Best Of

Further to my lament earlier this morning about the refusal of our political class to come to terms with our predicament we had the interview with Mel Stride this morning. God, it was embarrassing.

So, why didn't you support Starmer and Reece's cuts? "Well, err, the wrong kind of cuts, all last minute etc". Complete garbage.

No benefits for those on ILR. So, what is going to happen to these people? "Well, some of them might go home..."

Funding £5K for those starting work and buying their first home.. Supposedly funded by cuts in public spending amounting to £42bn over the Parliament. I repeat "over the Parliament". This for a country borrowing £150bn a year. And this is supposedly responsible! It doesn't even touch the sides of our issues. By the end I was nearly banging my head off the steering wheel.

Kemi Badenoch

@KemiBadenoch
·
14h
My message is clear: if you’re here illegally, you will be detained and deported.

Our new Removals Force, modelled on US ICE, will deport 150,000 illegal migrants each year.



She wants us to model this?

https://x.com/PabloReports/status/1974882303211192750

Bad Enoch is really not trying to win my vote back at all.

ICE are repugnant. Nobody should be modelling anything on them.

Exactly. Nobody following the news would be looking at what ICE are actually doing and want to copy that. She has terrible judgement. Hopefully some journalists will take he to task on this and see if she doubles down on her stupid idea.

The Conservatives will set out proposals later on cutting public spending on welfare, aid and civil servants which the shadow chancellor will say would save £47bn over five years.

His proposals include saving:

£23bn from the welfare bill

£8bn by bringing civil servant numbers from 517,000 down to 2016 levels of 384,000

£7bn from the overseas aid budget

£3.5bn by ending the use of hotels to home asylum seekers

£4bn by ensuring benefits and social housing are reserved for UK nationals

£1.6bn by scrapping environmental policies, including cutting subsidies for heat pumps and electric vehicles.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gzv9j78dyo

"£1.6bn by scrapping environmental policies..."

Wot, not cutting the £25bn on carbon capture?

The £25bn on carbon capture should not just be cut, we should use it as a firing range for the RAF to practice bombing, as an eternal reminder not to appoint ministers who don't understand the laws of thermodynamics. It is an incomprehensibly stupid policy that even the Greens don't want, and I mean the sensible pre-Zack Greens. I know there are people on PB who are concerned that slagging off Labour will let Reform/Con in, and it's an understandable concern, but God in Heaven above it's a policy that's so stupid it makes my heart cry. That's £25,000,000,000 pissed up the wall because Ed Miliband is an idiot. Damn, guys, do better.

Have we done Turning Point funded Christian fundamentalists protesting against gay entertainment venues in Soho yet?

A link would be nice 😀

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25518686.bizarre-footage-shows-evangelical-group-black-uniforms-target-soho/

There are gay entertainment venues in Soho??! What is the world coming to.

I detest Soho.

Soho is the worst place in London to get lost in. You’re never quite sure if you’re stepping into a high class restaurant or a brothel.

It really is frightening for someone as innocent as me.

just order the tasting menu, what could go wrong?

Bloody laptop now updated to Win 11 at last after two failed downloads. Taken much of the afternoon and evening. Now I can depart. Night all.

Get a Macbook

MacBooks are extortionate. You can't buy one for less than £1000 - it goes up rapidly from there - and at the price the models are nice, but not that nice. With discounts you can buy decent enough Windows and Chromebook equivalents for literally half the price.

My experience is pay twice as much for a Macbook - and they last four times as long. No hassles upgrading the operating system either.

Every Windows laptop I ever had turned to sludge after a few years.

Unless you're running a LLM or rendering video, almost any spec of machine will do these days.

My work desktop is close to celebrating it's 20th birthday. It was a fairly high end rig in its day (20gb ram, decent Xeion(iirc) series processor, Quattro graphics card, and we stuck an SSD in it about 10 years ago. I did have to replace the CMOS battery a couple of weeks ago! It won't run win 11 (no TPM2) so it's days are probably numbered now support for win 10 has ended, although I'm not in a mad panic over it (everything business critical is cloud based with decent rollback provision, the machine is effectively just a terminal).

It's not even the oldest machine in the business - there is a 23 year old laptop running Vista sat airgaped on one of the cnc milling machines - you stick a program on a USB, shove it in the laptop, then download it to the machine control (Heidenhain Tnc 155P) via Rs232 serial.

Sluggish windows laptops aren't usually hardware, generally nuke windows and reinstall and they go OK again. It's not the problem it used to be either (win 98 machines seemed to need throwing away and starting again every few months, I'm not I've every had to nuke a win 10 box).

Have we done Turning Point funded Christian fundamentalists protesting against gay entertainment venues in Soho yet?

A link would be nice 😀

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25518686.bizarre-footage-shows-evangelical-group-black-uniforms-target-soho/

There are gay entertainment venues in Soho??! What is the world coming to.

I detest Soho.

Soho is the worst place in London to get lost in. You’re never quite sure if you’re stepping into a high class restaurant or a brothel.

It really is frightening for someone as innocent as me.

Indeed.

I can only imagine your embarrassment at accidentally ending up in a high class restaurant.