the UK!

[TW]Fox;17463619 said:
I wouldnt expect a comprehensive rail system but more than one train a day between the two closest, large cities on the Queensland coast would be expected.

The point being that the UK isnt quite as bad as people say.



Hardly ever - I loved it - but you can hardly say UK roads are rubbish compared to the rest of the world when we have a comprehensive motorway network and other countries do not.
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Very true took me 36 hours to travel 250 miles in Indonesia Sumatra mental note stop been so tight and take the flight!:p

Thinking about it though , Australia does have The Ghan and The Indiana which are one of the longest train lines in the world if I remember correctly

Edit TO be fair to the Aussies there country is still fairly young in comparison to UK. Just playing devils advocate to be honest I agree totally with you fox on the road system in this country:)
 
Best : When the **** hits the fan we are the best at getting ourselves out of it.

Worst : Majority of the public are as thick as two short planks. And we are very poor as a nation at planning for the future, or we do plan but get it completely wrong. Perfect example is our poor telecommunications network, instead of giving money to dossers how about investing in some decent network over the last 13 years, most people with an ounce of intelligence could see the way the internet was going 11 years ago.
 
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[TW]Fox;17463830 said:
Not very frequent though, doesnt The Ghan run twice a week :D
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Something like that.

Daft thing is earlier this year Alice Springs flooded and the train was suspended so all the supermarkets in Darwin NT shelves were empty! took them 3 days for the lorries they laid on to get up to replenish the shelves , had to eat Domino's for 3 days. In true backpacker style good job I had the free vouchers:p

Dread to think of the headlines in the Daily Mail if that somehow happened over here :p
 
[TW]Fox;17463793 said:
You don't see much then given his location field tells you he lives abroad!
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Doesn't mean anything. For all I know he was born and lived in Auckland his entire life.

If he had travelled to some of the places I have he would understand that the UK is amazingly tolerant and accepting.
 
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Castiel said:
Doesn't mean anything. For I know he was born and lived in Auckland his entire life.

If he had travelled to some of the places I have he would understand that the UK is amazingly tolerant and accepting.
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There's a whole load of assumptions in those three sentences. I'm not going to argue with you but you're very, very far away from the mark.

You think the UK is a tolerant country. I do not. Let's leave it there before you make more false assumptions.
 
[FnG]magnolia;17464025 said:
There's a whole load of assumptions in those three sentences. I'm not going to argue with you but you're very, very far away from the mark.

You think the UK is a tolerant country. I do not. Let's leave it there before you make more false assumptions.
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It's definitely not intolerant.
 
Castiel said:
Then why ask if I were kidding, especially as New Zealand has it's own problems especially with racism and discrimination.
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I was suggesting that your opinion was very different to my own and was checking whether you were being serious or otherwise.

NZ has many, many problems, that's absolutely correct. I'm not seeing how this makes the UK a tolerant country though. Ad hominem?

I'm a Brit, btw, and lived in the UK for 36 years and - for what it's worth and I can't believe I'm having to justify myself here - I've travelled extensively.

My opinion is not the same as yours.
 
Sawell said:
"More than half of Britons believe they live in a racist society, according to a major survey commissioned by BBC News Online."
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If more than half believe that then surely the majority arn't racists.


Although apparently for the "most racist place/people on earth" we seem awful tolerant, no apartheid, no lynchings no mass deportations, we keep accepting different coloured asylum seekers and immigrants.

I guess we're the worst racists in the world, we're terrible at it.
 
[FnG]magnolia;17464158 said:
I was suggesting that your opinion was very different to my own and was checking whether you were being serious or otherwise.

NZ has many, many problems, that's absolutely correct. I'm not seeing how this makes the UK a tolerant country though. Ad hominem?

I'm a Brit, btw, and lived in the UK for 36 years and - for what it's worth and I can't believe I'm having to justify myself here - I've travelled extensively.

My opinion is not the same as yours.
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Then why the sarcastic tone in the original comment?

I too have travelled extensively, lived in five other countries aside from Britain and have found overall that the UK (if not all it's people) is more tolerant than the others, including France, Saudi, USA, Germany and Australia.

But as you say, you have a different opinion, that's fine, I reacted to the sarcasm not your opinion.
 
Tefal said:
If more than half believe that then surely the majority arn't racists.


Although apparently for the "most racist place/people on earth" we seem awful tolerant, no apartheid, no lynchings no mass deportations, we keep accepting different coloured asylum seekers and immigrants.

I guess we're the worst racists in the world, we're terrible at it.
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Absolutely.
 
[TW]Fox;17460753 said:
I generally dislike living in the UK and, given the opportunity, would emigrate. I plan to do so one day. However I honestly think that too many people wear rose tinted glasses. I'll focus on the transport networks thing as this is where my interest lies and most of my experience is.

It is quite true that aspects of the UK transport network are poor. Trains are often overcrowded and or expensive, many of the roads have huge potholes in, areas of the country are heavily congested, etc.

But this doesn't mean we are poor compared to the rest of the world. In actual fact, the rest of the world is often far poorer. Lets first focus on roads - a topic close to my heart and one that a lot of people tend to whinge about. I've heard people post that stupid comment about our roads being worse than a third world country on numerous occasions.

The reality of course is that our roads are amongst the best in the developed world. Yes, really. There are countries with better road networks than us - Spanish highways are better (Because we, the EU members, paid for nice new ones), and smaller high wealth countries like Switzerland etc have better maintained road networks. But what about the rest of the English speaking world?

Have you ever driven in America or Australia? In many cases the roads are absolutely shocking. The state of much of the highway network in the USA has to be seen to be beleived. We have potholes on residential streets, these guys have what can only be described as craters on 70mph highways. The roads are terrible. Our roads are frankly beautifully well maintained in comparison.

Then we've got highway networks. The Americans have a lot of highways but they are all totally random, junctions all over the place, random signposts, exits with sharp 90 degree bends, etc. Ours are sensibly laid out, well signposted, and all junctions conform to strict standards.

Australian highways? LOL. They don't really even have them. The main road between Sydney and Adelaide, two of the largest cities in the country, is a single carriageway road for most of the way. The motorways around Sydney are rough and bumpy - even the toll roads (We have only 1 toll Motorway, the USA and Australia have many).

The normal roads are a state as well. HUGE dips, massive gullies, the amount of cars with ripped off undertrays is unbeleivable. I cant remember the last time i scraped the bottom of my car here - yet in both the US and AUS I was frequently scraping hire car undersides off tarmac.

Trains.

Everyone moans about trains - but at least we have a semi integrated network with integrated ticketing in many places and frequent services. Try and catch a train from Rockhampton to Mackay, two of the largest cities on Queenslands East Coast. They are only 200 miles apart, and there is a large railway line linking them. Despite this there is ONE TRAIN A DAY. Yet people over here moan about our trains? Try using the railways in San Francisco. You need 3 different tickets to use CALTRAIN, BART and the Muni! In London, one ticket works on everything.

How about you get some clue and THEN form an opinion on how much our transport networks suck?
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Although when you look at Japans transport network... it's frankly amazing.

Personally I didn't find the roads in Florida/Cali/New York as bad as you're describing, also some of these places have weather that destroys roads.
 
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