It makes the accidental discovery of C&H all the more special. I remember the day a school friend showed me a C&H book he got from his dad. It was never in the newspapers where I grew up, so I would never have discovered it otherwise.

Not everything in this world needs to obtain global reach and fame.

Stewart Butterfield shaved the shit out of two yaks at his video games company, which eventually became Flickr and Slack.

The only consistent bullet point in the playbook of venture capital-driven startups for the last 30 years is to sell $1 bills for $0.50 and then hope to make it up in volume.

Friends of mine recently got planning permission for a house they've been living in for about 3 years already.

So you can def roll the dice on such things, maybe you get away with it for decades, maybe your house gets flattened.

My (also an immigrant like you) take on Ireland is that many of these systems are run and controlled by humans, and you can get pretty far by trying to make that human connection with the people controlling your fate. My wife was initially refused maternity benefit, because she did not have enough social security contributions. She works part-time, and she was missing 1 contribution (about €120) out of something like 38 for the year. After friends (the same from above) suggested we phone them and talk to the people, the maternity benefit application was approved. I find that there is a lot less "sorry can't help you, computer says no" here.

Why do you say so?

Pushes glasses up nose well actually, we should use GWp, but that's not really a unit and good ol' watts should suffice.

At each of these locations there is one or more necks that can be wrung if something goes wrong with my services

I know it's not really a solution for your nocturnal proclivities, but I think the argument holds. If you had to sacrifice a couple of your sleeping hours but you know you can sort your problem, then you migt be inclined to do so?