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https://news.sky.com/story/row-over-new-greggs-vegan-sausage-rolls-heats-up-11597679 (https://archive.ph/5Ba6o)

A heated row has broken out over a move by Britain's largest bakery chain to launch a vegan sausage roll.

The pastry, which is filled with a meat substitute and encased in 96 pastry layers, is available in 950 Greggs stores across the country.

It was promised after 20,000 people signed a petition calling for the snack to be launched to accommodate plant-based diet eaters.


But the vegan sausage roll's launch has been greeted by a mixed reaction: Some consumers welcomed it, while others voiced their objections.

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spread happiness@p4leandp1nk
https://twitter.com/p4leandp1nk/status/1080767496569974785

#VEGANsausageroll thanks Greggs
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7
10:07 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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Cook and food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe declared she was "frantically googling to see what time my nearest opens tomorrow morning because I will be outside".

While TV writer Brydie Lee-Kennedy called herself "very pro the Greggs vegan sausage roll because anything that wrenches veganism back from the 'clean eating' wellness folk is a good thing".

One Twitter user wrote that finding vegan sausage rolls missing from a store in Corby had "ruined my morning".

Another said: "My son is allergic to dairy products which means I can't really go to Greggs when he's with me. Now I can. Thank you vegans."

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pg often@pgofton
https://twitter.com/pgofton/status/1080772793774624768

The hype got me like #Greggs #Veganuary

42
10:28 AM - Jan 3, 2019
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TV presenter Piers Morgan led the charge of those outraged by the new roll.

"Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns," he wrote on Twitter.

Mr Morgan later complained at receiving "howling abuse from vegans", adding: "I get it, you're all hangry. I would be too if I only ate plants and gruel."

Another Twitter user said: "I really struggle to believe that 20,000 vegans are that desperate to eat in a Greggs."

"You don't paint a mustach (sic) on the Mona Lisa and you don't mess with the perfect sausage roll," one quipped.

Journalist Nooruddean Choudry suggested Greggs introduce a halal steak bake to "crank the fume levels right up to 11".

The bakery chain told concerned customers that "change is good" and that there would "always be a classic sausage roll".

It comes on the same day McDonald's launched its first vegetarian "Happy Meal", designed for children.

The new dish comes with a "veggie wrap", instead of the usual chicken or beef option.
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It should be noted that Piers Morgan and Greggs share the same PR firm, so I'm thinking this is some serious faux outrage and South Park KKK gambiting here.
 
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Bog-standard Poster said:
Are you buying my old house? Don't blame the seller, blame the fuckwit millionaires looking to flood to the countryside because of COVID, willing to pay silly prices for houses because they look out onto green fields and not urban bughives.
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Sounds like you didn't live in our rat's nest of a capital, so probably not. I'm probably trying to buy one of the houses one of those fuckwit millionaires left behind.

On a separate note, how shit are the trains? While I'm trying to sort this out I've been shuttling up and down the country every week between Norf and Lahndan on the trains. I'm now a month into this, and there is not one train ticket that I've not had at least partially refunded through delay repay. They're literally never on time. How is Avanti West Coast making any money whatsoever?
 
Clem Fandango said:
Sounds like you didn't live in our rat's nest of a capital, so probably not. I'm probably trying to buy one of the houses one of those fuckwit millionaires left behind.
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Jibing aside, I bought a house in a shit hole because why would I spend top money on a £300,000 new build that will soon be worth £150,000 because of recession or infintyniggers? I picked it up for very cheap because it was a run-down, shit hole area. Then because of covid it was gentrified and everyone with dosh flocked there.

British trains are unfortunately dog shit. European train journeys are, for the most part, an absolute pleasure and a genuine fun, relaxing and beautiful way to travel.
 
Clem Fandango said:
Why is buying a house so shit in this country? I mean the actual process. Everyone overvalues their house, puts it on for too much and then you have to start at a massively low offer and incrementally creep your way up. Then you end up in a bidding war with other buyers, you've got to deal with estate agents and their obvious self-interest, and don't even get me started on the fucking chains...

Is it like this abroad? Why can't I just go on a website and add a house to my basket?
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Home buying in the UK is a nightmare for all the hoops you have to jump through. Everyone involved wants their own little slice of the cake despite doing almost nothing but sit on their hands the entire time. Also make sure you get home buyers insurance before putting in an offer on any home.
 
>IMPLYING said:
It's not just them. The house owners themselves can be cunts. My aunt told me a story once of when her brother-in-law got into one of those bidding wars and thought he cinched a good deal on a house since it was 8k below market value. Then the owners of the property said it wasn't high enough and voided the auction entirely only to put it back up for one later. This was around 2007 or so. I hope those fuckers felt stupid when the prices crashed the year after.
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So, the seller has to accept the offer of the buyer ? So far as I'm aware, putting a house on the market is only to invite offers for it, there is no obligation to sell. A seller is entitled to refuse an offer, if it does not match their expectations.
I take much greater issue when a seller accepts an offer and then allows a rival bidder to gazump the original bidder. This to me is underhand, but again shows how some people will sell out good principles for money. Once an offer is accepted, the house should be taken off the market.
Clem Fandango said:
It's so blatant nowadays though. You can see past sale prices for a property on Rightmove, as well as historic listing's for the same property. So you can literally see when some cunt bought it two years ago, did absolutely nothing to it, then put it back on the market for an extra £100k. Sometimes they just reuse the same photos in the listing.
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I don't think you're being very realistic regarding peoples' expectations of market forces. I suppose I need more context to your statement, a percentaage rather than a monetary amount would be more useful. If the market has moved and the property in that area is now worth £100k more, what do you expect the seller to do, effectively sell at a loss ? The seller most likely will have to buy another property, so they will have expectations regarding their next purchase and where the market has moved, pro-rata.

If you don't agree with the offer price, then either bid less, or don't bid at all. Nobody is holding a gun to your head ? The fact that the market data is freely available to all, should mean that sellers taking the piss should be easily spotted and avoided. In any open market, you will always have buyers and sellers with unrealistic expectations - nobody is forced to match them in the market.

Managing the expectations of sellers should be one of the jobs of a good estate agent. But they do have a vested interest ( they normally claim a percentage of the sale price as a fee ) and so their interest is normally primarily in a high volume of sales, achieving the greatest price is a secondary consideration in maximising their revnue and bonuses.
 
EddyRooney said:
So, the seller has to accept the offer of the buyer ?
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It's just the overall pointlessness of it. The anecdote I gave was of someone who clearly had a minimum amount in mind, so why didn't they just set it at that? When I speak my aunt again I'll ask her if it was in-person or online, but the latter can take days or weeks if there's no set deadline. Don't under-price for an auction where people are investing time in bidding for a house you specifically put up at a below-market price to tempt people with the hope of getting it at a below-market price, especially when you have no actual intention of selling it for less than that. Put it on the market for how much you want in return and just stop wasting everyone's time is the main crux of what I'm getting at. If you want to open bids at the market price for the property or even higher, go ahead, just don't take the piss of offering less than you were ever going to accept.

Dickinson had a good approach to auctions.
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Major incident declared at Barry Island:


An 'incident' - yet there's a major Police presence there. An 'incident' is shoplifting or not paying your taxi fare. Apparently there's been a fatality, therefore a bit more than an incident if true.

Some happier news - Gary Neville is banned from The City Ground, Nottingham:

 
EddyRooney said:
If you don't agree with the offer price, then either bid less, or don't bid at all. Nobody is holding a gun to your head ? The fact that the market data is freely available to all, should mean that sellers taking the piss should be easily spotted and avoided. In any open market, you will always have buyers and sellers with unrealistic expectations - nobody is forced to match them in the market.
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Oh don't give me that. This isn't my first rodeo. I've already got a house and yeah, apparently it's doubled in value since I bought it ten years ago. But where does this extra value come from?

A house is only ever worth what someone will pay for it, but you can't tell me that these predatory house flipper cunts aren't making things worse for everyone. How does anyone decide what price to put their house on sale for? Well, they look at recent sales of comparable houses in the area. So if some flipping flipper round the corner managed to con some unlucky sod (who, yeah, didn't "have" to bid, but you know sometimes people actually need a place to live) into paying over the odds, then even genuine sellers will use that as the yardstick for what they put their house on for.

This bubble is ridiculous. I'm not going to sit here and pretend the UK housing market of all things is just a regular free market that isn't being manipulated to fuck.
 
Inquisitor_BadAss said:
Home buying in the UK is a nightmare for all the hoops you have to jump through.
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Searches. Every time someone wants to buy a house, they have to pay for searches. It doesn't matter whether all the information is publicly available, they have to pay for a specialist company to produce a two-inch-thick bundle of paper telling them about the mine shafts and floods and shit. Every time. It's a fucking racket.

The number of people involved in selling is insane as well. You have the estate agent, who markets the house. Fair enough. Your solicitor talks to the seller's solicitor, but the actual deeds have to be transferred by a conveyancer, who might also be a notary but probably isn't, and they all have to coordinate with one another and with the estate agent. They in turn have to talk to the specialist who carries out the searches. The seller has to get a survey, which requires another specialist; it's advisable for the buyer to get their own survey as well, just in case the seller's survey lied about it all. There's insurance for all of these things. All this adds cost and means it can take months to negotiate a sale. In my case there was also a probate issue, as we were buying a house being sold after the owner died. That added an extra three months minimum to the sale. Half a fucking year it took, not least because one of the two people selling - a fucking vicar no less - got greedy and refused to assent to the sale for a whole month because he thought he could get more for the place. Fucking arsehole. He was wrong. I was already paying over the odds; not a soul bit at the price he was demanding.
 
Clem Fandango said:
Oh don't give me that. This isn't my first rodeo. I've already got a house and yeah, apparently it's doubled in value since I bought it ten years ago. But where does this extra value come from?

A house is only ever worth what someone will pay for it, but you can't tell me that these predatory house flipper cunts aren't making things worse for everyone. How does anyone decide what price to put their house on sale for? Well, they look at recent sales of comparable houses in the area. So if some flipping flipper round the corner managed to con some unlucky sod (who, yeah, didn't "have" to bid, but you know sometimes people actually need a place to live) into paying over the odds, then even genuine sellers will use that as the yardstick for what they put their house on for.

This bubble is ridiculous. I'm not going to sit here and pretend the UK housing market of all things is just a regular free market that isn't being manipulated to fuck.
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If you're convinced it's a bubble - then sell your housing stock and rent. Or short the housing market ( Christian Bale did it in the Big Short ) There are options to hedge this situation.

Clem Fandango said:
But where does this extra value come from?
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This is the market. It is peoples' perception of the housing market. Peoples' perceptions have more influence on the price in the market than the actual intrinsic value of the asset. The condition and size of your house ( ie the product ) might not have changed since when you originally bought it, but if there are more people in the area, the same amount of housing stock, then basic supply and demand means your house will be worth more. It simply means the demand curve has moved to the right. More people = greater competition = people prepared to pay more for the same product, ceteris paribus. This is one of the great mysteries to me - the youth that simultaneously cry refugees welcome here AND complain they can't get on the housing ladder.

The major problem I see with the market is it is overly regulated. The government, as is normally the case, have skewed the market with their well meaning interventions. It's a very British thing that we are so obsessed with home ownership anyway, other cultures place less emphasis on it.
I think the whole thing about flippers is a bit weak and strawmanish ( probably no such word ). I really don't see this impacting prices the way you make out in your example. It would be extremely micro in nature - it's not going to be a macro determinant of price, such as supply and demand, interest rates and employment, wages and disposable income. Crying about "some unlucky sod" whilst I have a degree of sympathy as all of us have been ripped off for something at some point, is a bit of a stretch because that is the nature of the market and life in general, there are always going to be winners and losers. Caveat emptor.

The market should be way more efficient - surveyors, solicitors, agents and the government all have an interest in maintaing the status quo as it provides them with an easy income stream.
 
A friend bought his dream home recently and it seemed more like a bizarre Kafkaesque quest than a commercial transaction. From dealing with an extended family selling it who had a number of buyers drop out due to them being dicks, to having to pay for surveys to find things they’d hidden when they had their own surveys, do tracking down and buying the freehold for the land (which randomly came including a bunch of other freehold in the area) the whole process needs streamlined but I guess too much money from this broken system is being made by too many people.

Being stubborn is his superpower but I know I’d have just said “fuck it” at about a million points during the process.
 
EddyRooney said:
If you're convinced it's a bubble - then sell your housing stock and rent. Or short the housing market ( Christian Bale did it in the Big Short ) There are options to hedge this situation.
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Sound advice, for sure. But for most people it's not really an option to "play the market", like it's a game. Like, I own one house and it's rented out, and that rent covers that mortgage. So to play the Big Short, I have to turf out my renters (not even sure how I go about doing that these days) , stick it on the market, and might have to pay that mortgage myself while I wait for it to sell? Most people aren't tycoons with "housing stock". But anyway, my observation was merely that it's clearly unsustainable for any asset to double like that consistently. In a few years basically all homeowners in the UK will be "asset millionaires" on paper.

EddyRooney said:
The market should be way more efficient - surveyors, solicitors, agents and the government all have an interest in maintaing the status quo as it provides them with an easy income stream.
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Well, this at least I can agree with. As you can probably tell from my wittering, I'm no expert in property or the economy. My initial post was just a whinge about the misery of the whole process. And right now I have an utter arse pain of a commute while I try and sort somewhere to live dahn sahf.
 
We should have a system like some of the more civilised euro places. You put the house on at a price, people bid. You accept one bid, and then both of you sign it. At that point you’re not allowed to back out and if the buyer drops out they pay you x% as a deposit. Keys exchanged when rest of money is transferred. Done.
Scotland has a better system than England I think. Never bought a house in England but it wasn’t so bad here. Blind bids like here are good for sellers, less so for buyers. You do need a solicitor for the missives, unless you really know what you’re doing
 
Made In Wales said:
The start of (hopefully) the beginning of the end of Starmer:


500,000 today, millions tomorrow...
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Archive (GB news articles are obnoxiously formatted)

Keir Starmer issued stark warning as 500,000 Britons set to walk out in major national protest: 'It's not right wing to be afraid of what's going on'​


The protest movement is taking place in all city centres across the country this weekend

Britons have been urged to "unite" against Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in a nationwide protest against the current Labour Government.

The Great British National Strike, taking place this weekend, is set to see more than 500,000 people across the country walking out in protest of the state of the UK.

Speaking to GB News, organiser of the protest Richard Donaldson said he is "not prepared to wait four years" for Starmer to be potentially ousted from power - instead calling for a general election now.

Defending the nature of the strike, Donaldson argued that it is "not right wing to be afraid of what's going on" in Britain.

Explaining the reason for the protest, Donaldson stated: "This is a movement about unity. We are the Great British National Strike, and it is a protest.

"It is going to be taking place tomorrow at 12:00 pm in every city centre across the UK.

"We stand against illegal immigration, net zero, inheritance tax and the attacks on our farmers, the attacks on our most vulnerable, the lack of inquiry into rape gangs and the attacks on free speech and two-tier justice."

Making clear that the protest is "open to any legal British citizen" across the nation, Donaldson stressed: "Anybody is welcome, if you are a legal citizen of this country - whether you're black or white, whether you are on the left wing of politics, the right wing, whether you are religious, you're Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, whatever, it doesn't matter.

"If you are a legal citizen of this country and you are fed up of the way things are going, please, please join us."

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When pressed by host Nana Akua on what he means by "the way things are going" with the Labour Government, Donaldson claimed that there is a "whole list" of issues infuriating hard-working Britons today.

Donaldson expanded: "There's so much. We've got around 14.3 million Brits living below the poverty line, we've got four million children going to bed hungry every single night. Fuel debt on average now in the UK is £1,094 per household.

"We're £12.1trillion in national debt, if you spread that out amongst our taxpaying citizens that's about £180,000 per person.

"At the same time, we're paying £8million a day just on hotels for illegals, and we spent £16billion last year."

As Nana argued that Starmer would claim the Labour Government were "voted in on a landslide" and have "a mandate to do the things they are doing", Donaldson told GB News that "many people" are "not prepared to wait four years" for another election.

Donaldson said: "If you'd got a job based on lies on your CV and you got caught out on those lies and you didn't do the things that you said you were going to do and you didn't have the intentions that you set out when you when you applied for that job, you'd get sacked pretty quickly, wouldn't you?

"So for me, I'm not prepared to wait another four years, and I know very many people aren't prepared to wait for another four years.

"The people us, all of us need to stand together here, and the only way we can we can do this is through unity."

He concluded: "We're not being represented. When you speak to the average Brit, 99 per cent of us are all of the same opinion. It's not right wing to be afraid of what's going on.

"It's not right wing to not want our country to be flooded with illegal criminals. It's not right wing to oppose the net zero policies that are coming in."
 
Made In Wales said:
The start of (hopefully) the beginning of the end of Starmer:


500,000 today, millions tomorrow...
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You do know these things never happen and this is just a bunch of pajeets running based patriot accounts from Bangalore farming a few rupees worth of advert revenue on Twitter?

I don’t a single person will do this walk out, if they do they’d get sacked.

Even the unions can’t run an effective strike these days so a bunch of LARPers going full blood and soil won’t either,
 
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