It always seemed weird to me that most companies just discontinued their traditional sugary variety and went diet only, instead of having a diet version and the sugary version just at a higher price.
The death of original Irn Bru is a bit of a tragedy, and I’m not even sure what the point of low sugar Lucozade is supposed to be.
I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?
Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.
GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).
but isn’t your national post serving an important competitive function, keeping other (fully private) mailing and courrier services in the pricing ballpark?
private companies would fill the void - at the consumer’s expense, no?
Royal Mail is fully private; no part of it is nationally owned.
It was sold off on the cheap a decade ago (while it was still profitable) with a major “caveat emptor” stipulation that the universal service obligation would remain as it was.
The private owners have since hived off the profitable parcel delivery arm (GLS) into a legally distinct entity, and have started whinging that the now isolated letter delivery business is unprofitable without degrading the service obligation.
It’s a cynical move.
I know number literacy is not journalism’s strong point, but surely even the author can grasp the basics of “which number is bigger”.
Bringing 0.25 million houses into occupancy does not “arguably” negate the need to build 1.5 million houses. At best it reduces the required new builds to 1.25 million.
The larger figure (700k) is a meaningless figure for this discussion, because short term vacant homes are by definition not a problem that needs to be solved. Most of them will be homes which are vacant “between occupants”, e.g. ones where the tenant has moved out and a new one hasn’t moved in yet, or the homes of the recently deceased whose estate is still in the process of winding up.
Heck, even a proportion of the 250k “long term” ones won’t be actual problem vacancies; some of those will just be ones like those of the recently deceased for whom the process takes longer than 6 months. A relative of mine recently died, and it took maybe 4-5 months to sort out probate, another couple of months on the market before an offer was accepted, and as far as I know now (about 6 months on again) the new owner is still in the process of renovating it prior to moving in. That’s “long term vacant” in those stats, but it’s not a problem that needs anyone to solve it- it’s just that sometimes things take time.
Dealing with genuine long term vacancies is legitimately a worthy pursuit in these times of housing crisis, but pretending that it’s literally the solution to the problem (and not, you know, building stuff) is a cheap dream.