Nice people thread part 6 - thrice by twice as nice :)

PasturesNew

michaels wrote: »

Not venturing this on the main board with an immigration topic but I am fed up with the Tories for playing politics with people's lives. They could easily have supended the LMU from taking new foreign stdents and got them to revalidate existing ones but instead they did something draconian to garner headlines and get the headlines that 'finally something is being done about immigration'...and s*d those who have spent tens of thousands and spent 3 years studying and are now unable to complete their courses. Gesture politics is abhorent but when it directly srews up peoples lives in order to get a headline I can't think of NP words to describe matters.

Did they have actual courses then? My friend's dad did this scam in the 1970s (made his living out of it), fake college, just to get students into the country.... no actual college, no courses....

But yes - a simple 10 minute sit down verbal chat with each student would immediately ascertain who is real and who is a dud. You can tell who is studying/attending/working easily enough face to face with a chat.

GDB2222

Students - how much is reasonable as a monthly allowance? DS is staying in halls but catering for himself. We'll pay his rent, but I'm not sure how much he needs for food, clothing, etc?

Also, he's going to Edinburgh, from London, and I don't fancy driving him there. (I'm a wuss when it comes to driving.) He wants to take loads of stuff with him, but this isn't very practical by train. Do any NP have a brilliant solution for getting him and his stuff there, not necessarily at the same time?

Edit: And we need insurance cover for his stuff + laptop.

PasturesNew

Re cars, I knew somebody aged just 21 making a good living by buying cars at a South West auction (probably near Plymouth), then driving them straight across on the Holyhead(?) ferry to Ireland. Buy on a Mon/Tue, back home by Friday with £1-2k in his pocket most weeks.

PasturesNew

GDB2222 wrote: »

Students - how much is reasonable as a monthly allowance? DS is staying in halls but catering for himself. We'll pay his rent, but I'm not sure how much he needs for food, clothing, etc?

Also, he's going to Edinburgh, from London, and I don't fancy driving him there. (I'm a wuss when it comes to driving.) He wants to take loads of stuff with him, but this isn't very practical by train. Do any NP have a brilliant solution for getting him and his stuff there, not necessarily at the same time?

An allowance? Blimey ..... cut him off. £20 for food/fun, clothes = Xmas presents..... he can have the cardigan his aunty knitted him (nobody will notice it has 3 arms) .... and be grateul ...



Brilliant solution might be to find 2-3 others doing the same thing and work out a man/van hire between them. . . not very brilliant though.

LydiaJ

GDB2222 wrote: »

That's very interesting, and quite alarming! The sea level concentration of He is 5ppm, which seems to be an equilibrium level. At least it was that level in the 1940's, before people used He much. I agree with you that this generation is squandering resources. I strongly suspect that future generations will look back on us as totally irresponsible idiots.

Yes I agree the 5ppm must be an equilibrium value. The escape into space is on one side of the equilibrium, obviously, and I imagine quite a lot of the production is alpha decay of Radon gas in the atmosphere, with smaller contributions from He escaping from balloons and cryogenics and of course alpha decay of other things. That's just an educated guess, though.

So I was too hasty in disagreeing with your comment that it is freely available from the atmosphere - sorry. I hadn't appreciated that your "cost of condensing it out" comment included considerations of how low the concentration is and therefore how pathetic the returns would be. TBH I probably misread it as "cost of condensing it" (ie cost of liquefying it, which is comparatively trivial) rather than "cost of condensing it out" (ie cost of extracting the 5ppm from the rest of what makes up the atmosphere, which is huge). Oops - I should pay closer attention to what somebody has actually typed before disagreeing with it.

LydiaJ

PasturesNew wrote: »

An allowance? Blimey ..... cut him off. £20 for food/fun, clothes = Xmas presents..... he can have the cardigan his aunty knitted him (nobody will notice it has 3 arms) .... and be grateul ...

Yes, well we all know you manage to live on less than £1 a day for food, but I'm not sure that's what GDB has in mind for his son while he's studying.

chewmylegoff

GDB2222 wrote: »

Students - how much is reasonable as a monthly allowance? DS is staying in halls but catering for himself. We'll pay his rent, but I'm not sure how much he needs for food, clothing, etc?

Also, he's going to Edinburgh, from London, and I don't fancy driving him there. (I'm a wuss when it comes to driving.) He wants to take loads of stuff with him, but this isn't very practical by train. Do any NP have a brilliant solution for getting him and his stuff there, not necessarily at the same time?

Edit: And we need insurance cover for his stuff + laptop.

i used to get £120pw, in london, between 1997-2000. i had to pay for catered halls out of that which was about £70pw, so i had another £50pw to spend on top. i didn't need to get a job in term time, and managed to get by ok.

in the holidays i think my parents just gave me money as well but i can't remember now. i used to spend the summer kipping on a mate's floor in leeds and getting drunk every day, so i must have had enough money to do that without getting a job somehow and i did not draw down any student loans until year 3.

i reckon it would have been better if my parents had just paid my halls and given me £10 a week on top (perhaps £30 or £40 on top if they need to get their own food), and then expected me to get a job to cover anything else i wanted, at least for the first year, and then maybe upped my allowance in years 2 and particularly 3 so i didn't need a job.

fascinatingly, they gave my sister, who went to uni in the same year as me, a credit card on mum's account, which turned out to be a fairly disastrous thing to do. i do not recommend it.

zagubov

GDB2222 wrote: »

Students - how much is reasonable as a monthly allowance? DS is staying in halls but catering for himself. We'll pay his rent, but I'm not sure how much he needs for food, clothing, etc?

Also, he's going to Edinburgh, from London, and I don't fancy driving him there. (I'm a wuss when it comes to driving.) He wants to take loads of stuff with him, but this isn't very practical by train. Do any NP have a brilliant solution for getting him and his stuff there, not necessarily at the same time?

Edit: And we need insurance cover for his stuff + laptop.

First, congratulations to DS. He's going to love it there!:beer:
The drive's too much for one person but if you do manage to do it, by sharing the drive with someone else, consider the M6 to Carlisle and then cross country to Edinburgh from Abington (you're not really going East as Edinburgh's duealmost north of Carlisle. Cheap petrol at Carlisle Tesco and Preston Bamber Bridge Sainsburys.

Other option is by train and find out how much to transport a trunk (if you've got one) then taxi at the other end. Leaves the problem of how to hoik it up the stairs when he gets there. Plus you need to find out if there's a place (cupboard/spare room) to store the stuff over the hols. I didn't and had to carry shedloads of bags home on my first Christmas!:eek:
Other threads have discussed good east coast routes.

I take it you've visited the other threads about what he'll need.

chewmylegoff

couldn't you just post the stuff afterwards?

http://www.parcelforce.com/send-uk/non-account-services/2-day-delivery-large-items

You can send items up to 1.5m in length and 3m length and girth* combined on our standard services. But if you send using express48large this increases to 2.5m in length and 5m length and girth* combined.
Our express48large service offers you delivery within 2 working days+ and like our standard services, is fully tracked from collection to delivery, at which point we also obtain an electronic signature. We will also come and collect your parcel from you for no extra cost.

so up to 30kg of (non-breakable) stuff in a big box, they will come and get it from you, costs £25. just post all his clothes and books up there, carry all electronic/breakable stuff?

PasturesNew

That sounds like a great way to move chewy ..... I wonder what sort of box would be best to maximise weight -v- durability. 30Kg is 66lbs, so a sack of spuds.