I hate

Downhill portrait painting

Didn't see this was a reply at first and thought - 'that's a bit of a niche peeve'...

I should have headed off to the monkey tennis thread really.
Edit. Oh, hang on…

Yeah, it's annoying if you're forrun muck wanting to see ANY OTHER FUCKING COUNTRY.

Squires (Guardian football cartoonist) is a Brit living in Aus, here's his take on their Olympics coverage:-

https://twitter.com/squires_david/status/1418765960828264448

Ha!

...

We never even had Ch 7 so obviously he can get fucked too.

Check out Peckham BMX club. Kye Whyte representing tonight. Club does great work to get local kids into the sport.

It's tricky though as to be competing in the BMX national series here now requires a pretty hefty investment in kit, entry fees & travel + accommodation through the summer. Not quite as exclusive as dressage, but perhaps no longer quite as inclusive as it was a decade or so ago.

Olympic silver medalist Kye Whyte

Brilliant. So happy for him, and Beth getting the gold too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/58022309

Any sport requires significant funding at that level though (albeit not to the extent that dressage does).

The difference is at grass roots, where it is easier by magnitudes for a kid to have buy / borrow a BMX, than to have access to a dancing donkey.

Olympic silver medalist Kye Whyte

Coming to the I Hate thread and seeing this out of context made me think you were being incredibly harsh.

not at all, massive rep to both the BMX medalists... actually to all those that competed
such an excellent competition to watch

This is why I can't watch Australian television, the ABC news channel is as far as I'll go...

Clients who haggle when it comes to paying you. My prices are aggressively reasonable, yet I’m also too soft to put my foot down.

Then they have the cheek to ask you back to do another job?! You either value my services or you don’t. If you don’t feel like paying me for the first job, why the fuck do you think I’d want to come back to do another?

WAC

A-fucking-men, I always tell them not to bother asking me to quote again, they tend to look bemused as if I should be grateful for their trying to underpay me.

Also, people who won't pay for materials up front on a £10k plus job. I am prepared to risk not getting paid for a few days of my life, but I will be damned if I will pay for the privilege.

There was a big thing on the Nextdoor app, people balking at being asked for 50% up front.
This was apparently only a tactic used by cowboys trying to steal your cash. Was gonna wade in but thought better of it, wouldn’t have managed to remain very polite!

Depends how much you're talking about doesn't it and whether all materials get delivered to site.

Definitely remember my folks having friends who got stung on this back in the day.

As opposed to a roofer I've met who did a £16k roof and the client just plain refused to pay.

It's a 2 way trust thing, I have turned down work based on a feeling of mistrust alone. If people don't feel I am trustworthy it is their prerogative to place their work elsewhere.

I always give a paid invoice for materials money paid upfront.

I didn’t weigh in, because there are instances of people being ripped off. What irked me was the 30 posts of incredulous anger at the possibility that people might need cash up front, and the attitude that the majority of tradespeople are cowboys out to rip you off. People want the world, yet don’t want to pay.
The ratio was literally about 15:1 of people saying it was insane to get any kind of advance payment, where as all the good tradespeople I know do it as standard on big jobs.

It also doesn’t add up in my eyes. I trust you to do work on my house, but I don’t trust you with cash.

But people do get ripped off so I get it, but I’m also careful about choosing tradespeople in general.

I got ripped off last year. I've always been happy to pay upfront previously, but now after losing a very serious amount of money I'd never do it again.

Most people are decent human beings, but it only takes one to leave a very bitter taste unfortunately.

I thought I was careful when picking the tradesman out too, knew him for a couple of years and had done various other smaller scale jobs for us, friends and family.

As opposed to a roofer I've met who did a £16k roof and the client just plain refused to pay.

My grandad was still doing carpentry jobs here and there well into his late 60s, I remember he asked me to go and give him a hand picking something up in his transit from a well-to-do area somewhere between chelmsford and southend as it need an extra pair of hands lifting.

Turned out it was a lovely handmade spiral staircase he'd made that connected the two floors of what was easily a 750k house in the early 00's.

He'd got all the materials up front, MADE IT, installed it and then the posh cunt who hired him and her prick husband refused to pay him for the job unless he gave them a significant discount because they thought he was just an old man with a dodgy hip and an easy pushover.

turns out the reason he'd asked me along (a 20st lump with a shaved head) was to make sure they didn't try to get physical with him when he went back to "get his tools" (that he'd left there expressly for a reason to return when they'd not paid him on completion day). He then explained that as they hadn't paid a penny for anything the staircase was his property and I stood in the hall between them and the staircase while he unbolted the whole thing and we split it into its various sections and loaded it onto the van and left them to figure out how to get up to the second floor of their gaff from now on for themselves.

When they called him to relent and ask him to put it back he made them pay a hefty additional fee for the removal and reinstallation for both our time and told them he wasn't available for a week to put it back in.

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What a lad.

Wicked story

you should give SBS a go, a lot of good content, foreign fillums and a decent news service

#rep