All is not well in the UK's Socialist Utopia

[pErvinalia]

A plumber? At $150 an hour?? Damn mrjonno, you must be rolling in dosh if you can afford plumbers and electricians. Most of us have to scrape by with electrical tape and toilet plungers.

Good way to flood the place and cause even more damage, you need a recession prices have come down here, got my tap fixed for £20, and 2 electrical sockets that kept blowing/sparking for £30

No wonder you are totally helpless. There's no mystery about plumbing or simple electrical fixes. When Seth talks about the "dependent class", I now know who he is talking about. It might surprise you, Jonno, but there are actually people in the world who wouldn't die within a couple of days if dumped out of the city into a rural environment where they had to organise much of their own food and water, and do a lot of their own maintenance work. Do you realise you don't have to be as helpless as you are? Is your irrational fear of looking after yourself a symptom of shame you perhaps feel at being totally unskilled in even the most basic things?

[JimC]

A plumber? At $150 an hour?? Damn mrjonno, you must be rolling in dosh if you can afford plumbers and electricians. Most of us have to scrape by with electrical tape and toilet plungers.

Good way to flood the place and cause even more damage, you need a recession prices have come down here, got my tap fixed for £20, and 2 electrical sockets that kept blowing/sparking for £30

No wonder you are totally helpless. There's no mystery about plumbing or simple electrical fixes. When Seth talks about the "dependent class", I now know who he is talking about. It might surprise you, Jonno, but there are actually people in the world who wouldn't die within a couple of days if dumped out of the city into a rural environment where they had to organise much of their own food and water, and do a lot of their own maintenance work. Do you realise you don't have to be as helpless as you are? Is your irrational fear of looking after yourself a symptom of shame you perhaps feel at being totally unskilled in even the most basic things?

I can do a certain amount of maintenance around the house (carpentry, repairing holes, painting), but when it comes to serious electrical stuff, I leave that to the experts (having no wish to be fried...).

I can change washers in taps, but more serious plumbing than that goes to Mr Plumber...

[pErvinalia]

The thing is, it's not actually that hard or technical.

[Jason]

Plumbing is extremely easy and soldering is kind of fun. Since I was trained to work on equipment up to 600vac there's no residential electrical work I can't do, but that's one I don't recommend you DIY unless it's something simple light changing a light socket or a faulty outlet (most people can use a screwdriver and remember to turn off the circuit breaker before beginning to work).

[MrJonno]

No wonder you are totally helpless. There's no mystery about plumbing or simple electrical fixes. When Seth talks about the "dependent class", I now know who he is talking about. It might surprise you, Jonno, but there are actually people in the world who wouldn't die within a couple of days if dumped out of the city into a rural environment where they had to organise much of their own food and water, and do a lot of their own maintenance work. Do you realise you don't have to be as helpless as you are? Is your irrational fear of looking after yourself a symptom of shame you perhaps feel at being totally unskilled in even the most basic things?

I'm totally dependent on professionals doing their job and?, knowing to survive in the outback may be useful if you want to live in the outback personally I will give it a miss. I doubt if there are many places in the UK where you can't get a pizza delivered in under 30 minutes and if there was you wouldn't get me living there. I don't know what its like in Australia but we don't sell electrical goods without plugs these days as it was deemed (rightly) too dangerous to encourage the population as a whole to put one on. I do know how to do it but I suspect its now a dying art and fine let it die

[Rum]

Plugs attached and usually fused/sealed shut. Nanny state madness to me.

[MrJonno]

Plugs attached and usually fused/sealed shut. Nanny state madness to me.

Meaning you get a few less house fires each year , items work out of the box against a few pence on top an item?,

Sounds reasonable to me, doesn't matter if you can wire a plug or not, if your neighbour can't and his house goes up in flames

[JimC]

Plugs attached and usually fused/sealed shut. Nanny state madness to me.

Meaning you get a few less house fires each year , items work out of the box against a few pence on top an item?,

Sounds reasonable to me, doesn't matter if you can wire a plug or not, if your neighbour can't and his house goes up in flames

Actually, in this I agree with you. Too many cases of "the cause of the fire was established to be faulty wiring"

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Plugs attached and usually fused/sealed shut. Nanny state madness to me.

Meaning you get a few less house fires each year , items work out of the box against a few pence on top an item?,

Sounds reasonable to me, doesn't matter if you can wire a plug or not, if your neighbour can't and his house goes up in flames

Actually, in this I agree with you. Too many cases of "the cause of the fire was established to be faulty wiring"

I thought it was "a loose nut behind the multimeter".

[Seth]

One day I got bullied and then I massacred half the school with an AR-15 that I bought at the candy shop with loose change.

...because no one else in the school had a gun with which to stop me...

[Seth]

No wonder you are totally helpless. There's no mystery about plumbing or simple electrical fixes. When Seth talks about the "dependent class", I now know who he is talking about. It might surprise you, Jonno, but there are actually people in the world who wouldn't die within a couple of days if dumped out of the city into a rural environment where they had to organise much of their own food and water, and do a lot of their own maintenance work. Do you realise you don't have to be as helpless as you are? Is your irrational fear of looking after yourself a symptom of shame you perhaps feel at being totally unskilled in even the most basic things?

I'm totally dependent on professionals doing their job and?, knowing to survive in the outback may be useful if you want to live in the outback personally I will give it a miss.

You're dependent because you CHOOSE to be dependent, and the problem with your attitude is what the fuck do you do when the outback doesn't GIVE you a pass? What do you do when, somehow, against all your expectations, you find yourself in a survival situation?

You die.

I, on the other hand, improvise, adapt and overcome because I spend my life learning how to do things like plumbing, electrical work, welding, shooting, carpentry, masonry, concrete-laying, horse doctoring, delivering calves, fixing tractors and trucks, growing crops, slaughtering animals, gutting and deboning and preparing said animals, hunting, fishing, flying, shooting, taking photographs, building radios, installing antenna systems, tactical movement and fieldcraft and a thousand other things I've troubled myself to learn how to do because when it comes to the narrow passage, I want to not just survive, I want to thrive.

You? You just sit down in the middle of the road and die because you're confused, afraid and have no idea what to do to save yourself, like the thousands of people in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina or any of a thousand other disasters where people just sat down and died because they were too willfully ignorant to survive.

[rainbow]

Oh come on Seth, you're just playing at SURVIVAL.

In Africa you might learn what it really means.

[Seth]

Oh come on Seth, you're just playing at SURVIVAL.

In Africa you might learn what it really means.

True enough. But one works with the environment one has, and the one I spend a lot of time in is every bit as hostile as Africa, and in some ways more so. Few people freeze to death in Africa...except perhaps on Kilimanjaro.

The point remains that it is a truism that in a crisis you will revert to your training, and if you fail to train, in a crisis you will do nothing...which often means getting unpleasantly dead.

Don't just stand there, do something!

[Rum]

Plugs attached and usually fused/sealed shut. Nanny state madness to me.

Meaning you get a few less house fires each year , items work out of the box against a few pence on top an item?,

Sounds reasonable to me, doesn't matter if you can wire a plug or not, if your neighbour can't and his house goes up in flames

Actually, in this I agree with you. Too many cases of "the cause of the fire was established to be faulty wiring"

Evidence that this is the case please? Intuition won't do it!

I demand my right to burn my house down seeing as how I'm not allowed to shoot people in the UK!

[Pappa]

Oh come on Seth, you're just playing at SURVIVAL.

In Africa you might learn what it really means.

True enough. But one works with the environment one has, and the one I spend a lot of time in is every bit as hostile as Africa, and in some ways more so. Few people freeze to death in Africa...except perhaps on Kilimanjaro.

The point remains that it is a truism that in a crisis you will revert to your training, and if you fail to train, in a crisis you will do nothing...which often means getting unpleasantly dead.

Don't just stand there, do something!

I agree with Seth here. Aside from the specific skills, survival training teaches a person to be practical in a crisis more generally.

Plus, learning practical skills is extremely fun and interesting if you like that sort of thing.