommerce site, I have to check whether they ship to the US.
And the web by a Brit working in Switzerland. It all runs on Chinese hardware with software written by people (and their dogs) from every nation on earth.
The point, if there is one, is buried in the details.
> Because the internet was invented in America so it's the only country where a country suffix was never used from the start of its popularity.
I expect some countries like the UK and Australia to use something like `co.uk`. I expect many countries to use their own top-level domain. I do not assume that some `.com` website is American.
Is “the only” based on experience? How many websites from how many countries have you come across?
> I'm not saying this is good or bad or justified or not, just saying what the conventions are.
Do people associate `.com` with “company”? Or just “regular website”? Are people even stopped from making a `.com` if they don’t have a “company”?
> I do not assume that some `.com` website is American.
If it's clearly local to somewhere (news, shopping, etc.) as opposed to global or a webapp or something, and doesn't say it's specific to any other country, then yes people generally assume it's American.
Because when sites are intended for audiences in other countries, they usually use a country-specific TLD. Which, for historical reasons, never became a convention in the US since it's where the Internet was invented.
If you haven't noticed that this is a clear pattern, I don't know what to tell you.
If it is a business, people expect the .com is the global/international/headquarters address, not an us specific one per se. Some will have other country codes mostly to avoid phishing but some only redirect it to a subpath on the com website to handle regionalities/languages.
Random examples of foreign brands/companys in completely different industries: https://www.nestle.com is the "global" address of Nestle, a Swiss company. Mitsubushi, a japanes company uses https://www.mitsubishi.com with a /ja subpath to handle japanese language. The FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association which was founded in Paris, France and is know headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, uses fifa.com as its main domain despite having several regional office accross the globe but none in the US.
> In her November Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves scaled back business rate discounts that have been in force since the pandemic from 75% to 40% - and announced that there would be no discount at all from April. That, combined with big upward adjustments to rateable values of pub premises, left landlords with the prospect of much higher rates bills.
> Properties are assessed in a rating list with a rateable value, a valuation of their annual rental value on a fixed valuation date using assumptions fixed by statute. Rating lists are created and maintained by the Valuation Office Agency, a UK government executive agency.
Ah, interesting. So it sounds like the tax roughly scales with property value (or size). And pubs are probably a "poor use of land" because the revenue per square foot is not particularly high?
Yes. It scales with a government agency's estimate of the property's annual rent (even if you own it), based on market rates in the area over the past two years, which they then scale up/down based on floorspace and how dilapidated the building is.
You pay a percentage of the hypothetical rent as tax. There is a lower rate if you're a small business, and there are also tax reliefs for various reasons (charity, partial building occupation, etc.)
Pubs have high costs, small margins and customers are extremely price-sensitive. What pubs are generally asking for is more types of relief, because what we tend to see is pubs close, people in the area become more isolated, and the building remains empty for years thereafter. [] Pubs appreciated the post-COVID relief, but tax rates are about to shoot up.
[] fun fact: if the building is vacant, its landlord must pay rates as if it's 100% occupied. Hence this brazen scheme where a man puts a snail farm in every room so you can pay the rates of an agricultural enterprise: https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/04/...
Interesting how punitive the tax structure is on vacant buildings. On the one hand, harsh for the landlord. On the other hand, encourages lower rent to get the space occupied and reduce blight.
Many deaths were postponed because their taxes were reduced due to Covid. Those taxes are now returning to normal levels. This will result in a glut of deaths, as pubs that were just hanging on go under.
The policy question is, basically, do we want to subsidize pubs because they're part of our national culture, even though we don't use them nearly as much as we used to?
"Does Britain really need?" has been responsible for the gutting of so much of what used to make Britain a nice place to live over the last 20 years. You can say she same about public libraries, local bus routes, civic architecture, arts funding, youth services, maintenance budgets. The damage has been incalculable.
Probably because the line keeps getting moved. There's a lot of pressure to build housing with little to no consideration of community, either existing or new.
Just get rid of all the third spaces in an area and turn it into a lifeless residential suburb or something. Once pubs are gone it'll be something else.
While agreeing totally with your sentiment it's a fact that alcohol (the raison d'etre for pubs existing at present unless their business model changes) is classed as a Group 1 carcinogen. 'Consuming alcohol increases the risk of developing at least 7 types of cancer;, https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/... etc., We've all got to die but some ways are nastier than others.
I’m not familiar with the UK, but is the tax on alcohol at pubs higher than at a store? My general understanding was that people have just shopped visiting pubs for other reasons - like diluted drinks, crappy food, loud music, etc.
People stop visiting crappy pubs if they have diluted drinks (quite rare, UK is very strict about being served exact alcohol measures, there is very little free pouring in the UK and many people would spot other drinks being diluted), crappy food (sadly all too common), loud music (age related), etc.
But not many pubs are crappy in these respects.
The main reasons why fewer people are visiting average or good pubs are:
* cost of living is going up so many people have less disposable income
* the younger generations are much less interested in alcohol than previous generations
The latter point is an interesting one. There are two wildly different drivers for this that I’ve witnessed.
Many of the under 25s now either don’t drink alcohol at all, or only drink a fraction of what their elders did. Many prefer to just go to the gym instead (which is the millenials third space).
On the flip side, some of the children of my friends and family say that alcohol in pubs is just too expensive, so they get their kicks from recreational drugs like weed or ket.
The number of people who have the disposable income to go to the pub regularly is falling in the UK, and the mainstay of the pub was often the working class and they are being priced out by everything getting more expensive.
There aren’t enough people with enough disposable income to weather the storms and keep going to the pub regardless, and therefore pubs (in general) are in deep trouble.
> is the tax on alcohol at pubs higher than at a store?
No, but the tax on food - which is where a lot of money lies, for most pubs in this day and age - is. Also, business rates end up being significantly higher per unit of alcohol sold. This means stores can keep alcohol prices very low (even under cost, as a promotional item).
Add to that that alcohol consumption rates are decreasing overall, sugar tax affecting non-alcoholic drinks, energy prices skyrocketing, etc.
Bars and pubs aren't really competing against the store or restaurants, they're competing against you drinking alone or with only close friends. If stepping in to have a beer and shoot the shit would cost a significant chunk of a day's wages, you just won't do it, but if I can buy more beer with an hours wages than I can drink in an hour, it's not a bad time.
Weatherspoons charge under £3 for a pint in town. That's 15 minutes at minimum wage.
Beer was far more expensive 25 years ago - £1.60 in 2000 in the student pub when I first started buying my own beer, that was about half an hour at minimum wage.
On the cost side: Wages are higher, energy costs more, rent is higher (because if the pub can't operate the owner can get planning permission to convert it to a private dwelling and sell it for £600k rather than making £12k a year in rent)
On the demand side: People are healthier and drink less. It's nowhere near as acceptable to go out for a few pints at lunch time. People can't drive to a rural pub.
The thing is, they've purchased so many historic pubs, that if you refuse to drink at one that's a choice. I'm not saying that's a terrible choice, but it's a choice that bars you from an awful lot of pubs.
Not really. Applebee’s is still too food oriented.
Wetherspoons are definitely pubs. They just have a reputation for cheap drinks and cheap meals. But there’s still a significant proportion of people who go there for drinks only.
It’s more like a drinking warehouse with carpet on the floor and a menu of mostly beige food than a larger version of a cosy country pub with a roaring fire and a varied food menu sometimes involving vegetables that have not been deep fried.
It's the VA for survivors of the 1980s as it doesn't allow music or TV inside, so tends to get ignored by the soccer followers of a weekend and the younger generation entirely.
TBF their curry club and other food specials are basically subsidising old bachelors to the point of being an ersatz social service @ £8.45 to £11.45, including a drink, for 12 hours of service every Thursday.
Generally speaking, its best described as the RyanAir of pubs. It gets you there, cheaply, but the juice may not be worth the squeeze in terms of ambience and clientele.
no music or tv? that sounds fucked... why don't ppl just drink in a park? iirc public drinking is actually legal in the uk?
(I know in some countries it's actually not -- Bratislava being one surprising example, though some cops were really chill when I was like hey sorry, I thought this was allowed, it's cold out so I bought a pounder and I wanted to warm up on the way to my hostel I'm not trying to bother anyone... though maybe they may have been letting me slide mostly because they were amused by what a pounder is once I defined it)
(A pounder is a big can of beer that got it's nickname because American frat bros will "pound" (chug) it to get very drunk quickly in places where the sales of beer are looser than liquor)
Isn’t it a pounder because it’s 16oz (US fluid ounces) which is a (US) pound?
(Note a US pint is about 474ml compared to the UK pint which is 568ml).
Of course US fluid ounces are a different size to UK (Imperial) fluid ounces. Plus the UK has 20 (Imperial) fluid ounces in a UK pint whilst the US has 16 (US) fluid ounces in a US pint.
How does it go? “A pint’s a pound the whole world around, except the UK where a pint of water is a pound and a quarter.”
As for drinking in a park, it is either something you do in the height of summer, or something you do if you are a tramp. There’s not much middle ground.
I have been to a nice ones, like the one in Exeter (but the owner is from there so that figures); I forgot the other two that were nice. Not many nice ones but they do exist.
Most expensive pint I've paid round here was £6, so pubs are about 2x that - about half hour of adult minimum wage, same as spoons charged 25 years ago.
So how do spoons make a profit?
The main difference that I see is that they buy cheap properties and thus don't have crushing rents.
What this page doesn't show is the increase in rent for these buildings.
One thing I've heard is that they have consistent high throughput so they will buy beer that's closer to expiry and hence cheaper, because they know people will drink it before it goes off.
Dunno how much of an effect that is, it can only account for so much.
Think about the price of a keg of beer - much cheaper/pint than buying beer at a pub or from anywhere else in a smaller size. Very high-volume customers have contracts with distributors that can get them even better deals, sometimes significantly better.
Alcohol is pretty much always sold at a huge markup though - 4-5x is standard in the US. UK regulation might be different, but it's likely that the majority of costs in the pub business are in insurance and licensing rather than alcohol and rent.
To be fair actually £6 a pint does sound more like it, I think I'm getting confused with rounds (so I most often spend £10-£12, but I'm buying two pints)
It's hardly a subsidy if it's the removal of a tax that will go away entirely if the business is shuttered. This is frankly an awful framing. A well designed tax taxes a small portion of the business' margin. If the business has small margins, the tax is proportionately small. The tax in question is one that applies regardless of whether the business is making any money, and hence seems to have the express purpose of killing businesses.
> In her November Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves scaled back business rate discounts that have been in force since the pandemic from 75% to 40% - and announced that there would be no discount at all from April.
That, combined with big upward adjustments to rateable values of pub premises, left landlords with the prospect of much higher rates bills.
Nearest town has 3 pubs where rates are going down significantly and 4 where they're going up. I wonder why, is it that the previous setup was unfair to those who are seeing their rates going down?
The pub I do go to each week is seeing rates going up +£3,300. That's not as big an impact from yet another inflation busting minimum wage increase.
However the much bigger concern is that people will be scared to drive there. Currently you can drive there, have a pint, and then go home, and be confident you're not triggering the limit. They're reducing this limit, which means no more trip to the pub.
I'm sure it's fine in big cities where people live in walking distance.
It's important to separate the spirit of this from the spirits of it.
Pubs as social gathering places are critical to exist and keep alive.
Drinking neurotoxins that have a lot of destruction and damage, maybe not so much.
In the UK pubs are extremely different as well than the US. This site is for the UK, since it's asking for a postal code, among other signs. The UK also I believe has last call at 11 PM, which helps fuel the binge drinking before 11 PM and the wild public afterwards. In North America, last call for alcohol can be 1-3 AM, and people generally aren't in a rush to fuel up to blast off.
Last call at 11pm stopped being a blanket rule in 2003. The Licensing Act 2003 (England and Wales) abolished strict closing times.
Most pubs now have much longer hours (some even 24/7) although they choose their opening hours based on how busy they are or think they will be. The local councils will take into account local considerations and limit individual pubs as they see fit.
Decades of hooliganism (mostly a thing of the past thankfully) has meant that you can't be in possession of alcohol within view of the pitch in the top 5 tiers in the UK. (And by the 5th tier you're looking at matches that have attendances anywhere down to 400 or so, although some clubs in the 5th tier still manage to attract 10000 fans to home games).
This spills out into the local community around stadiums too. Many pubs really close to the ground will have extra restrictions on matchdays, that's probably what you've experienced. But that's not just the UK, I remember going to a River Plate game in Buenos Aires 20 years ago and being amazed that on match days there was no alcohol served within a mile of the stadium or some such rule.
I've been to Champions League games in the UK sponsored by a variety of alcoholic drink companies and they weren't serving alcohol anywhere in the stadium (well, I guess they still do in the hospitality sections).
Even when the stadiums do serve alcohol they do strange things like stopping serving as the second half kicks off. As someone who wants to watch all of the football I've paid to go see it's a very odd thing getting a pint at half time and drinking it in under 10 minutes in order to be back to the stands in time for the second half to kick off. Us Brits just accept it and deal with it.
Compare that to watching rugby or cricket in the UK where you have no fan segregation and alcohol allowed at the seats.
It's also much more relaxed at the lower tiers of UK football. I've watched a few Dulwich Hamlet games with a friend and they allow to bring your own beers in (may have changed, haven't been for a few years), and sometimes have a "pay what you want" admission price.
Wherever I go in the UK I try and keep a look out for a local game, even if the football is terrible the people watching is often amazing and worth the admission price alone.
There will always be idiots, regardless of whether alcohol is involved or not, but I'm talking about the levels of hooliganism that were rife in the 80s and 90s, the things that got alcohol banned (when in view of the pitch) at football matches.
That level of hooliganism at games and around the stadiums is a mostly a thing of the past.
The days of open brawls in the stands that you saw in the 80s/90s are gone, you just get the occasional bit of jostling nowadays if that. (I used to do stewarding back in the late 90s and saw a lot of the bad side of things.)
The various "firms" that would meet up for their arranged pre-match fight have dwindled to almost nothing and now there is little fear for away fans walking to/from games. It used to be quite a scary prospect depending on the ground visited.
However, successive UK Governments have repeatedly kicked the can down the road when considering reversing the 1985 ban that stopped people having a drink in view of the pitch.
I don't think any UK political party has the bottle (pun intended) to reintroduce it, it would be a pretty divisive proposal and most political parties try to steer well clear of such things in today's politics.
Things are starting to change though. At some grounds you do have home and away fans mixing in the concourses (the Putney End of Fulham's ground for example) but most grounds in the top tiers are designed to keep home and away fans apart as much as possible.
Funny enough I worked with an old timer back in Charleston, SC which historically had no regulated last call. During his drinking years they passed a law requiring an 0200 closing time which, as he put it, was a terrible idea because it put all the drunks out on the street at the same time causing joint chaos. In his view having no official close meant folks naturally filtered out over time as they were sated. Seems any hard stop causes trouble?
How do you imagine this playing out?
People don't get the alcohol they want anymore -> no more orders -> No more business -> Not worth it for the owner
It's interesting, I was hoping it would be based on more than just the rates change though. Maybe combined with Google "how busy is this place" data, for example.
Agreed. Currently it reckons that the most-fucked pub in my area is the largest pub within walking distance from a major premier league football stadium.
But it's always busy even out of season, and absolutely heaving on match days. I'd be surprised if a single match day's profits weren't sufficient to cover the additional tax for the year.
Personally, I'll continue to offer my enthusiastic support to my much smaller, friendlier local even though it's facing only a tiny tax increase by comparison.
Whilst you make a good point, the true purpose of this site it to draw attention to the new outrageous tax bills faced by pubs; many of which are going under and are a real loss to the communities they serve.
brilliant website which manages to convey classic British humour on a classically British topic. Also shines much needed light on the very serious challenges independent British Pubs are undergoing - these are essential social institutions, social coherence is damaged every time one of these shut down.
Thanks for pointing out the stool scale. I went from "hahaha I'm sure this some kind of 'how shitty stuff is'" to "let me see how it works" to "oh, it's actually a useful medical chart" lol
Seems fixed now. I wonder if it was related to the number of entries with nulls in one of those two fields (but not necessarily both at the same time).
I’d love to know why people are happy with others making a fortune not through hard work, but through buying land and letting others hard work increase its value.
In the case of these pubs it sounds like they’re being priced out of the area through no fault of their own while trying to run an honest business so I don’t quite follow your logic here…
"Bar" is certainly the catch-all term in the U.S., but "pub" is also very widely understood to refer to a specific type of bar, especially (but not limited to) bars deliberately styled as Irish or British pubs.
Come to Virginia, where it's outright illegal for any establishment serving alcohol to not also serve food (and not only must food be served, it must account for at least 45% of revenue).
Do they make you order food with every round of drinks? I remember hearing about places like that from my dad, and it seems it would have worked better in the era of cheap drinks/low built-in alcohol taxes.
I went to college in a county that only allowed alcohol sales with food for clubs (think: country clubs). So, of course, the restaurant that I worked for created its own club. You simply filled out your name (and maybe phone number, I don't remember) on a piece of paper when you ordered your drink.
Yes. Being on the other side of the world, I've only ever heard of efforts to save English pubs. Thus, without more details, one knows that is what is being referred to. Perhaps Scotland has the same kind of movement happening at the local level, but something on a global website implies global context.
Maybe not so much active efforts to save them, but the mass lamentation around the collapse of the industry that has been going on for several decades. What efforts there are to save them is merely an extension of that.
Much the same thing has happened here too (the local watering holes struggling and failing, that is), but that isn't even considered newsworthy at the local level, let alone a message that has spread far and wide. English pubs, for whatever reason, are the only ones that have consistently caught grander attention.
But there will always be someone living under a rock, as they say.
Wales comes along with England due to how their legal framework is setup. It is a good technical point you raise, but for all intents and purposes within the context they are the same place.
And yet it is the one part of the UK that actually has a language that is spoken by a non-trivial percentage of the population (unlike NI or Scotland where a tiny percentage can speak their Celtic tongue)
> And yet it is the one part of the UK that actually has a language that is spoken by a non-trivial percentage of the population
98% of the UK population can speak English, so I'm not sure where you got that idea. Clearly every part (maybe some small, uncelebrated village breaks the rule) of the UK has a language spoken by virtually the entire population of that region.
> (unlike NI or Scotland where a tiny percentage can speak their Celtic tongue)
If you are struggling to say that England is the only country in the UK that sees most of its population still speak the language of its ancestral roots, then I suppose that's true, but when English is the most commonly used natural language across the entire world I'm not sure that is much of a feat.
What does any of this have to do with the discussion at hand?
Wales/Welsh doesn’t jive under the conditions set. Perhaps you missed "non-trivial percentage"? Outer Hebrides is a part of the UK where ~50% of its residents speak Scottish, never mind England and its English dominance, so clearly ~30% is still considered within trivial range. Otherwise "the one part" doesn't work; seeing many parts of the UK fit the bill.
This is also a problem that exists within countries. My RSS feed is littered with Canadian independent (national) news agencies not defining what municipality article headlines relate to. E.g. "Mayor pushes back against province on xyz issue". Okay, that might be huge news for Timmins Ontario , but maybe BAU for Toronto. Even skimming the lead paragraph doesn't define the city often.
*Editting with a point: Perhaps everyone assumes a local audience.
Good luck. Americans won't even differentiate Washington State and Washington D.C. Even the AP guidelines say that "Washington" is ubiquitous shorthand for "Washington D.C." and recommends against shortening it to "D.C."
The most hilarious thing is that I learned recently that when they applied to be a state, the people from WA requested to be the state of Columbia. But a Kentucky rep said that would be too easily confused with the District of Columbia, and Congress changed it to Washington.
Americans do! If you are west of the Rockies, Washington resolves to the west. If you are east, it’s DC, and you have to say “you know, where Nirvana is from.”
Don’t get me started on east coast dumdums pronouncing Oregon as “Orry-gone.”
The one near me which is absolutely fucked, as far as I'm concerned, deserves it.
Fighty customers, crap beer, odd opening hours, and half their food menu is off ("sorry mate, we've got no cheese"). Oh, and now their credit card terminal prompts customers for a tip!
Near me, the (nice but always too busy) Old Dairy is getting a cut, and the (mediocre Arsenal fan packed) Bank of Friendship and Arsenal Tavern are getting obliterated. God exists, and he supports Spurs!
Ironically, the pub it suggested near me that was the most fucked closed down years ago (it's not just them, quite a few databases don't know that), so yeah, good call.
The Farmer's Dog pub is listed as fucked, maybe this site could get a shout-out on Clarkson's Farm. The difficulty of doing business in the UK is a common theme on his show.
I mean alcohol is the worst drug: it’s highly addictive, toxic to the body, one of the few drugs with potentially fatal withdrawal, and a major driver of violence, accidents, and family breakdown. Unlike most drugs, it seriously harms people beyond the user — and because it’s legal, cheap, and socially normalised, its damage happens on a massive scale.
I agree until your last sentence. Pubs closing can be devastating.
Pubs are often the centre of a community, especially small ones. Not even small towns. Traditionally they have been centered around drinking, but this is changing. Much like libraries had to adapt to falling reading rates, pubs have had to adapt to falling alcohol consumption.
The hard part of this is that food and wage costs are often covered by alcohol costs, though where I'm from the government has exercised vice taxes to make this less tenable. More customers doesn't necessarily mean that much more profit, for a host of reasons.
I hope pubs find a way forward.
Source for my rambling: worked in and managed pubs for a decade. They're not just for heavy drinkers.
Having watched two alcoholic family members die horribly, spurred on by functioning alcoholic friends whos only social interaction is at the pub through habit only, fuck 'em. Let them die.
We need better social spaces which do not have the token cost of drinks to use.
It is a "use it or lose it" style campaign by the looks of it.
Lots of Pubs in the UK are closing down in recent years. Pubs have traditionally been a big part of socialising in the UK.
I don't drink anymore so I don't bother unless I am having a pub lunch on a Friday.
> Can't you drink non-alcoholic beverage? If the point is socialising, alcohol is not a requirement.
It kinda is though depending on who you go to the bar with.
I went to the bar to get fucked up, a lot of my career I've worked in toxic workplaces, so have stressful day and work and then hit the bar.
Most of my mates at the time were heavy drinkers. We are talking about people that would have 6 beers and the bar and have a bottle of Rioja when they get home. Some of these dudes have turned out to be scumbags.
Once I stopped drinking, I never spoke to them again. Not once. So these people weren't my real friends.
> I know a lot of bars in my area also are places to play board games nowadays.
TBH, when I see people playing board games other than like Chess or Draughts as adults (and there are not children present), I just find it embarrassing like it is like some child day care. I appreciate it is a "me" problem, but I can't stand it.
No. It was obvious from the title that this was about the UK, and also why should they - American sites don't indicate this either, and they have no monopoly on the language.
Sure. So then just add a couple of extra words to the homepage to make it clear? It's not that hard, and saves visitors a lot of time from hunting around trying to figure it out.
Due to the history of the internet, anything ".com" should be assumed to be US-specific if not obviously global, just like anything ".co.uk" should be assumed to be UK-specific if not obviously global.
If you use a .com for something that is specific to a country/region that is not the US, the onus is on you to clarify. That's the problem here. If you're not going to make it ".uk", then you should be making that obvious on the homepage.
Due to the history of the internet, anything ".com" should be assumed to be a commercial entity.
If you are from the US, the only nation who doesn't frequently use a national TLD, the onus is on you to judge if a site is commercial, US-specific, global, or something else entirely.
I mean... I don't disagree that there is an onus on any website to make it clear who it's audience is. But .com hasn't been exclusively US centric for literally decades. Even during peak 90s domain name territorialism .com meant "commercial".
People outside the USA, i.e. the majority of the world, often experience the opposite to what you've described: the tiresome implicit assumption that everything on the internet is US-related by default. It's not.
Drinking is a _very_ weird cultural artifact from our past. It doesn't improve your life, it has been scientifically proven to not 'help you relax', and there may in fact be no safe amount of alcohol to drink; all the pop-sci headlines that say 'one glass of wine a week may improve your health' are really about studies that put the safe max at one glass per week.
From what I can tell, the UK is no longer subsidizing what is effectively a criminal enterprise that is centuries old.
With all due respect this opinion verges on neo prohibitionist alarmism. The social benefits of alcohol have been widely acknowledged and at a time when we are all spending too much time at home on our phones (arguably worse for health than a pint), communities need more social spaces. That place may not necessarily be a bar and it’s perfectly fine if you don’t wish to drink, but it’s a bit much to refer to a cultural product as a criminal enterprise.
The social benefits do not come from alcohol. At the very best, they come from what we have learned to believe about alcohol.
Alcohol consumption follows a nasty curve. The average adult in the UK drinks about 11 liters of pure alcohol per year on average. Which is obviously a lot. But what's worse is, almost no one drinks 11 liters. The median is much lower, exactly how low is hard to find numbers on but as much as 1 in 5 Brits don't drink at all.
That means most of the alcohol is consumed by people who drink way too much by any sane definition.
If you own a pub, or an "off license", or arrange a music festival or pretty much any cultural venue, you know that in your bones. Staying afloat without selling alcohol, in particular without selling alcohol to people who drink far more than they should, is hopeless. You can't change things on your own. And even suggesting we should maybe work together to change will alienate your most profitable customers, who are understandably defensive about their drinking.
No, it's not a criminal enterprise, by definition. But you'll do better if you have a criminal's attitude - pick one: denial (consuming a lot yourself may help), rationalization ("if I didn't do it someone else would") or callousness. That's one reason pub chains do better.
Many people have written what you have written, trying to justify their life choices to strangers on the internet.
None of them have ever explained why alcohol, or any drug use, needs to be part of third spaces.
Society is losing third spaces, largely due to unchecked capitalism eroding the society it serves... but 'pubs' are just another form of rent-seeking by landlords. It has been proven without a doubt that third spaces as a commercial venture is ultimately non-functional, yet that is what pubs and bars have always been, and now they are dying out.
> None of them have ever explained why alcohol, or any drug use, needs to be part of third spaces.
Third places need to have some kind of draw, else nobody will show up. "If you build it, they will come" is for the movies. In the real world you need to have a compelling reason to have others come in your door. Space alone is not sufficient to establish a third space.
That draw doesn't necessarily have to be alcohol (or another drug), but it was the thing that many people used to want. Threatening use of a third space by fear of the wrath of a mighty deity only buys you one day out of the week, I'm afraid.
You're quite right that people no longer want alcohol like they used to. Why nurse a hangover when you can get the same dopamine rush scrolling through TikTok at home from the comfort of your couch? This means that many third spaces of yesteryear no longer serve a purpose, and as you call out, have closed as a result.
Which is all well and good, I guess, but some segment of the population still wish that there were third spaces for them to exist in. Trouble is that they've never been able to find anything as compelling as alcohol used to be across large swaths of the population, making a different kind of third space of the same scale a complete no-go. Trying to salvage the remaining alcohol-centric third places is the only path they can see to try and relive that glory.
Of course there are plenty of alcohol-free (or at least not alcohol focused) third spaces that revolve around niche interests, but these are generally not seen as a good fit for those who don't have that particular niche interest. Alcohol was historically so successful as the foundation for a third space because, once upon a time, nearly everyone was interested in it, bringing everyone in the door.
Again, with all due respect, I’m not seeing how my comment is pushing a “life choice” on anyone, and the movement to restrict alcohol consumption equally qualifies as pushing a life choice on someone.
Commercial pubs have existed for hundreds of year. But drinking doesn’t have to be commercial. In Berlin where I live there’s a non-profit hacker space that has a bar with at-cost drinks. It’s also perfectly legal to buy a beer and sit in the park. And of course, nothing is better than having friends over for a wine tasting.
The book "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" would be a good read for you, should you wish to consider alternative viewpoints.
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Distilling what I remember about an entire book I read a couple years ago into a HN comment is difficult, but one of the more salient notes from it is this: Adult humans are naturally suspicious of others and slow to trust, particularly those they have no existing points of connection to. In contrast - children have much lower inhibitions in this sense and are much better at this.
Alcohol, in moderation, is one of the most effective tools in humanity's arsenal to more easily socialize with and create trust with total strangers.
The "reduction of inhibitions" we are all aware of in terms of being a risk of making negative choices, also serves to greatly reduce inhibition of the average adult to new interactions and experiences.
It is difficult to achieve this result in adults otherwise, especially in terms of a single activity with low investment required in time, money, facilities, and commitment.
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It is likely that as we transitioned from a society where adult encounters with total strangers were rare (tribal/village) to common (urban) that alcohol played a pretty significant role in creating the social cohesion for it.
It is not at all clear that we have found some successful alternative to this, and we may well find that even with all the documented downsides of it, we're worse off as a society for moving away from it.
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Again, this is my recollection of a book I read a couple years back - don't take this word for word. I will also note that it's not all rosy and has some thoughts on the types of consumption we should probably discourage as well and the general risk/reward of alcohol in society.
Alcohol doesn't create social cohesion chemically. This is a learned effect - there are societies where they had different beliefs about alcohol, and there it doesn't have this effect. This is a really old finding of anthropology. (Of course, in today's global world, beliefs about alcohol get homogenized, so there are ever fewer of societies where they have diverging beliefs about alcohol effects.)
Moreover, it seems likely to me that just like the "relaxing" effect of nicotine, this advantage is "stolen" from daily sober life. If we as a society agree to judge each other less harshly when we're drink, I think we will just naturally judge each other more harshly when we're sober.
However, unlike with nicotine, where the effect is physical and individual (you relax when you get nicotine because you get stressed by physical addiction when you don't), for alcohol it's social and collective. You suffer the negative effect (social pressure to basically be more uptight in everyday sober life) whether you participate or not.
What's especially American about this remark isn't the experience of consuming alcohol in public. What is characteristically American, I think, is the assumption that we can pronounce a thing good or bad merely on the basis of its effect on the individual, with no regard for one's relationships with other people. Drinking in a pub is a social activity, and the alcohol is a lubricant for that activity. Yes, doing too much of it can cause great harm; doing any amount of it could cause some harm; it does not follow that the thing is a net detriment to society, and that it should be banned.
Maybe it is that way for people in the UK, or maybe people of a certain age group.
However, I am, as I said, an American, but also a Millennial. For many Millennials, drinking isn't a social activity, it is a form of quiet shame. We saw our parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents destroy their lives because of alcoholism, we lost friends and family because of being victims of drunk drivers, we saw people die of complications of a lifetime of drinking.
A lot of us simply chose not to repeat those mistakes as those mistakes effect the people around us in grave ways.
If anything, drinking is an anti-social activity, even if you do it entirely socially.
> I just don't see the point in keeping it around.
So 'you do you' and continue not drinking, no need to preach your life choices. I'm also 'millenial' , I enjoy many alcoholic drinks both socially and because they go with my meal or simply are something not hot/dairy/sweet and other than water.
> [Millennials] saw our parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents destroy their lives because of alcoholism, we lost friends and family because of being victims of drunk drivers, we saw people die of complications of a lifetime of drinking.
Why do you think alcoholism - which is certain distinct from drinking - was new with the generation above 'millenials'?
As a Brit (an actual one, not because my great great grandfather was one) I'd have to say that pub culture in the UK is not strictly about drinking alcohol at all. It's a social place to meet friends, play games, watch sport and hide from the weather.
Pubs won't question you if you ask for a lime and soda and they may even stop serving you if they think you've drunk enough.
It sounds like you don't understand what a pub is like.
Whilst this is definitely not what's it's like, this quaint video is all about the lineage of the pub in the UK, and explains the third-spaceness of them, which I'd argue still exists[1].
Pubs are so important for our communities in the UK, whether that's watching the game, seeing a friend's band, celebrating a birthday or just catching up after work.
Many of the parts of my life have been lived in a pub. If it's criminal, I'd happily be locked up. Or maybe lock me in, a sadly rarer occurrence these days.
Exactly, designing a 'third place' that isn't alcohol focused seems to be a tough nut to crack. Alcohol greases the wheels for socialization and is a highly profitable item for a place to sell that keeps the lights on (people may have several drinks an hour, drinking leads to more drinking both in the long and shot terms, etc). Meanwhile a typical coffeeshop here in seattle is, aside from the espresso machines, is a near silent library-like space. Many people heads down in a book or a laptop. Instead of having a few drinks per hour you instead may have a single coffee and maybe a pastry or sandwich.
If someone opened a social space with maybe a kitchen that let you pay by the hour to hang out, credit for kitchen orders. All the other bar/pub accoutrements gaming (darts, pool, shuffleboard, pinball, whatnot), sports on the tv, whatever .. I still don't think people will go for it.
I think the only non-boozy option that comes to mind is the small town diner but those are thin on the ground.
> Exactly, designing a 'third place' that isn't alcohol focused seems to be a tough nut to crack.
how so? I go to a climbing gym and it is a pretty social (and, of course, healthy) activity... crossfit is not my thing but apparently it is similar for more traditional workouts. to the extent you can consider a cycling or running club a "space" those are similar. dog parks for dog owners, playgrounds for parents, etc...
Many of those lack spontaneity though. I don’t walk past a climbing gym with a friend of mine and think “fancy popping in there for an hour or so?” You need to plan a visit to many of those places so you have the right clothing/footwear/etc.
The social point of a pub is that you can just decide to go in on a whim. Pubs are increasingly not about alcohol either. I’ve had a few instances in the last couple of years where I couldn’t drink alcohol for extended periods (various reasons, mostly medication related). Hasn’t stopped me going to the pub.
Years ago you would get an odd look if a group walked into a pub and all ordered soft drinks but not so much now (well, you still will get that in some pubs).
Obviously I’m not out looking for another place to buy a lime and soda after midnight but I can quite happily have an evening out without having to drink alcohol whilst others do or don’t around me.
Here is what I will say. Drinking certainly is not a healthy choice. However hanging out with your peers for a few hours a night in public certainly is.
Unfortunately I haven't found any place that cracks that problem in america, especially into the later hours. There isn't really a place for people to hang out and socialize without it being a boozy bar. As someone who doesn't really enjoy drinking I don't even really want to go to boardgame/chess/trivia nights at bars because I feel like I'm freeloading. ( I imagine any given bar patron is having 1-3 drinks per hour and potentially ordering some food if that is an option. I might order some food and have a soda...)
I assume part of the problem being that alcohol has the helpful side effect of greasing the wheels socially. Coffee houses that are open late are generally library like affairs, a lot of people sitting around on laptops or with books, any attempt to start a more social night is, in my experience, refused because of this.
Am I the only one that has no idea what this is talking about? Even the "About" section just dumps a ton of jargon about something being a problem for "pubs" - which, very unclear from the homepage, is actually talking about bars/places to drink beer/etc in the UK.
But again, now I know it's talking about that kind of pub, what is the actual issue? Some sort of rate being added to something? What rate? Is this related to a rating system? Taxes? Is it affecting the consumer? The owner?
To be fair, I'd say that most people in the UK who would be interested in the contents of this site are aware of the context and know what phrases like "rates increases" actually mean.
It's been in the news quite a bit over the years since the pandemic.
For a generic ".com" domain that isn't American, it's generally a good idea to yes, have a kind of minimal hint that tells you at least which country it's about, and at least a single link you can follow to get the broader context.
I'm following a link to it on HN. When I get there, I have zero context. Visitors to your site can come from anywhere, so it's generally considered a good idea to provide basic context.
> For a generic ".com" domain that isn't American, it's generally a good idea to yes, have a kind of minimal hint that tells you at least which country it's about, and at least a single link you can follow to get the broader context.
Umm, I take it you didn't click the "About" link at the top right of the page. That gives you some of that context and names the countries involved in the first full sentence.
Alternatively clicking on the "Map" link should give a sizable proportion of people a big hint about which countries it involves. Three seconds of scrolling out on the map makes it obvious.
While this is cool to see, would be nice to see some indication of the nation specific context for those outside that nation... especially since it's the more generic .com tld instead of say .uk ...
Maybe even a Union Jack in the corner as a background image, or something.
Given the arguments I have had with people on here about swearing and formal language and all the self censoring they seem to do, I thought it was immediately obvious from the URL that this was not american.
Kinda meta, but this is the first time in a long time where I've put only the first half of my postcode in expecting it not to work and been surprised. Most of these "find your nearest XYZ" site require the full postcode which is just unnecessary unless you're looking for a fairly precise location. A full postcode can narrow your location down to an individual street, so its nice not to give too much away if you can.
For anyone not in the know, UK postcodes are made up of two parts: a general area (the outward code) and then a more specific one (the inward code.) Generally speaking a postcode + house number will be good enough to get a letter delivered to the right place, though the sorting office might not be too happy with you...
The format [0] is roughly: AB12 3CD, though the number of letters/numbers on the left side can vary a bit. As far as I know the second set of numbers is always 1 digit though, so that's how you can easily split the two sides of it to format it nicely. There's a couple of special ones that break the rules though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
I agree with the bit about the having to enter a full postcode on some sites, I often use one nearby or, if they make me select a specific address for no valid reason I make sure I use a random address nearby. Apologies to some of my neighbours who might be bombarded with junk mail for services I’ve once been half interested in.
A full postcode is often much less than a single street.
Picking something at random stick “SW15 6DZ” into Google maps and you’ll see it only covers 6 buildings (most are individual houses but some are split into flats). According to the Royal Mail address finder site there are only 12 unique delivery addresses that share that postcode. The Western half of that road has 12 or so full postcodes for only 100 houses.
A full postcode and one other bit of information can often be enough to uniquely identify someone.
If a US 5 digit zipcode is roughly equivalent to the “general area” part of a UK postcode (94107 <=> SW15) then the full UK postcode is like the 9 digit US Zip+4 format where the extra 4 digits narrow location down to a block, part of a block or even a specific building.
A friend of mine who lived in a tent in a park got his own postcode. True story.
Details: election time. He went to the election folks and asked for his election papers. They said "sure, where do you live?" he said "the Bender, Eastville Park, Bristol", they said "that's not a valid address", he said "that's where I live, so that's where I'd like my registration to be, please". There was some back and forth. They caved, and duly entered his address on the electoral roll as such. Then he went to the Post Office and said "this is my address, as entered on the electoral roll, can I have my postcode please?". The Post Office kinda had no option, since this was now his official address. So they gave him a postcode and the postie had to walk through the park to drop off his mail.
The post office will attempt to deliver if you put an address on it.
There is guy living off grid in I believe Dorset on YouTube called "Maximus Ironthumper". The post office told him to try sending himself letters, eventually they started turning up. Then that became the address.
He has a whole series of videos about how he kinda managed to setup his off grid living situation, there is everything from how to avoid planning permission, to how he setup his solar power.
>The post office will attempt to deliver if you put an address on it.
I still find it fascinating that we developed this human system, with expectations that are still in play, even if some aspects become less and less relevant, it's still an important tool beyond being dependent on technology. Same with lending libraries. A few things we should cherish that have real ethics in this lets-monetize-everything world.
Yeah it's hard to see either being created today if they didn't exist already. A good thing to remember when something gets called impossible.
I believe similar has happened, whereby a seller of the Big Issue (a magazine sold by the homeless to raise money) had a postcode issued to a bench where they could pick up deliveries of the magazine.
That's a nice way to give the postie a pleasant walk on a lovely summer day.
This is Britain we're talking about, it'll be pissing down rain/sleet on the other 364 days.
The concept of a postcode was originally due to the sack weight a postie could deliver before returning to the van.
Each postcode would then have an optimum delivery route often devised by the postie's themselves.
"A full postcode is often much less than a single street."
My business has its own unique postcode and so does next door! Between us we cover roughly three acres. Our place is one building with parking and a fair bit of greenery.
There is apparently a suite to rent in the Rosewood Hotel in London (near Holborn) which has it's own postcode (WC1V 7EN).
To be fair it's a 6-bedroom wing, but still a fun fact.
My postcode in Surrey had about 7 houses according to the postie.
> the 9 digit US Zip+4 format where the extra 4 digits narrow location down to a block, part of a block or even a specific building.
A US Zip+4 usually identifies a specific delivery point. In some places this can mean it can even identify specific units within a building.
Mail from a guy that wants to preserve pubs wouldn't be junk.
How is that different from a mail from a local church asking me to donate, or a local bingo club opening a new location - it's all junk. If I didn't ask for it to be sent to my address, it's all junk.
One person's junk is another person's fuel for heating.
Throughout the year a friend of mine would collect any junk mail, but mostly many copies of the free daily newspapers (Metro, Evening Standard, etc) that litter the trains/underground in the evenings, soak them with water than use a briquette maker to press the paper into blocks. Once dried they provide an ample supply of fuel to heat his home for the 6-10 months of the year (depending on how poorly your home is insulated) that heating is required in the UK.
He definitely didn't have a "No junk mail" sticker on his letterbox.
Pubs generate way more tax revenue than churches.
And I'm sure HSBC generate even more tax revenue, that doesn't mean that if they send me unsolicited mail about bank accounts it isn't junk.
Any communication received without explicit consent, after providing details, is junk, and would fall under GDPR as using that info for a different purpose than what was described.
Yep, locally where I am there’s one postcode for all the houses on one side of the street (all the even numbered houses) and another for the opposite side (all the odd numbers.)
Presumably it helps a lot with validating the address is correct, kinda like a checksum, and also probably helps with how deliveries are organised by the local office before the postie is sent out with them all.
In Ireland we were very late to the postcode game and when we introduced them a few years back they actually uniquely identifies a single address. We also continued our "interesting" habit of renaming everything to make them sound more Irish so they are called Eircodes. In theory you could just put the single 7 character Eircode on a letter and it would be enough although our postal service has said we can't do that.
Why not?
By being late to computerized sorting, the postal service (An Post) never actually needed postcodes the way others did, as by the time they got computerized, fuzzy address lookups in the full address database was something that was available. It's mostly the third party couriers and marketing people pushed for post codes so they could apply techniques from other countries here.
Now asking An Post to overhaul their system to work on postcodes only is a bit like asking a postal service which requires postcodes to make them optional. It's technically possible, sure, but they're not going to want to spend the money.
_That said_, An Post's last resort routing department is pretty famous for getting the right address from pretty fragmentary information like "Mary down by the church, formerly of Kilnowhere", so I'm sure if a letter with just a eircode arrived there they'd sort it, but I imagine that An Post don't want to encourage people doing things that increases load on the labour intensive sorting.
This is delightfully referenced as the Blind Letter Office in Terry Pratchett's book "Making Money":
<Moist ran downstairs and Lord Vetinari was indeed sitting in the Blind Letter Office with his boots on a desk, a sheaf of letters in his hand and a smile on his face.
'Ah, Lipwig,' he said, waving the grubby envelopes. 'Wonderful stuff! Better than the crossword! I like this one: "Duzbuns Hopsit pfarmerrsc". I've put the correct address underneath.' He passed the letter over to Moist.
He had written: K. Whistler, Baker, 3 Pigsty Hill.
'There are three bakeries in the city that could be said to be opposite a pharmacy,' said Vetinari, 'but Whistler does those rather good curly buns that regrettably look as though a dog has just done his business on your plate and somehow managed to add a blob of icing.'>
There used to be a site "postcodeine" which would overlay the prefixes onto a map as you typed, so you could enter "SW" or "KY" etc and watch it narrow down the area by keystroke.
> A full postcode can narrow your location down to an individual street,
Often a single block of flats. Rurally perhaps even just a single residence?
No, still usually a few residences rurally but probably more variable
I lived in SW1 many years ago and was surprised to learn, from this website, that SW goes all the way out to SW19!
Fun fact: apart from the main office SW1 they're alphabetised by area, from SW2 Brixton to SW19 Wimbledon. All of the London postcode areas are like this.
Hadn't noticed that before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW_postcode_area
SW2 to SW9 are in alphabetical order: Brixton, Chelsea, Clapham, Earls Court, Fulham, South Ken, South Lambeth, Stockwell.
But then it starts again and you have to squint a bit for SW10-SW20: Brompton, Battersea, Balham, Barnes, Mortlake, Putney, Streatham, Tooting, Wandsworth, Wimbledon, West Wimbledon.
Looking at a few others (SE, etc) I see that the first chunk of them are in alphabetical order, but then they've added some extra ones later that break the ordering (e.g. SE19 onwards) but they have tried to add the extra ones in mostly alphabetical order too.
Yeah, they've become a bit muddled over the years but generally alphabetical in the batches they're added. E was nice and clean before the Olympics, then they added E20 for Stratford after E18 Woodford.
Most people assume it's relative to how far out the area is from the centre
And a bit further to SW20 in Raynes Park (a.k.a. “West Wimbledon” in Estate Agent vernacular).
I’ve lived somewhere in SW18/SW15/SW19 for the last 30 years. Having not grown up in London I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Apparently many other bits of London (North, East, central, etc) are good too but I’m not ready for change.
Wow a fantastic independent pub near where I used to live in London is seeing its rateable value go up 480%! This website really puts the headlines in to a nice local perspective.
It seems like the taxes only go up while the services get worse in the UK, although I’ve been away for 5 years now so maybe things improved.
> seeing its rateable value go up 480%!
Rateable value is based on what the market prices would be to rent that space. So, somebody is doing nicely apparently.
But if the landlord owns the pub (rare in the UK I know), but I believe it’s the case in this instance, then what are they getting from unrealised property price gains?
What does anyone gain from it really, except money in the bank for a handful of individuals, outsized property prices seem to be a hurdle for functional societies in basically every way.
It doesn't benefit a town if rent is so expensive that their businesses shut down.
When young I use to work in construction. (With diplomas) The wages for 18 year olds in the Netherlands at the time were such that I got 340 euro per month for 40 hour weeks. It's a truly shit salary but you could also see it as a wonderful formula to build cheap houses. As my boss billed the customers 28 euro per hour for my work and those houses cost roughly 35000 to buy(!) and it took roughly 80 hours of work each. (Very rough estimates but that oddly doesn't matter) You could say I build 6.4% of the houses. They roughly cost 350 000 euro today which seems 10 fold but since people can't afford that they need a mortgage and pay 3 times that amount over 30 years. That would mean my labor now costs 10 000 per month. At the time I tried to calculate the savings escape velocity and discovered that if I saved 100% of my income I would be able to buy my own house in never years. If I build 6.4% of a house in 2 weeks that would be 3.2% per week or 32 weeks to build 100%.
Say 64 weeks and the process produces one whole home for someone else. I get that there should be some people between the construction worker and the citizen eventho they never did anything useful to the result but the margins are so preposterous that the original salary is a mere rounding error.
Then I look at Amish barn raising videos and the laughter becomes uncontrollable. I would definitely go there and help out - for free of course. If I had to keep doing that I would look for some vegetables and uhh my own house? Even if they would never build it for me it would still be more enjoyable than the western extortion scheme.
You conveniently leave out that you were making minimum(?) youth wage.
In 2026, at 18y minimum wage is €7.36 per hour and at 21y it rockets up to €14.71
Not that youth wage past 18y isn't a stupid concept, but your wage being guaranteed to at least double in ~36 months time is rather relevant.
The were making 8.5 per hour which above the 2026 youth wage.
They also are relating a story from their past and since they have had an account since 2015, I am assuming their youthful past was at least 1 decade ago if not nearly 20 years ago.
No, the 340 were per month, the 40 hours are per week. I usually do back-of-the-envelope calculations with 4.3 weeks per month, which would leave them below 2 EUR/h.
Edit: But you are of course right about inflation! According to this website[1] it would bump them to 3.2 EUR/h.
[1]: https://www.inflationtool.com/euro-netherlands/2005-to-prese...
Even accounting inflation and the youth wage, that wage sounds too low for the Netherlands.
It should’ve been at least 450 euro equivalent even in 1990, using 2024 value euros.
Source: https://www.boeckler.de/pdf/ta_netherlands_mwdb.pdf
Sounds about right.
The point was that market value has very little to do with cost but is driven by intentionally limiting construction permits.
Out of the million euro that people have to pay to buy the 350 000 home very little goes towards building it.
The surplus of people looking to live someplace isn't an accident.
Now let us imagine what it is like running a pub. After subtracting the cost and the 5000 rent bill they probably have a sizable negative salary.
Minimum jeugdloon exists since 1974. Of course the numbers change but the ratio doesn't.
Look at it like this: if 18y minimum wage was €3 back then and would double to €6 at 21y, and you're a construction worker working for €8.50 at 18y, you're sure as shit going to demand a raise at 19, 20 and 21 because all the people making minimum wage are getting those raises too. Maybe not a doubling, but you wouldn't (shouldn't) gnash your teeth and still make €8.50 three years later.
> In 2026, at 18y minimum wage is €7.36 per hour and at 21y it rockets up to €14.71
And the average house price just went past half a million. Even cheap housing is north of 350K. You can't save up against yearly price increases.
> ... those houses [...] took roughly 80 hours of work each.
80 hours total on-site labor to build, or 80 hour of your (presumably lower-skill) labor?
This is more or less exactly Marx's argument about extracting the surplus from labour, and the alienation people feel when they cannot afford the products they themselves make.
As property prices increase, developers are more incentivized to build new properties and increase density.
The increase in supply then lowers prices.
The problem comes when local laws and the planning permission system make it hard or impossible to increase the supply of homes. Then there's no balancing force to bring prices down when they go up.
I certainly agree with your last paragraph, however whilst I believe you're not wrong about the first I don't believe that is the only option for increasing supply.
For example, if you look at some of the densest cities in the world they are still predominantly single standing homes, just much more tightly packed, and in homes we can't huild. So I believe zoning and planning are the key issues, and I think property developers would actually play a smaller role in solving the supply problem if you allowed individuals to solve this problem themselves with less strict zoning and planning.
Obviously big developments still play a role, but at the stage American cities are often at, NYC excluded, I think zoning being more favourable to medium density would go a long way.
Price rarely ever goes down meaningfully.
Leverages and confidence from the credit agency (be it banks or private investments), and the higher possiblity of approving the borrowing, and thus getting more shitty debts to be made, and contribute more to the total Gee-Dee-Pee which is the holy grail those economists chase after
so basically, none of it realized unless they borrow.
Basically better rates to go into more debt. More importantly (and part of the risk) is that they have a safety hatch if they really need to exit the business.
Nothing, but if market value of the land is going up, then that means the price for government services is going up (e.g. government employees need to be paid more, land acquisition or rent costs more, materials cost more, etc). Hence taxes collected have to go up.
This could all simply be due to a devaluation of the currency, rather than due to increased desirability or productivity.
Collateral you can borrow against?
Here’s the Lamb and Flag in Oxford
https://www.ismypubfucked.com/pub/11447801200
> the Inklings, a literary group including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, started meeting at The Lamb and Flag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_%26_Flag,_Oxford
The Lamb and Flag has faced previous financial challenges.
It in fact closed temporarily in the pandemic due to UK law preventing their then owner / operator, St John’s College, a charity, subsidising a loss making business, despite having the wherewithal to do so.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-55763746.amp
> On the way to an Inklings meeting, Lewis gave some money to a street beggar, and I made the usual objection: "Won't he just spend it on drink?" He answered, "Yes, but if I kept it, so would I."
Amateurs. One close to me is at an +821% increase in its tax bill and rateable value at 613%.
> It seems like the taxes only go up while the services get worse in the UK,
Same in the Netherlands
[dead]
The services have certainly not got better in the last 5 years. This Government is fiscally illiterate and has hit the top of the Laffer curve and is now trying to go down the other side.
This government have been in power for less than 2 years. Despite launching a lot of trial balloons on raising taxes they haven't actually raised the headline tax rates (other than allowing fiscal drag to do so).
Overall the tax burden in the UK is middling for western democracies. It's actually on the low side for low earners - which is probably a problem because the distribution is such that the majority pay very little.
The other problem being cliff edges and complexities which distinctive chasing pay rises and working more for a lot of people.
The biggest problem is that the tax on a median taxpayer is not just "middling", it's a bit over a third of what a median German taxpayer is paying. The rest of the fiscal problems (convoluted tax rules, cliff edges to try to claw something back, abrupt tax increases like the one on pubs) are downstream from that.
> the tax on a median taxpayer is not just "middling", it's a bit over a third of what a median German taxpayer is paying
Could you put the actual numbers in for that please, because to me that implies German tax rates of 120%? Is that across all forms of taxation, including local (the relevant one here!)
Apologies, brain glitch: it's half, not third. Also, I'm talking about the effective tax rate, not the marginal tax rate. Here are the numbers:
Median salary of a full time employee in the UK in 2023 (to match the German source): £34,963 [1]
Take home on that salary (after income tax and NI): £28,692 [2]
Effective tax rate on a median salary in the UK: ~18%
Median salary of a full time employee in Germany: €4,479 pm [3] or €53,748 per year
Take home: €34,281 [4]
Effective tax rate on a median salary in Germany: ~36%
Tax _rates_ are not that different, but the previous British governments really ramped up the tax-free allowance, which significantly reduces the effective tax rate.
[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
[2]: https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php
[3]: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Labour/Earnings/Earnings-E...
[4]: https://salaryaftertax.com/de/salary-calculator
Unfortunately, if an election were to be held today, the morons at Reform would have the greatest chance of winning, thanks to Starmer's ostrich syndrome, Corbyn dividing the Labour vote and the Tories being absolutely irrelevant after 15 years of continuous rule.
I'd be interested to know your view on how you think Britain should be governed and the extent to which you think others would agree. Serious question: can you offer a link to some such description?
Curtail immigration to pre-Brexit levels (with a strong focus on repatriating criminals and net tax non-contributing immigrant households), focus on the working class and devise a route for the UK to get back into the EU. Also refocus policing to focus on actual societal issues - child grooming and the rise of fundamentalist elements (as evidenced by the UAE banning their citizens from studying in the UK) - as opposed to elderly citizens tweets. Devalue the GBP to refund the NHS and roll back austerity while investing further into energy independence and removing bureaucratic red tape for consumer scale mitigation technologies.
Any party that does all of these will be guaranteed electoral wins for decades - I've seen the data back when I was a Tory. Problem is, these points are kryptonite to the very identity of either major party.
Thank you! I took a bet with myself on what you would say (if you did) and lost! Seems to me that the EU as presently constructed is a huge problem; on some other points I'd agree.
Disagree on being subsumed into the stagnating EU (far better to align with dynamic English-speaking economies with strong growth, like the US).
The EU customs union prevented the UK striking bilateral global free trade deals, and the legacy of EU over-regulation continues to curtail our innovation. The UK has a solid history of global trade and innovation, and it can acheive more if unshackled from the EU.
Austerity is absolutely necessary. If we keep giving the NHS above-inflation pay rises inline with what their staff demand, it would consume the entire annual excess wealth from the productive half of the economy in a matter of decades.
What we need are sensible and pragmatic policies like Reform's scaling back of net zero, for example. The cost of Ed Miliband's net zero measures are an estimated £4.5 trillion over the next 25 years, and a gross cost in excess of £7.6 trillion.
https://iea.org.uk/media/net-zero-could-cost-britain-billion...
That's more than our entire GDP. Just one example is the 20 year wind farm contracts that Miliband has set up, with a guaranteed energy cost that's nearly double the market rate for gas power (and then on top of that we need to pay for wind curtailment, grid upgrades and expensive backup power plants to cover low wind days).
https://x.com/ClaireCoutinho/status/2011335138987168173
We were promised that renewables would reduce energy bills. That was a total fiction, and the politicians are to blame.
Green energy could be a massive success story, and it could make our bills cheaper, but inept politicians from the Tories and Labour have focussed instead on vanity metrics.
Y'all got any of those bilateral trade deals yet? Brexit was done and dusted by 2019, it's been 7 years now. Where are those deals you're talking about? Where's your trade deal with English-speaking economies like the US? Heck, not even CANZ want to deal with you guys now.
On the NHS, of course, gut the only thing that's keeping the country sane. I can literally not keep count anymore of the number of skilled doctors and talent who have left the UK after years of practice because the pay was becoming untenable with current living needs. Remove the NHS and you might as well call yourself a client state of the US.
On renewables and net-zero, yes, what we need is more reliance on conventional fuels so that we can be ever more reliant on Russia and the Middle East and the US right? Meanwhile economies like China, India and even your brethren in Australia are racing to put in more renewables capacity because it is just so much more cheaper and efficient now. Those guys are forging real paths to energy independence, unlike you lot.
Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note. Wake me up when Hinckley Point C comes online.
We’ve struck an incredible 71 trade deals since Brexit. And there are more in the pipeline. We genuinely have a better global position now than we did in the customs union.
You think the NHS is “keeping us sane”. Two of my family members have been close to death waiting for an ambulance that never arrived / waiting in a crowded emergency waiting room with internal bleeding for hours. I pay about £10K per year in tax to the NHS for a service that is inferior to the private care I receive for approx £1K a year. The whole system is a shambles and gets worse every year. It underpays and mistreats its staff. It is inefficient.
On your point about renewables, I never claimed we needed more reliance on fossil fuels. I think we should be building more nuclear plants. France is a shining example of how to generate electricity. And then, once we have affordable battery storage (in a few years) we will be able to expand wind/solar in a sensible fashion without our stupid politicians making our energy bills the highest in the developed world.
> Renewables haven't been reducing your energy bills because you guys haven't been putting up anything of note.
The UK is #1 in Europe for wind capacity and #2 globally for offshore wind (behind China). And we have the highest energy bills in the developed world
I thought Corbyn started his own party? Surely they have time to figure out a way to look more competent than Starmer of all people
The more Corbyn performs, the more the Labour vote will get divided. The same balkanization happened with the Tories and Reform/UKIP.
Don’t. Just don’t.
There’s time for some party to sort themselves out before the next election is due (Aug 2029).
"This" ...?
You jest.
Meet the new government, same as the old government.
old government left them a £20bn funding hole to fix as they broke the rules on spending.
[flagged]
The onus is on you to suggest an alternative. Which countries not under it 'face the same problems'?
- A strong leader and a weak bureaucracy, so that your vote means something. - A good constitution that puts hard limits on what they can do, no boiling the frog with freedom of speech restrictions like Canada, Australia, and The UK
So basically an elected dictator with a functioning kill switch. Not a parade of faceless, temporary, unimportant prime ministers and elections which don't matter.
> your vote means something. - A good constitution that puts hard limits on what they can do
Quite a lot of serious problems arise when voters want things that are ""unconstitutional"". What if the voters want speech restrictions? That's a big part of why they're implemented, public/media campaigning for them.
> freedom of speech restrictions like Canada, Australia, and The UK
Unlike in the USA, where speaking out to, or disagreeing with, the president will get you removed from positions of authority?
(If you haven't already gathered, such bogus claims of free speech restrictions in other countries are distracting you from the reality of what is happening in your own country.)
This was an incredibly stupid comment, for the following reasons:
- I never mentioned the US
- I am not from the US
- I wasn't talking about the US
You had some axe to grind and you ground it false pretexts.
Do better.
So essentially Soviet democracy (at least as it was supposed to have worked in theory)?
How would you ensure that the strong leader wouldn't just bring in the Cheka as quickly as Lenin did?
We both have very different ideas of what "Soviet democracy" is :)
Theirs was a party democracy. Or are you referring to the actual soviets (workers councils) pre Bolshevik coup?
The actual soviets - they remained in operation for the first few years after the Bolshevik coup, and the revolutionary slogan "All power to the soviets!" gave Lenin a convenient figleaf for sidelining the elected Duma.
Of course, the soviets also proved unwilling to entirely subjugate themselves to Lenin's whims, and made a habit of choosing non-Bolshevik delegates. This culminated in the failed Kronstadt rebellion of 1921, after which any pretense at democracy was finally ended.
But - in theory - the soviet model sounds akin to what you're looking for. Being made up of delegates rather than representatives meant that the power of recall on demand was baked-in at every level, and power flowed upwards to a strong executive leadership.
In reality, it's hard to see how any sufficiently strong leader wouldn't be able to override or simply ignore any sort of kill switch or other constitutional arrangements that might happen to stand in their way - as has happened every time it's been tried in the past.
Ah you have misunderstood me.
I think the person elected should hold a lot of powers. Because otherwise, what is the point of voting if they're just going to leak it all to the civil service?
By "kill switch", I just mean you need a way to stop a leader with a lot of powers in exceptional circumstances - such as violation of a constitution.
One striking feature in the UK is the number of pubs that 'went on fire'.
The business is no longer viable, planning constraints (and often listed building constraints, which is protection for historical buildings, many pubs are very old) won't let them do anything else with the building so they sit empty until they spontaneously combust. Soon after they get demolished and regrow as a supermarket or apartments.
Worth noting the circle of "pubs that light on fire" and "flat roofed 1970s slum pub" almost entirely overlap. Nobodies setting fire to their thatched-roof pub from 1650 because of pub rates. They just change hands through the breweries every 3-4 years now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat-roofed_pub
https://news.sky.com/story/police-now-treating-fire-at-histo...
More profitable to convert the pub into a house and sell it that to actually run a pub.
Not quite that old, but plenty of historic pubs have gone on fire
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq87x44ey9po
This is the hidden tragedy of the "listed building" process. It's actually a sizeable burden on a property, because suddenly there's all these compliance requirements on how you do repairs and upkeep.
_Not_ doing repairs and upkeep is free.
Arson is very difficult to prove.
So the listing process preserves a building exactly as it is, sometimes for decades past its usefulness, until it collapses or burns down.
Great idea!
https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/personal-finance/finance-expe... shows how little pubs make per pint, very sad.
If anyone's curious about cask beer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ud_eTwY4nc&list=PLyDTS7ZG3z... is a very interesting youtube video series by The Craft Beer Channel.
My grandparents were publicans 70+ years ago. Even they they made very little on beer. All the profit was spirits and software drinks. Probably food as well now.
> software drinks
I knew java was good for something
Must have been muscle memory.
> All the profit was spirits and software drinks.
What are the margins on a Codeacola?
15 quid for a 25ml of whisky is ridiculous however.
Depends on the whisky.
You could buy a bottle of Teachers and serve yourself 25ml for 70p. You could buy a bottle of 30-year aged Macallan matured in sherry oak, and serve yourself 25ml for £160.
In a pub, you should be able to get a shot of blended whisky for about £4-6, and mass-market single malts (the kind you also find in supermarkets) for about £5-£10.
If you don't ask for a specific whisky, they should ask you which one you want, and/or say "is name alright?" and give you one of the cheap ones.
Depends how old the whisky/whiskey is.
> This is great for HMRC because it collects 10 times more than what the publican does
WTF.
Disclaimer - I don't drink at all. Still, when visiting London, I found going to Pubs (for the food mostly) a magical experience. When you enter such place, see that it's so so old, almost like a relic, like a monument, you really appreciate the place. My business trips led me to London centre so I saw the oldest ones.
People really struggle when given a link to a web site that isn't for them, huh.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBRtbdVquWF/
Neither American nor from the UK, but I knew what this was about because it's possible to go online and seek out information. Neat.
What I didn't do was become some entitled see you next tuesday and complain that a .com should be reserved for the american audience and the site should use a .co.uk – As if american businesses don't utilise foreign TLDs to create cutesy URLs. Maybe now is a good time to note that the fashionable .AI TLD belongs to Anguilla, a British territory.
The fuck is that insta video have to do with this topic?!
It's about exactly this phenomenon of people seeing things that aren't for them and complaining about it instead of moving on.
It’s for you sunshine.
Touché
No. It's when the web site doesn't say who it's for at all, that's when everybody struggles. And understandably so.
People only struggle because of a self-centered view that everything is supposed to be for them, and things that aren't for them are a weird exception. A reasonable person will realize that the fact that they don't understand any of what it's talking about means they're not the target audience, and move on (or poke around out of curiosity).
It's self-centered to want to communicate well?
It's just basic communications skills, and honestly decency, to describe what a thing is and who it's for.
Maybe someone who isn't the target audience still wants to learn about the thing? Which this site provides no way of doing. That's the problem. Why choose to be inaccessible like that, when it's so easy to add a couple of works and links?
> or poke around out of curiosity
You mean like by following links that are supplied? Because that's my complaint: there are no links.
> it's self-centered to want to communicate well? > > It's just basic communications skills, and honestly decency, to describe what a thing is and who it's for
What is the main country where dying pubs is such a big subject?
For f**ks sake I am not from UK yet it is easy to understand what it is all about from context and language. And I wasn't even aware of that tax change.
Pure US arrogance.
> What is the main country where dying pubs is such a big subject?
How should I know? That's the point. It might as easily be Ireland for all I know. Or maybe pubs are dying in Boston or something?
> For f*ks sake I am not from UK yet it is easy to understand what it is all about from context and language.
I'm happy you're so smart. Not all of us are so lucky, I guess.
> Pure US arrogance.
Who said anything about the US? You know there are people from a lot of other countries who speak English too? If your concern is arrogance, it seems like it's your own that perhaps needs to be dialed back a little.
Suggesting that communication can be clearer isn't a form of arrogance. To the contrary, it's something that comes out of empathy, identifying how communication could help more readers/listeners.
> Who said anything about the US?
I just read your account name.
If they're not American, then following their own logic they probably shouldn't be heavily implying that they are. It's misleading. They should give context in each and every comment so that we know.
Is it too much to ask for clear communication?
You know that in many parts of South America, most Europeans are considered just as gringo as Americans? As are Canadians, Australians, etc.
If you're going to critique, you should probably try to get your facts right first.
It's not for you.
It's self-centered to want others to communicate well to you when they aren't attempting to communicate with you in the first place.
You want to learn about the thing? You have the entire internet at your fingertips. Click search bar, type "pub rates," boom, thousands of news stories.
If you want to know what's going on, put in the bare minimum effort to find out. If you don't care then ignore it and move on.
> It's self-centered to want others to communicate well to you when they aren't attempting to communicate with you in the first place.
For private communication, of course.
For public communication? On a .com? It's simple politeness, courtesy, and respect. It's about not wasting other people's time unnecessarily. It's just decency. I'm amazed that you can be arguing against basic decency and respect here.
Basic decency and respect is either ignoring it or putting in the three seconds of effort it takes to understand it, instead of complaining to someone who isn't even attempting to talk to you.
Are you the sort of person who goes up to people in public and asks what they're talking about? Because that's what you're doing. Except you aren't even asking, you're just saying "if you're going to talk in public then you need to explain your topic so everyone can understand it."
Your time isn't being wasted. It doesn't take any more time to think "I don't know what this is talking about, oh well" than it does to think "this mentions England and Wales, I guess it's about some local issue there." Unless you're so self-centered that the very idea of a web site's purpose not being immediately comprehensible to you personally is such an affront that you have to put in time to complain about it.
This is just about elementary communication skills.
You're arguing that obfuscation is somehow a good thing. How does that make any sense?
When people communicate clearly, it makes the world a better place. People understand each other more easily. They don't have to waste as much time figuring things out. It's the golden rule, treating others the way you'd like to be treated.
If you don't understand that, I genuinely don't know what to tell you.
All communication requires some context.
You're on a web site with a vague title and a bunch of random links, and zero explanation on the front page for what it's all about. Do you also complain about that?
This is not obfuscation, this is aiming at a particular audience that you aren't a part of. This web site doesn't need an introduction so that people browsing from Kazakhstan can understand what it's about, any more than a calculus lecture needs to start with basic arithmetic to cover attendees with no math background.
You're doing the internet equivalent of yelling at people to speak English when they're having a conversation in another language. It's as uncouth here as it is there.
> All communication requires some context.
Right! Which is why you should give that context when you create something for public consumption. Get it now?
> You're on a web site with a vague title and a bunch of random links, and zero explanation on the front page for what it's all about. Do you also complain about that?
Yes actually. HN has a terrible design for new visitors. Why would I defend that? HN is known for a lot of things, but its design is not one of them.
> You're doing the internet equivalent of yelling at people to speak English when they're having a conversation in another language. It's as uncouth here as it is there.
No, I'm doing the internet equivalent of criticizing where someone is giving a public lecture but refuses to give it a sufficiently meaningful title so people know whether or not they want to attend it.
This is a public website meant for public consumption. Not some private communication I'm trying to butt into.
You seem to be trying to defend some kind of gatekeeping-through-obscurity, where new potentially interested visitors ought to be made confused and have to "work" to figure things out. Why would anyone do that intentionally, or defend that? It's just rude and thoughtless.
You're acting as though you're being kept out, because you expect everything you see to cater to you. You're not being kept out, you're just not being explicitly invited in.
"...meant for public consumption." Which public? Not one which includes you! But you insist that you must be part of the group it's meant for.
> Maybe someone who isn't the target audience still wants to learn about the thing
This is fair enough, but they don't make it too hard -- there's an About page, where the first line mentions England and Wales and the rest of the page makes it clear that the issue is about rate increases. Googling something like "england pub rate increases" will get you the rest of the way if you're interested.
(I think us non-Americans sometimes go a bit far with the whole "finally you're tasting some of your own medicine, Yanks!" thing, and I'm sorry some people are being aggressive. But I don't think this site is as opaque as you're suggesting, nor that it makes any more assumptions about its audience than lots of US-based sites do. They're targeting locals, and I think it's fine for a home page to start talking to its intended audience immediately rather than wasting space on an introduction for outsiders.)
Remember that every time you read 'national' today and it means 'US'.
Except that as a english speaking non american, this happens literally all the time with ecommerce?
It's not until I get to checkout I realise they do not ship to my country or want to deal with me.
International shipping is an entirely different subject. You can assume that .com is American unless otherwise indicated, and that you'll need to check shipping policies. Just like as an American, when I go to a .co.uk ecommerce site, I have to check whether they ship to the US.
> You can assume that .com is American unless otherwise
Why?
American exceptionalism.
Because the internet was invented in America so it's the only country where a country suffix was never used from the start of its popularity.
I'm not saying this is good or bad or justified or not, just saying what the conventions are.
But there have never been a convention that .com was reserved to the US market.
co.uk, com.au, com.mx, com.my and co.jp exist for example, but I have never heard of a co.fr, com.it or co.de or org.dk
Bottom line: there is no real convention
> Because the internet was invented in America
And the web by a Brit working in Switzerland. It all runs on Chinese hardware with software written by people (and their dogs) from every nation on earth.
The point, if there is one, is buried in the details.
What does any of that have to do with anything? The subject is DNS names.
Here, read the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
> Because the internet was invented in America so it's the only country where a country suffix was never used from the start of its popularity.
I expect some countries like the UK and Australia to use something like `co.uk`. I expect many countries to use their own top-level domain. I do not assume that some `.com` website is American.
Is “the only” based on experience? How many websites from how many countries have you come across?
> I'm not saying this is good or bad or justified or not, just saying what the conventions are.
Do people associate `.com` with “company”? Or just “regular website”? Are people even stopped from making a `.com` if they don’t have a “company”?
https://www.paiste.com/
Is this Swiss business allowed to use `.com` because they have offices in the US of A?
> I do not assume that some `.com` website is American.
If it's clearly local to somewhere (news, shopping, etc.) as opposed to global or a webapp or something, and doesn't say it's specific to any other country, then yes people generally assume it's American.
Because when sites are intended for audiences in other countries, they usually use a country-specific TLD. Which, for historical reasons, never became a convention in the US since it's where the Internet was invented.
If you haven't noticed that this is a clear pattern, I don't know what to tell you.
If it is a business, people expect the .com is the global/international/headquarters address, not an us specific one per se. Some will have other country codes mostly to avoid phishing but some only redirect it to a subpath on the com website to handle regionalities/languages.
Random examples of foreign brands/companys in completely different industries: https://www.nestle.com is the "global" address of Nestle, a Swiss company. Mitsubushi, a japanes company uses https://www.mitsubishi.com with a /ja subpath to handle japanese language. The FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association which was founded in Paris, France and is know headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, uses fifa.com as its main domain despite having several regional office accross the globe but none in the US.
Honestly, unless you're going to say you're confused about .net and .io TLDs this comes across as willfully weaponised naivety.
.com means .company.
USAmerican have .us, i don't need a reason why you would need to claim that .com is USAmerican, unless you live in a very small bubble
This is fascinating. How does "pub" not immediately scream British?
When I read stories I feel I can pick out US and UK instantly:
> Everyone is freaking out about ... - American
> ... has been Sacked from - British
> They negotiated a total sum of ... - British
> The ... is totally insane - American
> How does "pub" not immediately scream British?
Maybe it screams "not American", but the rest of the Commonwealth does exist, you know. Some of us are standing right here.
> .. that's when everybody struggles.
That's not true though, is it?
Classic American exceptionalism.
Interest in context on "government pub rates". New tax scheme?
Existing tax. Proposed new calculation for the "value" of business property, disproportionately affecting pubs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8e57dexly1o
> In her November Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves scaled back business rate discounts that have been in force since the pandemic from 75% to 40% - and announced that there would be no discount at all from April. That, combined with big upward adjustments to rateable values of pub premises, left landlords with the prospect of much higher rates bills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_rates_in_England
> Properties are assessed in a rating list with a rateable value, a valuation of their annual rental value on a fixed valuation date using assumptions fixed by statute. Rating lists are created and maintained by the Valuation Office Agency, a UK government executive agency.
Ah, interesting. So it sounds like the tax roughly scales with property value (or size). And pubs are probably a "poor use of land" because the revenue per square foot is not particularly high?
Yes. It scales with a government agency's estimate of the property's annual rent (even if you own it), based on market rates in the area over the past two years, which they then scale up/down based on floorspace and how dilapidated the building is.
You pay a percentage of the hypothetical rent as tax. There is a lower rate if you're a small business, and there are also tax reliefs for various reasons (charity, partial building occupation, etc.)
But pubs have been in trouble for quite some time: https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Article/2025/05/27/numbe...
Pubs have high costs, small margins and customers are extremely price-sensitive. What pubs are generally asking for is more types of relief, because what we tend to see is pubs close, people in the area become more isolated, and the building remains empty for years thereafter. [] Pubs appreciated the post-COVID relief, but tax rates are about to shoot up.
[] fun fact: if the building is vacant, its landlord must pay rates as if it's 100% occupied. Hence this brazen scheme where a man puts a snail farm in every room so you can pay the rates of an agricultural enterprise: https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/04/...
But how does the "snail farm" scheme compare with the "place of worship" scheme?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/23/ye-of-littl...
This is the opposite of the Free House in Nelson, NZ; a pub in a former church.
https://thefreehouse.co.nz
Interesting how punitive the tax structure is on vacant buildings. On the one hand, harsh for the landlord. On the other hand, encourages lower rent to get the space occupied and reduce blight.
... was that a real guardian article, or just an elaborate prank built around the phrase "shell company"?
Pubs are dying. Have been for years.
Many deaths were postponed because their taxes were reduced due to Covid. Those taxes are now returning to normal levels. This will result in a glut of deaths, as pubs that were just hanging on go under.
The policy question is, basically, do we want to subsidize pubs because they're part of our national culture, even though we don't use them nearly as much as we used to?
"Does Britain really need?" has been responsible for the gutting of so much of what used to make Britain a nice place to live over the last 20 years. You can say she same about public libraries, local bus routes, civic architecture, arts funding, youth services, maintenance budgets. The damage has been incalculable.
You won't find any argument from me on all those other things.
But pubs are a weird place to draw the line.
Every one of them individually seems like a weird place to draw the line. Social fabric and the ties that bond matter.
Probably because the line keeps getting moved. There's a lot of pressure to build housing with little to no consideration of community, either existing or new.
Just get rid of all the third spaces in an area and turn it into a lifeless residential suburb or something. Once pubs are gone it'll be something else.
The government has decided that they know what’s good for you better for you than you do. So they tax alcohol at incredibly high rates.
Without this more pubs could exist. So I don’t think it’s a case of subsidising as much as removing the disincentive.
While agreeing totally with your sentiment it's a fact that alcohol (the raison d'etre for pubs existing at present unless their business model changes) is classed as a Group 1 carcinogen. 'Consuming alcohol increases the risk of developing at least 7 types of cancer;, https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/... etc., We've all got to die but some ways are nastier than others.
I’m not familiar with the UK, but is the tax on alcohol at pubs higher than at a store? My general understanding was that people have just shopped visiting pubs for other reasons - like diluted drinks, crappy food, loud music, etc.
People stop visiting crappy pubs if they have diluted drinks (quite rare, UK is very strict about being served exact alcohol measures, there is very little free pouring in the UK and many people would spot other drinks being diluted), crappy food (sadly all too common), loud music (age related), etc.
But not many pubs are crappy in these respects.
The main reasons why fewer people are visiting average or good pubs are: * cost of living is going up so many people have less disposable income * the younger generations are much less interested in alcohol than previous generations
The latter point is an interesting one. There are two wildly different drivers for this that I’ve witnessed.
Many of the under 25s now either don’t drink alcohol at all, or only drink a fraction of what their elders did. Many prefer to just go to the gym instead (which is the millenials third space).
On the flip side, some of the children of my friends and family say that alcohol in pubs is just too expensive, so they get their kicks from recreational drugs like weed or ket.
The number of people who have the disposable income to go to the pub regularly is falling in the UK, and the mainstay of the pub was often the working class and they are being priced out by everything getting more expensive.
There aren’t enough people with enough disposable income to weather the storms and keep going to the pub regardless, and therefore pubs (in general) are in deep trouble.
There's competition, too. Even if everything else remained the same, you'd expect more entertainment options to result in fewer pub visits.
> is the tax on alcohol at pubs higher than at a store?
No, but the tax on food - which is where a lot of money lies, for most pubs in this day and age - is. Also, business rates end up being significantly higher per unit of alcohol sold. This means stores can keep alcohol prices very low (even under cost, as a promotional item).
Add to that that alcohol consumption rates are decreasing overall, sugar tax affecting non-alcoholic drinks, energy prices skyrocketing, etc.
Bars and pubs aren't really competing against the store or restaurants, they're competing against you drinking alone or with only close friends. If stepping in to have a beer and shoot the shit would cost a significant chunk of a day's wages, you just won't do it, but if I can buy more beer with an hours wages than I can drink in an hour, it's not a bad time.
Weatherspoons charge under £3 for a pint in town. That's 15 minutes at minimum wage.
Beer was far more expensive 25 years ago - £1.60 in 2000 in the student pub when I first started buying my own beer, that was about half an hour at minimum wage.
On the cost side: Wages are higher, energy costs more, rent is higher (because if the pub can't operate the owner can get planning permission to convert it to a private dwelling and sell it for £600k rather than making £12k a year in rent)
On the demand side: People are healthier and drink less. It's nowhere near as acceptable to go out for a few pints at lunch time. People can't drive to a rural pub.
> Weatherspoons charge under £3 for a pint in town. That's 15 minutes at minimum wage.
Yeah but then you've to drink at spoons.
The thing is, they've purchased so many historic pubs, that if you refuse to drink at one that's a choice. I'm not saying that's a terrible choice, but it's a choice that bars you from an awful lot of pubs.
isn't weatherspoons like getting drunk at applebees basically? comparing that to a "pub" is kinda laughable
Not really. Applebee’s is still too food oriented.
Wetherspoons are definitely pubs. They just have a reputation for cheap drinks and cheap meals. But there’s still a significant proportion of people who go there for drinks only.
It’s more like a drinking warehouse with carpet on the floor and a menu of mostly beige food than a larger version of a cosy country pub with a roaring fire and a varied food menu sometimes involving vegetables that have not been deep fried.
It's the VA for survivors of the 1980s as it doesn't allow music or TV inside, so tends to get ignored by the soccer followers of a weekend and the younger generation entirely.
TBF their curry club and other food specials are basically subsidising old bachelors to the point of being an ersatz social service @ £8.45 to £11.45, including a drink, for 12 hours of service every Thursday.
https://thewetherspoonsmenu.uk/wetherspoons-curry-club-menu/
Generally speaking, its best described as the RyanAir of pubs. It gets you there, cheaply, but the juice may not be worth the squeeze in terms of ambience and clientele.
no music or tv? that sounds fucked... why don't ppl just drink in a park? iirc public drinking is actually legal in the uk?
(I know in some countries it's actually not -- Bratislava being one surprising example, though some cops were really chill when I was like hey sorry, I thought this was allowed, it's cold out so I bought a pounder and I wanted to warm up on the way to my hostel I'm not trying to bother anyone... though maybe they may have been letting me slide mostly because they were amused by what a pounder is once I defined it)
(A pounder is a big can of beer that got it's nickname because American frat bros will "pound" (chug) it to get very drunk quickly in places where the sales of beer are looser than liquor)
Isn’t it a pounder because it’s 16oz (US fluid ounces) which is a (US) pound?
(Note a US pint is about 474ml compared to the UK pint which is 568ml).
Of course US fluid ounces are a different size to UK (Imperial) fluid ounces. Plus the UK has 20 (Imperial) fluid ounces in a UK pint whilst the US has 16 (US) fluid ounces in a US pint.
How does it go? “A pint’s a pound the whole world around, except the UK where a pint of water is a pound and a quarter.”
As for drinking in a park, it is either something you do in the height of summer, or something you do if you are a tramp. There’s not much middle ground.
I have been to a nice ones, like the one in Exeter (but the owner is from there so that figures); I forgot the other two that were nice. Not many nice ones but they do exist.
That is spoons though, most pubs are 3-4x that
Most expensive pint I've paid round here was £6, so pubs are about 2x that - about half hour of adult minimum wage, same as spoons charged 25 years ago.
So how do spoons make a profit?
The main difference that I see is that they buy cheap properties and thus don't have crushing rents.
What this page doesn't show is the increase in rent for these buildings.
One thing I've heard is that they have consistent high throughput so they will buy beer that's closer to expiry and hence cheaper, because they know people will drink it before it goes off.
Dunno how much of an effect that is, it can only account for so much.
yeh that's what I always hear, but I don't know if its just an urban legend. I guess the fact that they buy in massive bulk also helps
> So how do spoons make a profit?
Think about the price of a keg of beer - much cheaper/pint than buying beer at a pub or from anywhere else in a smaller size. Very high-volume customers have contracts with distributors that can get them even better deals, sometimes significantly better.
Alcohol is pretty much always sold at a huge markup though - 4-5x is standard in the US. UK regulation might be different, but it's likely that the majority of costs in the pub business are in insurance and licensing rather than alcohol and rent.
To be fair actually £6 a pint does sound more like it, I think I'm getting confused with rounds (so I most often spend £10-£12, but I'm buying two pints)
3-4x £3 a pint? That's £9-£12 which is super expensive - I would say most places are in the £6-£8 region.
Yeh responded to another comment saying the same thing, Im getting confused with rounds. So I am spending £9-£12, but thats buying two pints
Maybe spoons is killing all the pubs.
> ...do we want to subsidize pubs...
Reducing taxes are not subsidizes. Subsidizes are when the government gives tax money to a business, not when they take a little less from a business.
People might think it's the same equation, but the difference in reality is enormous for the economy.
It's hardly a subsidy if it's the removal of a tax that will go away entirely if the business is shuttered. This is frankly an awful framing. A well designed tax taxes a small portion of the business' margin. If the business has small margins, the tax is proportionately small. The tax in question is one that applies regardless of whether the business is making any money, and hence seems to have the express purpose of killing businesses.
Lower taxes is not subsidising a business.
It is, when it gets a favourable treatment over other businesses
> In her November Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves scaled back business rate discounts that have been in force since the pandemic from 75% to 40% - and announced that there would be no discount at all from April.
That, combined with big upward adjustments to rateable values of pub premises, left landlords with the prospect of much higher rates bills.
Changes to property taxes on business premises.
Nearest pub
2023 Rateable Value £13,800
2026 Rateable Value £12,250
Change -£3,300(-23.9%)
I guess "no" would be the answer then.
Nearest town has 3 pubs where rates are going down significantly and 4 where they're going up. I wonder why, is it that the previous setup was unfair to those who are seeing their rates going down?
The pub I do go to each week is seeing rates going up +£3,300. That's not as big an impact from yet another inflation busting minimum wage increase.
However the much bigger concern is that people will be scared to drive there. Currently you can drive there, have a pint, and then go home, and be confident you're not triggering the limit. They're reducing this limit, which means no more trip to the pub.
I'm sure it's fine in big cities where people live in walking distance.
It's important to separate the spirit of this from the spirits of it.
Pubs as social gathering places are critical to exist and keep alive.
Drinking neurotoxins that have a lot of destruction and damage, maybe not so much.
In the UK pubs are extremely different as well than the US. This site is for the UK, since it's asking for a postal code, among other signs. The UK also I believe has last call at 11 PM, which helps fuel the binge drinking before 11 PM and the wild public afterwards. In North America, last call for alcohol can be 1-3 AM, and people generally aren't in a rush to fuel up to blast off.
Last call at 11pm stopped being a blanket rule in 2003. The Licensing Act 2003 (England and Wales) abolished strict closing times.
Most pubs now have much longer hours (some even 24/7) although they choose their opening hours based on how busy they are or think they will be. The local councils will take into account local considerations and limit individual pubs as they see fit.
Appreciate the clarification. My awareness was around soccer games.
The UK is just weird about that.
Decades of hooliganism (mostly a thing of the past thankfully) has meant that you can't be in possession of alcohol within view of the pitch in the top 5 tiers in the UK. (And by the 5th tier you're looking at matches that have attendances anywhere down to 400 or so, although some clubs in the 5th tier still manage to attract 10000 fans to home games).
This spills out into the local community around stadiums too. Many pubs really close to the ground will have extra restrictions on matchdays, that's probably what you've experienced. But that's not just the UK, I remember going to a River Plate game in Buenos Aires 20 years ago and being amazed that on match days there was no alcohol served within a mile of the stadium or some such rule.
I've been to Champions League games in the UK sponsored by a variety of alcoholic drink companies and they weren't serving alcohol anywhere in the stadium (well, I guess they still do in the hospitality sections).
Even when the stadiums do serve alcohol they do strange things like stopping serving as the second half kicks off. As someone who wants to watch all of the football I've paid to go see it's a very odd thing getting a pint at half time and drinking it in under 10 minutes in order to be back to the stands in time for the second half to kick off. Us Brits just accept it and deal with it.
Compare that to watching rugby or cricket in the UK where you have no fan segregation and alcohol allowed at the seats.
It's also much more relaxed at the lower tiers of UK football. I've watched a few Dulwich Hamlet games with a friend and they allow to bring your own beers in (may have changed, haven't been for a few years), and sometimes have a "pay what you want" admission price.
Wherever I go in the UK I try and keep a look out for a local game, even if the football is terrible the people watching is often amazing and worth the admission price alone.
No alcohol and physical segregation at the seats seems quite foreign compared to maybe just being able to handle one’s self around alcohol.
It’s one way to say hooliganism in the past I guess.
There will always be idiots, regardless of whether alcohol is involved or not, but I'm talking about the levels of hooliganism that were rife in the 80s and 90s, the things that got alcohol banned (when in view of the pitch) at football matches.
That level of hooliganism at games and around the stadiums is a mostly a thing of the past.
The days of open brawls in the stands that you saw in the 80s/90s are gone, you just get the occasional bit of jostling nowadays if that. (I used to do stewarding back in the late 90s and saw a lot of the bad side of things.)
The various "firms" that would meet up for their arranged pre-match fight have dwindled to almost nothing and now there is little fear for away fans walking to/from games. It used to be quite a scary prospect depending on the ground visited.
However, successive UK Governments have repeatedly kicked the can down the road when considering reversing the 1985 ban that stopped people having a drink in view of the pitch.
More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_in_association_footbal...
I don't think any UK political party has the bottle (pun intended) to reintroduce it, it would be a pretty divisive proposal and most political parties try to steer well clear of such things in today's politics.
Things are starting to change though. At some grounds you do have home and away fans mixing in the concourses (the Putney End of Fulham's ground for example) but most grounds in the top tiers are designed to keep home and away fans apart as much as possible.
Funny enough I worked with an old timer back in Charleston, SC which historically had no regulated last call. During his drinking years they passed a law requiring an 0200 closing time which, as he put it, was a terrible idea because it put all the drunks out on the street at the same time causing joint chaos. In his view having no official close meant folks naturally filtered out over time as they were sated. Seems any hard stop causes trouble?
Sometimes you have to try stuff to find out the unintended consequences. Not everything can be analysed/foreseen/predicted.
Hopefully they were able to see the negative effect, realise the mistake and reverse the decision.
Stopping serving at one hour didn’t have to mean closing at the same time.
How do you imagine this playing out? People don't get the alcohol they want anymore -> no more orders -> No more business -> Not worth it for the owner
Oh, nothing to imagine..
It’s already a reality in many places.
Last call at 2, people filter out by 3, instead of being pushed outside instantly.
Some sporting events don’t sell alcohol the last quarter, period, etc.
11PM is pretty standard but it varies quite a lot. Some places can be open much later, it depends on what the local council will license.
It's interesting, I was hoping it would be based on more than just the rates change though. Maybe combined with Google "how busy is this place" data, for example.
Agreed. Currently it reckons that the most-fucked pub in my area is the largest pub within walking distance from a major premier league football stadium.
But it's always busy even out of season, and absolutely heaving on match days. I'd be surprised if a single match day's profits weren't sufficient to cover the additional tax for the year.
Personally, I'll continue to offer my enthusiastic support to my much smaller, friendlier local even though it's facing only a tiny tax increase by comparison.
Whilst you make a good point, the true purpose of this site it to draw attention to the new outrageous tax bills faced by pubs; many of which are going under and are a real loss to the communities they serve.
brilliant website which manages to convey classic British humour on a classically British topic. Also shines much needed light on the very serious challenges independent British Pubs are undergoing - these are essential social institutions, social coherence is damaged every time one of these shut down.
I like how the status values could be used as labels of economic wellbeing for people, too:
Stealing this for error logging levels
The bristol stool scale also works well. Although that’s better for sprint planning maybe..
I live in south Bristol where the “Bristol stool scale” and the “pubs that need your help” overlap distressingly.
Thanks for pointing out the stool scale. I went from "hahaha I'm sure this some kind of 'how shitty stuff is'" to "let me see how it works" to "oh, it's actually a useful medical chart" lol
so...you got me. thinking it might have something to do with out worn the stools in your pub are. nope it's just, you know, stool.
s/Somehow/Possibly/g haha but I like that idea!
Kinda wish there was some way to quickly scroll through the pages... Also data seems to be different when ordered by different values?
When ordered by RV£ there are 43703 entries with data. Most negative RV£ change is -£137,500 for 33 Main Road
When ordered by RV% there are 43303 entries with data. Most negative RV% change is -87.0% for PAVILLION HOTEL
Seems fixed now. I wonder if it was related to the number of entries with nulls in one of those two fields (but not necessarily both at the same time).
It shows three pubs very near me. Two of those actually closed several years ago.
The third is listed under an old name, it changed hands and changed names years ago.
it is rated: "The (FPI) score of 22 means this pub is classified as “Feeling It”"
For a dumb american, what is a 'pub rate'?
A tax based on property value.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgjwgzwe2eyo
I would love to know why it is unrealized gains is such a popular property tax strategy.
I’d love to know why people are happy with others making a fortune not through hard work, but through buying land and letting others hard work increase its value.
In the case of these pubs it sounds like they’re being priced out of the area through no fault of their own while trying to run an honest business so I don’t quite follow your logic here…
Rates are based (at least in principle) on the rental value of the building, making the gain concept irrelevant. The rent would be the same.
I didn't expect this website would double as an intelligence test.
Access to this site has been blocked by the Protective DNS Service of the UK National Cyber Security Centre via CloudFlare
This might be the single most British website on the internet.
I wonder if there's an equivalent use case in the US.
For anyone else who entered a US zip code and was confused by the ‘invalid zip code’ error: this is UK only.
your first clue might have been that it does not say "zip code" in either the field label or the error message, it says "postcode".
The site has since changed the content from when I made the comment. It used to say zip code in the label and error.
Australia and NZ have postcodes, too.
If they had made this a .co.uk rather than a .com, there would be no confusion.
I think of postal code as a generic, international form of the concept, not tied to a location.
Or the term "pub." In the US it's much more usual to say "bar." Maybe "tavern" but that sounds rather dated to my ear.
When I lived in the PNW people used the word pub more than bar.
My sense is that it is an affectation meant to indicate an aspiration to something more than a bar (and its coarse patrons).
That’s because everybody up there thinks that liking soccer makes them English.
"Bar" is certainly the catch-all term in the U.S., but "pub" is also very widely understood to refer to a specific type of bar, especially (but not limited to) bars deliberately styled as Irish or British pubs.
Along a similar note, I hate when a Bar is labelled as a "Pub" and doesn't serve food. IMO, in the US, if it's labelled a "pub" it should serve food.
Come to Virginia, where it's outright illegal for any establishment serving alcohol to not also serve food (and not only must food be served, it must account for at least 45% of revenue).
Do they make you order food with every round of drinks? I remember hearing about places like that from my dad, and it seems it would have worked better in the era of cheap drinks/low built-in alcohol taxes.
I went to college in a county that only allowed alcohol sales with food for clubs (think: country clubs). So, of course, the restaurant that I worked for created its own club. You simply filled out your name (and maybe phone number, I don't remember) on a piece of paper when you ordered your drink.
They easy way would be to do like in some parts of Spain, for every drink you receive a tapa.
That way it can be considered that the food is part of the price of the drink.
There just aren't bars as proper bars. There are only bars in restaurants, where they can count on actual diners to buy plenty of food.
I'm nut sure I'd go that far... it's just I expect a "Pub" to include pub food.
every now and then you'll find a public house or similarly named
"Pub" is a fairly common term throughout the world. But "pub that needs you" made it pretty obvious that it was about pubs in England.
Did it? I put my postcode in and got nothing. It took browsing the map to discover it had no results for Scotland at all.
Yes. Being on the other side of the world, I've only ever heard of efforts to save English pubs. Thus, without more details, one knows that is what is being referred to. Perhaps Scotland has the same kind of movement happening at the local level, but something on a global website implies global context.
Being on the other side of the world, I had never heard of efforts to save English pubs, so that doesn’t sound like a global context at all.
Maybe not so much active efforts to save them, but the mass lamentation around the collapse of the industry that has been going on for several decades. What efforts there are to save them is merely an extension of that.
Much the same thing has happened here too (the local watering holes struggling and failing, that is), but that isn't even considered newsworthy at the local level, let alone a message that has spread far and wide. English pubs, for whatever reason, are the only ones that have consistently caught grander attention.
But there will always be someone living under a rock, as they say.
The website is for England and Wales.
Wales comes along with England due to how their legal framework is setup. It is a good technical point you raise, but for all intents and purposes within the context they are the same place.
And yet it is the one part of the UK that actually has a language that is spoken by a non-trivial percentage of the population (unlike NI or Scotland where a tiny percentage can speak their Celtic tongue)
> And yet it is the one part of the UK that actually has a language that is spoken by a non-trivial percentage of the population
98% of the UK population can speak English, so I'm not sure where you got that idea. Clearly every part (maybe some small, uncelebrated village breaks the rule) of the UK has a language spoken by virtually the entire population of that region.
> (unlike NI or Scotland where a tiny percentage can speak their Celtic tongue)
If you are struggling to say that England is the only country in the UK that sees most of its population still speak the language of its ancestral roots, then I suppose that's true, but when English is the most commonly used natural language across the entire world I'm not sure that is much of a feat.
What does any of this have to do with the discussion at hand?
Are you joking? They meant Wales, 27.7% of the population of Wales speak Welsh (and yes most of them English too).
Wales/Welsh doesn’t jive under the conditions set. Perhaps you missed "non-trivial percentage"? Outer Hebrides is a part of the UK where ~50% of its residents speak Scottish, never mind England and its English dominance, so clearly ~30% is still considered within trivial range. Otherwise "the one part" doesn't work; seeing many parts of the UK fit the bill.
I doubt most people would bother to think about that detail.
Silly me, I entered an Austrian zip code out of principle. Did not expect it to work, though, of course.
Seems to be England only. No results for Edinburgh.
I see results on both sides of the border here, Wales and England.
Business rates are a devolved matter, Scotland set their own rates.
Any plans to release the code? Would be nice to allow others to do something similar for their local pubs.
Seems to be England only.
Yeah, they could reduce confusion by changing "the government" to "the UK government."
If Americans did the same it would be great
This is also a problem that exists within countries. My RSS feed is littered with Canadian independent (national) news agencies not defining what municipality article headlines relate to. E.g. "Mayor pushes back against province on xyz issue". Okay, that might be huge news for Timmins Ontario , but maybe BAU for Toronto. Even skimming the lead paragraph doesn't define the city often.
*Editting with a point: Perhaps everyone assumes a local audience.
Americans, hm? I see what you did there.
Fine, fine. North Americans.
So just the three of us up here - Mexico/US/Canada?
Good luck. Americans won't even differentiate Washington State and Washington D.C. Even the AP guidelines say that "Washington" is ubiquitous shorthand for "Washington D.C." and recommends against shortening it to "D.C."
The most hilarious thing is that I learned recently that when they applied to be a state, the people from WA requested to be the state of Columbia. But a Kentucky rep said that would be too easily confused with the District of Columbia, and Congress changed it to Washington.
> when they applied to be a state, the people from WA
Western Australia?
Yes. Little known fact, it was renamed Washington by Congress.
Americans do! If you are west of the Rockies, Washington resolves to the west. If you are east, it’s DC, and you have to say “you know, where Nirvana is from.”
Don’t get me started on east coast dumdums pronouncing Oregon as “Orry-gone.”
Broken - getting `ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR` when trying to open it in Chrome
What is a pub? A place to drink in UK? What is a pub rate?
UK only
England & Wales only. The website is a response to new business rates (taxes) arriving this year.
Scotland, Northern Ireland & the rest of the world play by different rules.
nice concept, but my 'nearest' was miles away and not really a pub. Hmm.
Title could use (in Britain)
Doesnt work in Europe.
It's a UK issue / website. Should've been made more clear and used a .co.uk domain, imo.
Nobody tells US-only websites to use a .us domain.
I'll tell my ISP to use a .net shall I?
Cool! Would be nice to include all world postal codes and addresses.
The one near me which is absolutely fucked, as far as I'm concerned, deserves it.
Fighty customers, crap beer, odd opening hours, and half their food menu is off ("sorry mate, we've got no cheese"). Oh, and now their credit card terminal prompts customers for a tip!
I love a good pub, but most are crap.
Near me, the (nice but always too busy) Old Dairy is getting a cut, and the (mediocre Arsenal fan packed) Bank of Friendship and Arsenal Tavern are getting obliterated. God exists, and he supports Spurs!
what is a "rateable value" here?
Property tax valuation.
Ironically, the pub it suggested near me that was the most fucked closed down years ago (it's not just them, quite a few databases don't know that), so yeah, good call.
Same here, at least three nearby no longer exist and are now flats already.
I guess prepare for an acceleration of the same.
The Farmer's Dog pub is listed as fucked, maybe this site could get a shout-out on Clarkson's Farm. The difficulty of doing business in the UK is a common theme on his show.
Give tax breaks to tv personalities who buy farms as tax dodges and it has to be paid for by someone else.
The nearest "absolutely fucked" pub to me hasn't existed since 2008. I'd say they have bigger problems than a rates increase.
They do acknowledge this on the site
> Based on VOA data (Nov 2025) which is often inaccurate. Many pubs have also closed since then.
I mean alcohol is the worst drug: it’s highly addictive, toxic to the body, one of the few drugs with potentially fatal withdrawal, and a major driver of violence, accidents, and family breakdown. Unlike most drugs, it seriously harms people beyond the user — and because it’s legal, cheap, and socially normalised, its damage happens on a massive scale.
Sooooo yes happy with pubs closures.
I agree until your last sentence. Pubs closing can be devastating.
Pubs are often the centre of a community, especially small ones. Not even small towns. Traditionally they have been centered around drinking, but this is changing. Much like libraries had to adapt to falling reading rates, pubs have had to adapt to falling alcohol consumption.
The hard part of this is that food and wage costs are often covered by alcohol costs, though where I'm from the government has exercised vice taxes to make this less tenable. More customers doesn't necessarily mean that much more profit, for a host of reasons.
I hope pubs find a way forward.
Source for my rambling: worked in and managed pubs for a decade. They're not just for heavy drinkers.
Having watched two alcoholic family members die horribly, spurred on by functioning alcoholic friends whos only social interaction is at the pub through habit only, fuck 'em. Let them die.
We need better social spaces which do not have the token cost of drinks to use.
Ok so because your family were alcoholics nobody should have a space to drink? What an absurd thing to say.
No I'm saying we have a social problem with alcohol in this country and brush it under the table as a cultural identity thing.
Its extremely hard to cope with how bleak life is in the UK without frequent intoxication (source: abandoned the uk, no longer drink at all)
Fair. That's what they invented planes for :)
somehow my local, which is pretty dodgy, is doing fine. I need to driving distance to find one thats fucked, and Im not even in a well funded area
Just getting a totally black map with anonymous coloured dots on both chrome and Firefox. The pub may or may not be fucked, but the website is.
(Yes I tried disabling all the dark settings, no difference)
Find an English pub that needs you.
Not true, it also covers pubs in Wales
Yeah, I have NO clue what this site is even about.
It is a "use it or lose it" style campaign by the looks of it.
Lots of Pubs in the UK are closing down in recent years. Pubs have traditionally been a big part of socialising in the UK. I don't drink anymore so I don't bother unless I am having a pub lunch on a Friday.
Can't you drink non-alcoholic beverage? If the point is socialising, alcohol is not a requirement.
I know a lot of bars in my area also are places to play board games nowadays.
> Can't you drink non-alcoholic beverage? If the point is socialising, alcohol is not a requirement.
It kinda is though depending on who you go to the bar with.
I went to the bar to get fucked up, a lot of my career I've worked in toxic workplaces, so have stressful day and work and then hit the bar.
Most of my mates at the time were heavy drinkers. We are talking about people that would have 6 beers and the bar and have a bottle of Rioja when they get home. Some of these dudes have turned out to be scumbags.
Once I stopped drinking, I never spoke to them again. Not once. So these people weren't my real friends.
> I know a lot of bars in my area also are places to play board games nowadays.
TBH, when I see people playing board games other than like Chess or Draughts as adults (and there are not children present), I just find it embarrassing like it is like some child day care. I appreciate it is a "me" problem, but I can't stand it.
The UK government hates its populace, particularly its natives. Downvote all you want.
Would be much more helpful if it indicated literally anywhere on the homepage that this was specific to the UK.
Being a .com as opposed to a .co.uk, you can't even tell from the domain.
No. It was obvious from the title that this was about the UK, and also why should they - American sites don't indicate this either, and they have no monopoly on the language.
.com has meant commercial since the 90s so how about all US only sites use .us?
I think it's as simple as the fact that for a throwaway site it's considerably cheaper to get a .com domain than it is a domain that ends in .uk
Sure. So then just add a couple of extra words to the homepage to make it clear? It's not that hard, and saves visitors a lot of time from hunting around trying to figure it out.
There are plenty of US sites that make no mention of being US specific, I feel like this is well deserved
The US is the center of the world though. There are privileges to that like assuming the world revolves around you.
For now at least, empires fall, so do superpowers.
There is a reason the prime meridian goes through Greenwich and it isn’t because we asked nicely.
> There are privileges to that like assuming the world revolves around you.
Sometimes you need moments like this to remind you that your assumption is wrong
> The US is the center of the world though
Give it a few months.
Due to the history of the internet, anything ".com" should be assumed to be US-specific if not obviously global, just like anything ".co.uk" should be assumed to be UK-specific if not obviously global.
If you use a .com for something that is specific to a country/region that is not the US, the onus is on you to clarify. That's the problem here. If you're not going to make it ".uk", then you should be making that obvious on the homepage.
Due to the history of the internet, anything ".com" should be assumed to be a commercial entity.
If you are from the US, the only nation who doesn't frequently use a national TLD, the onus is on you to judge if a site is commercial, US-specific, global, or something else entirely.
I mean... I don't disagree that there is an onus on any website to make it clear who it's audience is. But .com hasn't been exclusively US centric for literally decades. Even during peak 90s domain name territorialism .com meant "commercial".
People outside the USA, i.e. the majority of the world, often experience the opposite to what you've described: the tiresome implicit assumption that everything on the internet is US-related by default. It's not.
Like the big red letters in the title that say "IN BRITAIN"?
I see them on the leaderboard, but not on the main page.
https://www.ismypubfucked.com/leaderboard
I don't see that. Ctrl+F and zero "Britain" anywhere on the page. Or even in the HTML source.
The only big red letters are "THAT NEEDS YOU".
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Man, it's weird being an American sometimes.
I do not drink. I am half Irish and half German.
Drinking is a _very_ weird cultural artifact from our past. It doesn't improve your life, it has been scientifically proven to not 'help you relax', and there may in fact be no safe amount of alcohol to drink; all the pop-sci headlines that say 'one glass of wine a week may improve your health' are really about studies that put the safe max at one glass per week.
From what I can tell, the UK is no longer subsidizing what is effectively a criminal enterprise that is centuries old.
With all due respect this opinion verges on neo prohibitionist alarmism. The social benefits of alcohol have been widely acknowledged and at a time when we are all spending too much time at home on our phones (arguably worse for health than a pint), communities need more social spaces. That place may not necessarily be a bar and it’s perfectly fine if you don’t wish to drink, but it’s a bit much to refer to a cultural product as a criminal enterprise.
The social benefits do not come from alcohol. At the very best, they come from what we have learned to believe about alcohol.
Alcohol consumption follows a nasty curve. The average adult in the UK drinks about 11 liters of pure alcohol per year on average. Which is obviously a lot. But what's worse is, almost no one drinks 11 liters. The median is much lower, exactly how low is hard to find numbers on but as much as 1 in 5 Brits don't drink at all.
That means most of the alcohol is consumed by people who drink way too much by any sane definition.
If you own a pub, or an "off license", or arrange a music festival or pretty much any cultural venue, you know that in your bones. Staying afloat without selling alcohol, in particular without selling alcohol to people who drink far more than they should, is hopeless. You can't change things on your own. And even suggesting we should maybe work together to change will alienate your most profitable customers, who are understandably defensive about their drinking.
No, it's not a criminal enterprise, by definition. But you'll do better if you have a criminal's attitude - pick one: denial (consuming a lot yourself may help), rationalization ("if I didn't do it someone else would") or callousness. That's one reason pub chains do better.
Many people have written what you have written, trying to justify their life choices to strangers on the internet.
None of them have ever explained why alcohol, or any drug use, needs to be part of third spaces.
Society is losing third spaces, largely due to unchecked capitalism eroding the society it serves... but 'pubs' are just another form of rent-seeking by landlords. It has been proven without a doubt that third spaces as a commercial venture is ultimately non-functional, yet that is what pubs and bars have always been, and now they are dying out.
> None of them have ever explained why alcohol, or any drug use, needs to be part of third spaces.
Third places need to have some kind of draw, else nobody will show up. "If you build it, they will come" is for the movies. In the real world you need to have a compelling reason to have others come in your door. Space alone is not sufficient to establish a third space.
That draw doesn't necessarily have to be alcohol (or another drug), but it was the thing that many people used to want. Threatening use of a third space by fear of the wrath of a mighty deity only buys you one day out of the week, I'm afraid.
You're quite right that people no longer want alcohol like they used to. Why nurse a hangover when you can get the same dopamine rush scrolling through TikTok at home from the comfort of your couch? This means that many third spaces of yesteryear no longer serve a purpose, and as you call out, have closed as a result.
Which is all well and good, I guess, but some segment of the population still wish that there were third spaces for them to exist in. Trouble is that they've never been able to find anything as compelling as alcohol used to be across large swaths of the population, making a different kind of third space of the same scale a complete no-go. Trying to salvage the remaining alcohol-centric third places is the only path they can see to try and relive that glory.
Of course there are plenty of alcohol-free (or at least not alcohol focused) third spaces that revolve around niche interests, but these are generally not seen as a good fit for those who don't have that particular niche interest. Alcohol was historically so successful as the foundation for a third space because, once upon a time, nearly everyone was interested in it, bringing everyone in the door.
Again, with all due respect, I’m not seeing how my comment is pushing a “life choice” on anyone, and the movement to restrict alcohol consumption equally qualifies as pushing a life choice on someone.
Commercial pubs have existed for hundreds of year. But drinking doesn’t have to be commercial. In Berlin where I live there’s a non-profit hacker space that has a bar with at-cost drinks. It’s also perfectly legal to buy a beer and sit in the park. And of course, nothing is better than having friends over for a wine tasting.
The book "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" would be a good read for you, should you wish to consider alternative viewpoints.
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Distilling what I remember about an entire book I read a couple years ago into a HN comment is difficult, but one of the more salient notes from it is this: Adult humans are naturally suspicious of others and slow to trust, particularly those they have no existing points of connection to. In contrast - children have much lower inhibitions in this sense and are much better at this.
Alcohol, in moderation, is one of the most effective tools in humanity's arsenal to more easily socialize with and create trust with total strangers.
The "reduction of inhibitions" we are all aware of in terms of being a risk of making negative choices, also serves to greatly reduce inhibition of the average adult to new interactions and experiences.
It is difficult to achieve this result in adults otherwise, especially in terms of a single activity with low investment required in time, money, facilities, and commitment.
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It is likely that as we transitioned from a society where adult encounters with total strangers were rare (tribal/village) to common (urban) that alcohol played a pretty significant role in creating the social cohesion for it.
It is not at all clear that we have found some successful alternative to this, and we may well find that even with all the documented downsides of it, we're worse off as a society for moving away from it.
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Again, this is my recollection of a book I read a couple years back - don't take this word for word. I will also note that it's not all rosy and has some thoughts on the types of consumption we should probably discourage as well and the general risk/reward of alcohol in society.
Alcohol doesn't create social cohesion chemically. This is a learned effect - there are societies where they had different beliefs about alcohol, and there it doesn't have this effect. This is a really old finding of anthropology. (Of course, in today's global world, beliefs about alcohol get homogenized, so there are ever fewer of societies where they have diverging beliefs about alcohol effects.)
Moreover, it seems likely to me that just like the "relaxing" effect of nicotine, this advantage is "stolen" from daily sober life. If we as a society agree to judge each other less harshly when we're drink, I think we will just naturally judge each other more harshly when we're sober.
However, unlike with nicotine, where the effect is physical and individual (you relax when you get nicotine because you get stressed by physical addiction when you don't), for alcohol it's social and collective. You suffer the negative effect (social pressure to basically be more uptight in everyday sober life) whether you participate or not.
What's especially American about this remark isn't the experience of consuming alcohol in public. What is characteristically American, I think, is the assumption that we can pronounce a thing good or bad merely on the basis of its effect on the individual, with no regard for one's relationships with other people. Drinking in a pub is a social activity, and the alcohol is a lubricant for that activity. Yes, doing too much of it can cause great harm; doing any amount of it could cause some harm; it does not follow that the thing is a net detriment to society, and that it should be banned.
Maybe it is that way for people in the UK, or maybe people of a certain age group.
However, I am, as I said, an American, but also a Millennial. For many Millennials, drinking isn't a social activity, it is a form of quiet shame. We saw our parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents destroy their lives because of alcoholism, we lost friends and family because of being victims of drunk drivers, we saw people die of complications of a lifetime of drinking.
A lot of us simply chose not to repeat those mistakes as those mistakes effect the people around us in grave ways.
If anything, drinking is an anti-social activity, even if you do it entirely socially.
I just don't see the point in keeping it around.
> I just don't see the point in keeping it around.
So 'you do you' and continue not drinking, no need to preach your life choices. I'm also 'millenial' , I enjoy many alcoholic drinks both socially and because they go with my meal or simply are something not hot/dairy/sweet and other than water.
> [Millennials] saw our parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents destroy their lives because of alcoholism, we lost friends and family because of being victims of drunk drivers, we saw people die of complications of a lifetime of drinking.
Why do you think alcoholism - which is certain distinct from drinking - was new with the generation above 'millenials'?
As a Brit (an actual one, not because my great great grandfather was one) I'd have to say that pub culture in the UK is not strictly about drinking alcohol at all. It's a social place to meet friends, play games, watch sport and hide from the weather.
Pubs won't question you if you ask for a lime and soda and they may even stop serving you if they think you've drunk enough.
It sounds like you don't understand what a pub is like.
Whilst this is definitely not what's it's like, this quaint video is all about the lineage of the pub in the UK, and explains the third-spaceness of them, which I'd argue still exists[1].
Pubs are so important for our communities in the UK, whether that's watching the game, seeing a friend's band, celebrating a birthday or just catching up after work.
Many of the parts of my life have been lived in a pub. If it's criminal, I'd happily be locked up. Or maybe lock me in, a sadly rarer occurrence these days.
[1] https://youtu.be/_GCcoaSq3x4?si=QunsiKqk4D4IRV0M
Exactly, designing a 'third place' that isn't alcohol focused seems to be a tough nut to crack. Alcohol greases the wheels for socialization and is a highly profitable item for a place to sell that keeps the lights on (people may have several drinks an hour, drinking leads to more drinking both in the long and shot terms, etc). Meanwhile a typical coffeeshop here in seattle is, aside from the espresso machines, is a near silent library-like space. Many people heads down in a book or a laptop. Instead of having a few drinks per hour you instead may have a single coffee and maybe a pastry or sandwich.
If someone opened a social space with maybe a kitchen that let you pay by the hour to hang out, credit for kitchen orders. All the other bar/pub accoutrements gaming (darts, pool, shuffleboard, pinball, whatnot), sports on the tv, whatever .. I still don't think people will go for it.
I think the only non-boozy option that comes to mind is the small town diner but those are thin on the ground.
> Exactly, designing a 'third place' that isn't alcohol focused seems to be a tough nut to crack.
how so? I go to a climbing gym and it is a pretty social (and, of course, healthy) activity... crossfit is not my thing but apparently it is similar for more traditional workouts. to the extent you can consider a cycling or running club a "space" those are similar. dog parks for dog owners, playgrounds for parents, etc...
Many of those lack spontaneity though. I don’t walk past a climbing gym with a friend of mine and think “fancy popping in there for an hour or so?” You need to plan a visit to many of those places so you have the right clothing/footwear/etc.
The social point of a pub is that you can just decide to go in on a whim. Pubs are increasingly not about alcohol either. I’ve had a few instances in the last couple of years where I couldn’t drink alcohol for extended periods (various reasons, mostly medication related). Hasn’t stopped me going to the pub.
Years ago you would get an odd look if a group walked into a pub and all ordered soft drinks but not so much now (well, you still will get that in some pubs).
Obviously I’m not out looking for another place to buy a lime and soda after midnight but I can quite happily have an evening out without having to drink alcohol whilst others do or don’t around me.
In america, going to a bar and not drinking is .. hard and the waitstaff tend to hate you (low tips per hour).
You’re American?
You thus aren’t “half Irish or “half German”. Stop with your cultural appropriation.
Here is what I will say. Drinking certainly is not a healthy choice. However hanging out with your peers for a few hours a night in public certainly is.
Unfortunately I haven't found any place that cracks that problem in america, especially into the later hours. There isn't really a place for people to hang out and socialize without it being a boozy bar. As someone who doesn't really enjoy drinking I don't even really want to go to boardgame/chess/trivia nights at bars because I feel like I'm freeloading. ( I imagine any given bar patron is having 1-3 drinks per hour and potentially ordering some food if that is an option. I might order some food and have a soda...)
I assume part of the problem being that alcohol has the helpful side effect of greasing the wheels socially. Coffee houses that are open late are generally library like affairs, a lot of people sitting around on laptops or with books, any attempt to start a more social night is, in my experience, refused because of this.
Am I the only one that has no idea what this is talking about? Even the "About" section just dumps a ton of jargon about something being a problem for "pubs" - which, very unclear from the homepage, is actually talking about bars/places to drink beer/etc in the UK.
But again, now I know it's talking about that kind of pub, what is the actual issue? Some sort of rate being added to something? What rate? Is this related to a rating system? Taxes? Is it affecting the consumer? The owner?
So confused.
lol for so many negative points this question has, there sure is seemingly a lot of support too. I guess I found the divide in our community
Nope, I have utterly no idea what "rate increases" are being referred to. Doesn't seem to have a single explanation or link anywhere that I can find.
To be fair, I'd say that most people in the UK who would be interested in the contents of this site are aware of the context and know what phrases like "rates increases" actually mean.
It's been in the news quite a bit over the years since the pandemic.
Not every site has to provide an ELI5.
The homepage doesn't even say it's about the UK.
For a generic ".com" domain that isn't American, it's generally a good idea to yes, have a kind of minimal hint that tells you at least which country it's about, and at least a single link you can follow to get the broader context.
I'm following a link to it on HN. When I get there, I have zero context. Visitors to your site can come from anywhere, so it's generally considered a good idea to provide basic context.
Or how about the US starts using ".us"?
> For a generic ".com" domain that isn't American, it's generally a good idea to yes, have a kind of minimal hint that tells you at least which country it's about, and at least a single link you can follow to get the broader context.
Umm, I take it you didn't click the "About" link at the top right of the page. That gives you some of that context and names the countries involved in the first full sentence.
Alternatively clicking on the "Map" link should give a sizable proportion of people a big hint about which countries it involves. Three seconds of scrolling out on the map makes it obvious.
"Umm", yes, that's why I referred to the homepage specifically.
It's generally a good idea to make the subject of your site clear on the homepage, without requiring people to start clicking around to hunt for it.
A form of property tax it looks like, charged on businesses: https://www.gov.uk/introduction-to-business-rates
While this is cool to see, would be nice to see some indication of the nation specific context for those outside that nation... especially since it's the more generic .com tld instead of say .uk ...
Maybe even a Union Jack in the corner as a background image, or something.
I'll do this on my projects when US sites start doing this on theirs
Given the arguments I have had with people on here about swearing and formal language and all the self censoring they seem to do, I thought it was immediately obvious from the URL that this was not american.