Not if you brought the land since 2013: If the church hasn't registered the chancel repair liability in the land's title register, there's no liability. And very few churches registered, judging it a pretty big middle finger to your congregation.

Of course, there are plenty of scammers happy to charge you £50 for insurance against an impossibility...

> Of course, there are plenty of scammers happy to charge you £50 for insurance against an impossibility...

Charging money for insurance against an event that is impossible is, i believe, a criminal offence in the UK.

Yeah there are a lot of very obscure legal rules that most people aren't aware of or haven't been enforced in many years.

Not from as far back but my house was built in the early 1980's and my house deeds include the stipulation that I must maintain a garage attached to the property (so I can't convert it to extra living space) because the local government retain the right to convert the space into a decontamination shelter in the event of chemical, biological or nuclear attack. Had a good chuckle with my lawyer regarding it, don't think I'll be too concerned about where to keep my lawn mower if the city has been nuked.

In Switzerland, the rule that every house must be constructed with an appropriate fallout shelter has only been relaxed 10 years ago.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-bunker-idUSTRE7B01R...

Years ago, I was doing some C++ training for Texas Instruments in Bedford, England. I remarked to the woman running the course how brutalistically ugly their building was. She said it was to prevent damage from earthquakes. Bedford is not exactly famous for these events, and she explained that TI simply had one (possibly quake proof) building designed, and then built the same one all over the world. She may have been pulling my leg, of course.

Interesting. I live near the TI HQ in Dallas, so I thought I'd take a peek. The Bedford location apparently still exists as "Bedford Heights," and it does look like a mini TI. The Bedford Heights website does call out the "cyclone-proof roof," which they imported directly from the Dallas HQ blueprints.

Ah, thinking back (it was a loooong time ago, and I was only on-site for five days) I think she may have mentioned typhoons.

The thing that really struck me at the time was not so much the building, but the security. There were card-access only doors every few yards, and they wouldn't give me even a visitor card - I had to be escorted to the lav and canteen all the time, which was irritating for all concerned. God knows what they were up to in there - summoning dread Cthulhu?

I did a two week contract for a defense research institute once where a senior staff developer had to babysit me like that. He was nice about it, but it must have been really annoying. It was simply easier for them than going through the bureaucracy of getting me a visitor pass for a contract that short.

Back then it was a FAB - does seem excessive I have had a couple of interviews (both avowed jobs) like that.

Huntings wouldn't even let me in the main building and Hanslope Park I was escorted (its much nicer than its description in the laundry files)

Yay, Laundry Files! If you are an IT nerd into Lovecraft, you owe it to yourself to read them.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Laundry_Files

Singapore still has mandatory bomb shelters.

The wild thing is we still have thousands of nuclear weapons, and the number of nuclear-armed states has grown since then. We just perceive a lower risk now-a-days, which I hope holds up.

We're more aware that in a situation where a local council has to take over your garage for decontanimation

1) You wouldn't have a local council

2) You wouldn't have a garage

The number of overall weapons has decreased by thousands. The coldwar is over so the risk nuclear war is lower.

More nations have weapons but the numbers weapons they have is very low and the ability to hit the US doesn't exist for the rogue nations.

Even without going archaic, I had to take insurance when I bought a terrace, because a lease existed on the land at some point but the owning company had dissolved years prior and no lease had been paid for a long time. This is very common in a country (UK) where the State has had strong continuity for several centuries, so land rights and entitlements can be tracked very far back.

In the US there is adverse possession, so if someone openly claims the land (living, using, maintaining, etc) for many years (10-20?), they can end up owning the land.

It helps settle minor arguments between property lines where fences existed for 50 years but the true line was not on the fence line.

These things really are to extract money and commissions during the property purchase. In most cases there is no issue at all but no-one is going to question paying a few pounds extra on a property purchase "for peace of mind".

When the likelihood of the risk is small, but the potential damage bill could be financially catastrophic, I think it's perfectly rational to buy insurance if the premium is so low.

Sure. My point is that often the risk is not small, it's non-existent.

When I bought my current house my solicitor suggested that the seller should pay for insurance cover for the fact that there was no planning paperwork for a small side extension. Of course I said OK and of course the seller also agreed. But that extension was even shown on the land registry plan and was obviously 20+ years old. Since planning breach action is limited to 4 years there was no chance of any problem. Free money for insurer, commissions, etc.

So I've done the same when I bought my last house(conservatory built 20 years ago, seller couldn't produce the correct paperwork for it), but the issue wasn't the planning permissions per se, it was that the original builder of the house(Belway) hasn't given permission and they reserve the right to do so for 99 years after construction(even though the house is a freehold now, the entire estate is still Belway's leasehold). So the insurance was against that as well.

Like, are the chances of Belway complaining and landing us in legal trouble close to zero? Yes, they are, but like said above - it was £50 and I got the seller to pay for it. When we sell the house I'll do the same just to avoid any bumps in the process because of it.

Hence why I wrote 'often'. There are obviously cases where there is a real, if small, risk.

Another thing: You already say that you would be fine paying for the person you will buy the house in the future. However, many indemnity policies run in perpetuity so in principle will still apply and there will be no need to buy a new one.

How do you make sure that the possibility is actually non-existent?

If it's only a small one-time payment, then it probably makes sense to pay someone that much just for doing the work to verify that it's not going to happen.

Planning enforcement is 12 years from the date at which it became obvious that building works had been completed. So if you build a castle inside a agricultural shed and take the shed down after 12 years, the timer starts after you take down the shed. Also, there are many caveats and Planning law is complicated and often quite vague in Britain, so you should take advice on your specific situation.

It's either 4 years or 10 years from completion depending on cases except if it was deliberately hidden [1].

In my case, the development became immune after 4 years, that's the most common case (e.g. extensions, conservatories, fences, etc)

[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ensuring-effective-enforcement

Planning enforcement for domestic development in England is definitely 4 years, I agree with the parent comment.

There was that one guy who covered his castle in hay bales for just over 4 years before revealing it and they took enforcement action successfully, but that's a bit different. I'm guessing that's why you said "became obvious that building works had been completed" but actually the rule is simply completion date but the courts decided that this guy was taking the piss so much that he still violated the intended meaning of the law. Your odd agricultural shed example may well fall foul of the same thing but I don't see what that has to do with the parent comment.

It's 10 years (not 12) in some cases but they wouldn't concern most domestic developments.

Any insurance of the type referred to by the parent comment is 100% definitely a swindle.

It was literally a one-off £4 in 2006. I doubt it helped the solicitor in any way...

Indeed if you have a fixed fee conveyancing deal (I'm not sure about the UK but it seems common over here) the solicitor is probably losing money just on the administration of filling out the paperwork and then billing you that 4 pounds...

Those indemnity policies are so common that any related admin work has to be included into fixed fee conveyancing deals.

In fact I suspect that these policies are so common partly because of they save solicitors' time and efforts, not least when they are on a fixed fee: They don't spend time looking into things they just suggest indemnity policies so they are covered and move on.

> The word Butt is derived from the Anglo French word 'bouter' meaning to expel.

Wow. I suppose that’s the same etymology for “butt” in the anatomological sense?

In the Oxford English Dictionary there are 19 separate entries for "butt" with various disparate senses, including a bundle of cloth, a headland, and a funnel-shaped wicker basket. Some of those entries have complex, multiple etymologies, but the word "buttock" is said to be derived from "butt, n.6" for which the etymology is given as: "Of uncertain origin."

So there you are. Happy to be of no assistance whatsoever!

Wiktionary says: Pprobably from Old English buttuc (“end; end piece”; also, “short piece of land”).

I wonder how "to expel" ends up being "a short piece of land"...

My favorite piece-of-land word is "gore," which is either a triangular parcel formed where roads intersect at an acute angle, or a narrow strip of land (usually also an acute triangle) of uncertain ownership resulting from inaccurate surveying. It's derived from the Old English word for spear, which also came to mean stab, and a stab wound, and eventually blood-n-guts in general.

Yep. Old English word for spear was "gar". One vegetable was related to the leek, but they described the clove as spear-shaped: the gar-leek. https://www.etymonline.com/word/garlic

Hah. I assume the English were looking at the budding shoot (aka "garlic scape" [0]) when they named it, whereas the Germans were looking at the knobby root (Knoblauch = knob leek).

[0] https://ediblejersey.ediblecommunities.com/recipes/garlic-sc...

And interestingly enough, the Swedish word for the fish which is called "pike" in English is "gär".

Lots of Nordic words in old English.

Also interesting is we (US, at least) have a fish called a 'gar' that looks similar to a pike, but isn't technically. Pike are family Esocidae and gar are family Lepisosteidae.

No, it’s not, the fish is called ”gädda”. The swedish cognate to gar would be ger, which has the same meaning of acute angle/point.

People in this thread might be interested in the History of English Podcast. I highly recommend it if you're interested in etymology and/or history: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com

Been wondering lately how the word "fast" means "moving quickly" and also "not moving at all" (as in "hold fast" and also the root of "fasten").

(Also: "refrain from eating".)

Per the venerable etymonline.com:

> The meaning "quickly, swiftly, rapidly" was perhaps in Old English, certainly by c. 1200, probably from or developed under influence of Old Norse fast "firmly, fast." This sense developed, apparently in Scandinavian, from that of "firmly, strongly, vigorously" (to run hard means the same as to run fast; also compare fast asleep, also compare Old Norse drekka fast "to drink hard," telja fast "to give (someone) a severe lesson"). Or perhaps from the notion of a runner who "sticks" close to whatever he is chasing (compare Old Danish fast "much, swiftly, at once, near to, almost," and sense evolution of German fix "fast, fixed; fast, quick, nimble," from Latin fixus). The expression fast by "near, close, beside" also is said to be from Scandinavian. To fast talk someone (v.) is recorded by 1946.

> "act of fasting," late Old English fæsten "voluntary abstinence from food and drink or from certain kinds of food," especially, but not necessarily, as a religious duty; either from the verb in Old English or from Old Norse fasta "a fast, fasting, season for fasting," from a Proto-Germanic noun formed from the verbal root of fast (v.). In earlier Old English fæsten meant "fortress, cloister, enclosure, prison."

Yeah, in a town near the one I grew up in, there's a street called 'Butt Hole Lane'. That made me laugh a lot when I was younger, even when my parents explained to me what the 'Butt' in this context meant.

Could have been worse... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane

> Leftover laws are weird things.

Fun fact: just like this old tax that the Italian residents are unhappy with, every single person that was old enough to vote for their representatives who then voted to ratify the income tax amendment in the USA is now dead. There is no one alive in the USA that was in any way represented in the vote for income tax; conversely everyone that is alive in the US today and is subject to it did not have any input into it: they were simply born into it, unrepresented, just as these Italians were.

There is a strong argument for all laws having an expiration date a few years past the expected lifespan of the youngest constituent of the represented population that passed it, otherwise we end up ruled primarily by those long dead, entirely unknown to us, as the laws pile up, amended in perpetuity but never aging out.

Today's voters are capable of electing representatives who could repeal that amendment. It's not like voters are left without recourse.

It appears that elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back. I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.

> I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.

If your long-term is long enough, you're guaranteed to be correct...

Putting that aside, even if you think your 'big change' is right and prudent and will Make Things Better, other people have their own plans. Now, unless you get rid of popular representation, you have legal hysteresis, and everyone's planning horizon lasts until the Next Big Change. Suddenly nobody's building nothing.

So you're left with a mess or an authoritarian government. Resistance to wild swings is actual conservatism at work, and is a very good thing.

> elected officials have an extremely strong bias to adding/amending versus repealing/scaling back

I find this to be a crippling problem of how politics works in modern democracies.

Taxes are a great example, because almost every country will increase it, but never decrease it. They’ll think of a 100 new ways to extract taxes, but never remove outdated ones.

Not necessarily. 50s / 60s US income tax is much, much higher than current rate. I just think the cycle of going up and down is extremely long.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Margina...

This is where supportability comes into play: a short time after the was people understood the need for such measure, today you would have a revolution for such a tax level. In 20 years it will come back, no worries, people will love it.

The top rates were much higher but few people actually paid those high rates due to loopholes.

These days people are paying more in real terms in aggregate.

I’m not sure about that either —- there were no tax havens back then. It’s so much easier since 80s to work around the tax system with off shore companies (granted it is getting harder for the past decade)

Or was I unaware the widespread loophole back in the old days?

Not so much a loophole, but back in the 50s all kinds of income were treated the same which meant you could write off your income against your investment losses.

I think it's naive to assume that rich Americans back then weren't working the system. If it was so great, why do we tax different kinds of income differently now?

I have always believed that the majority of the complexity in the tax code is derived from lobbying by special interests to lower taxes on their specific sort of income.

Lately though it seems like tax filing companies have been the ones primarily responsible for sustaining the complexity of the tax code - though whenever someone's particular benefit comes up that group tends to get pretty vocal (i.e. exemptions for SALT taxes and home owner/child credits)

Very true: my personal solution is to shop for better countries. There's no way to meaningfully influence the government's overreach. Hopefully this will become a trend and the cheapest countries will attract better talent.

> Hopefully this will become a trend and the cheapest countries will attract better talent.

Hrm, I disagree. I think the most beneficial countries will attract better talent. Having a low tax bill doesn't mean much if I need to pay for things privately.

I also personally emigrated from the US owing to the fact that healthcare there is immoral and it felt like (about a decade ago when I left) the country was on the path to major unrest. I've been quite happy up here in Canada where I pay more taxes but get to work with people who aren't burdened down by the stress of untreated health issues.

UN, WHO, WEF, WTO, and more... Where will you shop to as these unelected organizations gradually ascend?

> I'm not sure the current approach is long-term viable.

Can anyone of the downvoters say a few words? To me this seems both obvious and non-partisan. What we're doing is accruing ever more laws, creating a centuries-old legal code base without ever removing technical debt. This seems unwise.

(I wasn't a downvoter but sure)

Law isn't a simple practice due to the breadth of subjects it covers - but it is very simplified by the human factor. When laws are enforced they are done so after advocacy from a pair of humans and by the judgement of a human for penalty and possibly guilt (in some cases guilt is determined by a pool of jurors).

This means it's very different from programming where we have a dumb machine that is, at it's best ability, able to look at two numbers and tell you which one is bigger. When it comes to software edge cases must be explicit and factors must be encodable - violations must be recognizable by an algorithm and all cases must be covered. Compare that to the law where generally there are a set of guidelines that have slowly evolved over time to cover more and more edge cases - but viewing any law ever written as completely true to the letter would be a mistake - there will always be carve outs and reasonable judgement entering the picture.

I think the main problem with criticizing the creation of more laws is that we don't currently have laws to cover every situation and it's unreasonable to think we ever will - it'd be nice to get rid of some of the stupid ones but I strongly suspect you'll see this town in Italy end up being freed from any obligations since this hereditary claim is pretty bonkers.

Lastly I might point at countries with a long continuous legal history like England which hasn't changed governments violently or due to outside influence in a loooong time. There are a lot of really crazy real estate claims there, sure - but for the day to day stuff, the laws work. The cost of training lawyers might slowly be creeping up[1] but we aren't anywhere near a critical point of being unable to apply laws. I suspect that point will never be reached and we'll just see more and more specialty in legal professions - instead of an advocate in 1820 you can now hire a lawyer specialized in watershed rights. I expect that trend to continue with specialties deepening and growing further apart just like we've seen with development. You couldn't hire an "ops" guy in the 70's - everyone was expected to be well versed in operating system configuration, interaction and most were probably expected to be familiar with design.

So, I don't think this is actually an issue at quite the level you mentioned - but I do think it's one of these slowly creeping growth factors that makes us more vulnerable to societal system collapse.

1. I'd guess really slowly though since even in the US where precedent is a factor most relevant case rulings are probably from before 1870.

> This means it's very different from programming where we have a dumb machine that is, at it's best ability, able to look at two numbers and tell you which one is bigger.

And even that can get wonky. Do a search for "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_error_mitigatio...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_epsilon

Who else sees a software dev analogy here. Perhaps we need a law that says every 10 years we have a "sprint" to address the "technical dept" of anachronistic laws.

I do not believe this true. War over the past 20 years has been overwhelmingly unpopular. Have we in the US been able to stop that?

What then also of the minority that lives under these laws? I never once consented to them, and yet must submit to the majority.

> What then also of the minority that lives under these laws? I never once consented to them, and yet must submit to the majority.

And you receive their benefit too. You might not like paying taxes but you receive the benefit of paying taxes, that is why you are forced to pay taxes like everyone else. Some people get more benefit than others but we all get something from paying taxes. If you don't like paying taxes, then you are free to move to a place where there are no taxes and no benefit from them. I recommend Somalia, I heard it's lovely this time of year.

> If you don't like paying taxes, then you are free to move to a place where there are no taxes and no benefit from them.

That is false for US citizens; the US taxes you on your worldwide income, even if you don't live or work in the US.

Once you are no longer a US citizen, you are in the clear.

And what of the wars?

The US has a severe representation issue. Other folks have spoken well about the advantages of proportional representation vs. FPTP but if you're looking for something to blame for an effective lack of representation I'd look there first.

Honestly, if the US election before this previous one didn't have primaries and was an open field race there is almost no chance the former president would have been elected - and if the government was run on a parliamentary system even if his party had won there's no chance they would've brought him in as PM.

I am a one issue voter and my issue is proportional representation.

I like CGP Grey on this issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

I completely agree as far as voting methods are concerned and do think it would be a better system, but I still don't like giving a group of people rights to commit acts considered immoral when done by an individual.

I wanted to first address the question of being overridden. When you enter into any sort of relationship - dating, marriage, inhabiting a city, living in a country - you are agreeing to compromises to grease the wheels of society. Some people are always going to lose sometime - ideally those aren't always the same people and nobody loses an excessively burdensome amount but... If you live in a city of three million you probably fervently disagree with a few hundred thousand of the other residents on some issues you consider particularly important.

On the topic of actions considered immoral (or I'll start with illegal) when done by an individual - war actually only fits into this category in some countries, in a lot of areas murder in self-defense is legal and if 100 ninjas tried to murder you and it was clearly a case of self defense where all other actions were barred your actions might be legal in the US - they would probably be universally recognized as moral by everyone except the most staunch utilitarians which I assume would respond: "Dude - take the trolley in the face, duh - even if they started it it's 100 vs 1 lives lost".

That all said, war is frequently not a case of self-defense and is often abused for silly things like resource acquisition and prestige. Better representation allows us to severely punish governments that either look like they're going to go against the societal will or remove them after the fact - buuut there will be times when a country goes into unpopular wars justly due to either domestic misinformation or classification of information creating a different breadth of knowledge between law makers and the populace - with the former seeming more likely and the latter being pretty repulsive. And the freedom to act in response to aggression is one we need to keep separated from the slow response time of something like a pure democracy. This was actually the case in Athens where Strategos were free to act during their term (assuming an agreement between the then Strategoi) and were only subject to removal during regularly scheduled sessions.

I am strongly against war myself but I would be pretty happy with the US entering and occupying posts in civilian areas on both sides of the israeli/palestinian border to dissuade both parties from continuing attacks - I'm similarly okay with cypric occupation since that situation seems similarly unresolvable. War is pretty complicated but I don't think it's all that distinct from other issues a nation needs to deal with, poor representation leads to actions that go against the public will.

There's also no-one now alive who voted for women's suffrage, or the banning of the international slave trade, or the right to bear arms.

How about Switzerland? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...

Non-aggression and property rights are the only laws that truly matter. Natural rights stem from these principals.

> women's suffrage

If a government doesn't have a monopoly of force, nobody needs to vote or even acknowledge the government.

> banning of the international slave trade

Your body is your possession. Slavery violates that and the non-aggression principle.

> the right to bear arms

Who grants this right? The government doesn't have the right to take any property. It does so via aggression and violates natural rights.

> Non-aggression and property rights are the only laws that truly matter

That's certainly an assertion, but not one that I accept.

> If a government doesn't have a monopoly of force, nobody needs to vote or even acknowledge the government.

Meaning disputes with a government are settled (resisted) by ... force and violence?

Income tax in the USA was meant to be a temporary measure to support a war effort.

There are similar stories in other countries.

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary government plan.

No it wasn't. Those for it said that, but it is clear from their efforts of the many decades prior that they wanted it to continue forever.

I hope that no one is making this same comment about masks and social distancing in 20 years.

Masks suck but I enjoy having a bit of my personal space back.

In modern monetary policy, income tax is used as a deflationary measure and our government is funded by the fed.

Unfortunately they have a way of making war last forever as well.

Your "strong argument" is in direct opposition to the fundamental principle of common law: precedent.