Basically, bet on Boris staying. Without an obvious replacement, I just can't see MPs pulling the trigger.
Have you never heard of Rishi Sunak?
Can’t see it myself.
Can’t see that he would be better?
If they replaced Boris with the Bishop of Bath and Wells from Blackadder it would be better.
It was clear that Major was going to lead the Conservative Party to a poor result in 1997 (albeit few forecast exactly how poor), and he wasn't replaced.
Being shit is a necessary but not sufficient condition for MPs to dump their leader.
The Conservatives can still win the next election if they replace Boris and handle the credit crunch well. That’s what is driving this Robert, Conservatives don’t believe Boris leadership and policy handles the credit crunch well. Basically they want to take back control of policy to stand a chance in the next election, not write it off like they did in 97.
Which raises the question. How? What is Sunakism? Apart from a bloody good Scrabble score?
There was something brilliantly calm about Sunak when I watched him in action and then spoke to him. Knew what he was doing, knew he had a superb team working for him, was human and charming and alarmingly sexier than a 4 foot 2 man should be.
He's a northern Tory, he gets the need to offer the north more than HYUFD's "we don't need your vote cos you aren't really Tories", knows that as a gazillionaire he won't be swayed by the desperate need to line his own pockets like Peppa, and can point to almost unbelievable heroics throwing oceans of cash at business to keep people on jobs when the alternative was mass bankruptcies and unemployment.
The only hypothetical voting intention under Sunak had the Tories still trailing Starmer Labour by 3%. Sunak made zero net gains from Labour, only slight gains he made were from London and Southern LDs
You keep desperately flailing about posting this same shit. It's as if Conservative voters no longer care about conservation. Good governance. The British way. Principles. You keep saying "as long as we lift restrictions" - people vote on a lot more than that.
Red wall voters don't give a toss about conservation or fiscal conservatism, after all the only Tory leader they ever voted for was big spending Boris as he promised to get Brexit done
Red wall voters value honestly, integrity, fairness, and above all else not to be taken for granted with one rule for them and one for everyone else
You really are blind to that which is staring you in the face
No Redwall voters back a big state, the only reason they voted Tory in 2019 for the first time in their lives was big spending Boris promised to get Brexit done.
They would vote Labour again now Brexit is done rather than Sunak fiscal conservatism
You have no idea how the red wall would react to the end of Boris and his sleeze and a new fresh conservative leader
Neither do you if you think the redwall will ever vote for austerity
Why wouldn't voters in the red wall vote for a small state? Why wouldn't they vote for the same approach the Essex voted for in the 80s? Once upon a time it seemed ludicrous that working class voters in Harlow and Basildon and Canvey Island would vote for Thatcher. Why wouldn't voters in Bishop Auckland and Walsall and North East Derbyshire be interested in a similar small state approach? These aren't areas of high unemployment. These are areas of high home ownership. These are people who don't want to be dependent on the state. They may not be as rich as people in Surrey or Buckinghamshire. But that was true of Essex once, too, no?
Not all "red wall" is the same, the big link with my (And my prior) Bassetlaw/NE Derbyshire constituencies to Labour was the mining link. Labour could win here again, but I'd say it's about as likely as a win in somewhere like Dover, which obviously isn't "red wall".
I think we generalise too much - the red wall is made up of a lot of different types of people, in particular people who've moved there relatively recently because you can get a nice house relatively cheaply. Just as many Londoners moving out take their Laour politics with them, so Tories moving north to retire take their politics along.
I doubt if many non-political people anywhere think in terms of "big state" or "small state" - those are abstract terms. But if you translate it into a specific service - most obviously the NHS, but also decent schools, buses and trains - then people are mostly quite keen on a big state.
They should have admitted to all the parties at once. In a nineteen hour press conference, with some absurd excuse for the entire lot
This slow attrition is much worse
What in the name of Holy Fucketty Fuck-Fuck did they think they were doing? It makes Dom's eye test drivel look like a modest, understandable transgression of the rules
It's simply in Boris' nature to lie as a reflex. The slow attrition via leak does look as though it might have been designed to play into that.
Either slightly fortuitous, or a master political assassin at work.
And in what universe would Boris ever think 'let's come clean' the way to go ?
Excellent point. It certainly shows how you get Johnson - hold a bit back so you make the story the inevitable lie.
Its how you get most politicians. But Boris is particularly susceptible.
Thinking back a few threads, did @MoonRabbit have advance knowledge of today’s leak?
No
@MoonRabbit maintained wallpapergate would see Boris gone in a fortnight and I said it would not be wallpapergate but partygate is the real danger for him
I still reckon wallpapergate is more serious, because if the MPs commissioner investigates she has power of commons suspension. The party gate ‘proper investigation’ doesn’t have that ‘proper sanction’ forcing MPs to act. Does that make sense? There isn’t a strong case why she shouldn’t investigate, the PM is an MP too and has to share all the same rules of MP probity “cash for access” surely?
Boris referred the request for the exhibition to the cabinet office who rejected it
I have no doubt partygate is an issue of many more times magnitude which for the first time I really feel could see Boris fall
By what mechanism? Resignation? I think not. VONC? Nah, too many fearties. So how? Impeachment?
Yes you a right, the bit Big G is missing - the parliamentary commissioner has, I don’t really want to use this phrase on here, power to discipline. Facing suspension Boris would resign and there wouldn’t even be a vonk.
The party investigation, even from the police, doesn’t carry the same level of punishment, massive reputation damage yes for Boris and the party, but vonk still in hands what you call the fearties.
My suspicion is, if they got the numbers to win a vonk, the Tory finish Boris squad will now try to organise a parliamentary investigation into Boris, not one he can set up himself, manipulate, and carries no sanction. It will go down into the history books as the wallpaper what got him…
Seventy years before QEII came to the throne, in 1882, the world's first coal-fired public electricity generating station begins operation, in the City of London (QEII's reign sees the first nuclear power plants, in 1954 in the USSR and 1956 in the UK). Burnley FC change codes, from Rugby Union to Association Football. Britain seizes the Suez Canal (rather more successfully than during QEII's reign). The 1812 overture is played in public for the first time.
Question: Will QEII live to see Hinkley Point C generate electricity?
No.
But don't worry, it will generate lots of revenue for Bechtel.
One frontbencher said: “I think this is the worst exposed the prime minister has ever been by these leaks. There’s no explanation, there’s no way to distance himself. His only saviour is if the public has given up caring.”
One frontbencher said: “I think this is the worst exposed the prime minister has ever been by these leaks. There’s no explanation, there’s no way to distance himself. His only saviour is if the public has given up caring.”
On the perpetual red wall debate, people need to realise that a vote for Brexit and a vote for “Levelling Up” were one and the same. They are both votes for more money for public services and better jobs.
On the perpetual red wall debate, people need to realise that a vote for Brexit and a vote for “Levelling Up” were one and the same. They are both votes for more money for public services and better jobs.
I don't know how people don't understand this. Its why May going into GE saying no real change allowed Corbyn to nearly cause a massive upset. Corbynism gained popularity because he was saying no its not more of the same and there was a big market for that sentiment.
The most striking memory of the lead up to Brexit vote was an chap in Stoke of Asian heritage being interviewed and getting the you will be £x worse off if you vote to leave and him pointing to some shit housing going you might be, but i won't, its shit round here, it always been shit around here forever, what the hell have I got to lose.
Seventy years before QEII came to the throne, in 1882, the world's first coal-fired public electricity generating station begins operation, in the City of London (QEII's reign sees the first nuclear power plants, in 1954 in the USSR and 1956 in the UK). Burnley FC change codes, from Rugby Union to Association Football. Britain seizes the Suez Canal (rather more successfully than during QEII's reign). The 1812 overture is played in public for the first time.
Question: Will QEII live to see Hinkley Point C generate electricity?
Which 70 years have seen the most change? From my perspective, someone whose life spanned from 1882 to 1952 lived through the bigger change. 1882 seems almost unimaginably distant. Two world wars away; hell, they didn't even have a real democracy back then. 1952 is a long way away but my parents had both been born then, into houses which were recently built and look unremarkable today. 1952 doesn't feel that unreachable. It was even in colour. But maybe that's just recency bias.
On the perpetual red wall debate, people need to realise that a vote for Brexit and a vote for “Levelling Up” were one and the same. They are both votes for more money for public services and better jobs.
Brexit was more a vote for regaining sovereignty and reducing immigration. The 2019 general election result being to deliver Brexit.
However I agree the only votes for austerity were in 2010 and 2015 of recent elections and 2015 the only recent election where a majority narrowly voted for austerity (sweetened by promises of further tax cuts and the EU referendum for Leavers). In 2017 the Tories lost their majority on a continued austerity platform and needed the big spending DUP to retain office
On the perpetual red wall debate, people need to realise that a vote for Brexit and a vote for “Levelling Up” were one and the same. They are both votes for more money for public services and better jobs.
The trouble is that they were both based on a false premise, specifically that someone else was hogging all the money and was going to pay - the EU in one case, and SE England in the other.
Almost everyone wants more money for public services if that money comes from someone else, particularly if you feel it's only fair as they've been diddling the rest of us for years.
But delivering on the lie is really, really difficult. You can do a bit of repaving etc, but that's polishing the turd and it's not very clear how much time that buys you.
I know miniature pig can grow very big. I researched it. When she found that I conceded is no real thing as miniature pig.
I found myself saying if Wilbur did over a year or so get bit big for a flat in Chelsea - a 3 bed flat so he will have his own room - we could maybe drive him to my Dads. Say goodbye And leave him there.
Then I realised I Couldn’t leave him with anyone else if you love him so much, they might eat him.
Seventy years before QEII came to the throne, in 1882, the world's first coal-fired public electricity generating station begins operation, in the City of London (QEII's reign sees the first nuclear power plants, in 1954 in the USSR and 1956 in the UK). Burnley FC change codes, from Rugby Union to Association Football. Britain seizes the Suez Canal (rather more successfully than during QEII's reign). The 1812 overture is played in public for the first time.
Question: Will QEII live to see Hinkley Point C generate electricity?
Which 70 years have seen the most change? From my perspective, someone whose life spanned from 1882 to 1952 lived through the bigger change. 1882 seems almost unimaginably distant. Two world wars away; hell, they didn't even have a real democracy back then. 1952 is a long way away but my parents had both been born then, into houses which were recently built and look unremarkable today. 1952 doesn't feel that unreachable. It was even in colour. But maybe that's just recency bias.
Maybe 1919 - 1989. WWI grinds to a conclusion (there's a reason most contemporary war memorials date it 1914-1919), Russian Revolution consolidates the power of the Soviet. 1989 - fall of the Berlin Wall.
Seventy years before QEII came to the throne, in 1882, the world's first coal-fired public electricity generating station begins operation, in the City of London (QEII's reign sees the first nuclear power plants, in 1954 in the USSR and 1956 in the UK). Burnley FC change codes, from Rugby Union to Association Football. Britain seizes the Suez Canal (rather more successfully than during QEII's reign). The 1812 overture is played in public for the first time.
Question: Will QEII live to see Hinkley Point C generate electricity?
Which 70 years have seen the most change? From my perspective, someone whose life spanned from 1882 to 1952 lived through the bigger change. 1882 seems almost unimaginably distant. Two world wars away; hell, they didn't even have a real democracy back then. 1952 is a long way away but my parents had both been born then, into houses which were recently built and look unremarkable today. 1952 doesn't feel that unreachable. It was even in colour. But maybe that's just recency bias.
I have a strong suspicion the years 2000-2070 will dwarf everything else, or 2020-2090 if you don't think the last two decades have been interesting enough, tho they have produced:
The fall of the Anglo-American Empire The birth of the internet (the most significant human means of communication ever) The birth of the smartphone (the most significant human tech device ever) Climate change becoming tangible The rise of China Lots of wars, yawn The biggest pandemic in a century
And that's so far
In the next 50-70 years we will see
Climate change becoming epochal China supreme (then toppled?) Medical science defeating endless diseases, maybe even stopping ageing
but way beyond these, we will see:
Artificial General Intelligence, the machines outthink us, with all that entails from the arts to science to education to daily life at every level, onwards to religion
Maybe final and serious proof of non-human intelligence, interacting with us
It could easily be the most significant 70 years in the entire history of homo sapiens
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Basically, bet on Boris staying. Without an obvious replacement, I just can't see MPs pulling the trigger.
Have you never heard of Rishi Sunak?
Can’t see it myself.
Can’t see that he would be better?
If they replaced Boris with the Bishop of Bath and Wells from Blackadder it would be better.
It was clear that Major was going to lead the Conservative Party to a poor result in 1997 (albeit few forecast exactly how poor), and he wasn't replaced.
Being shit is a necessary but not sufficient condition for MPs to dump their leader.
The Conservatives can still win the next election if they replace Boris and handle the credit crunch well. That’s what is driving this Robert, Conservatives don’t believe Boris leadership and policy handles the credit crunch well. Basically they want to take back control of policy to stand a chance in the next election, not write it off like they did in 97.
Which raises the question. How? What is Sunakism? Apart from a bloody good Scrabble score?
There was something brilliantly calm about Sunak when I watched him in action and then spoke to him. Knew what he was doing, knew he had a superb team working for him, was human and charming and alarmingly sexier than a 4 foot 2 man should be.
He's a northern Tory, he gets the need to offer the north more than HYUFD's "we don't need your vote cos you aren't really Tories", knows that as a gazillionaire he won't be swayed by the desperate need to line his own pockets like Peppa, and can point to almost unbelievable heroics throwing oceans of cash at business to keep people on jobs when the alternative was mass bankruptcies and unemployment.
The only hypothetical voting intention under Sunak had the Tories still trailing Starmer Labour by 3%. Sunak made zero net gains from Labour, only slight gains he made were from London and Southern LDs
You keep desperately flailing about posting this same shit. It's as if Conservative voters no longer care about conservation. Good governance. The British way. Principles. You keep saying "as long as we lift restrictions" - people vote on a lot more than that.
Red wall voters don't give a toss about conservation or fiscal conservatism, after all the only Tory leader they ever voted for was big spending Boris as he promised to get Brexit done
Red wall voters value honestly, integrity, fairness, and above all else not to be taken for granted with one rule for them and one for everyone else
You really are blind to that which is staring you in the face
No Redwall voters back a big state, the only reason they voted Tory in 2019 for the first time in their lives was big spending Boris promised to get Brexit done.
They would vote Labour again now Brexit is done rather than Sunak fiscal conservatism
You have no idea how the red wall would react to the end of Boris and his sleeze and a new fresh conservative leader
Neither do you if you think the redwall will ever vote for austerity
Why wouldn't voters in the red wall vote for a small state? Why wouldn't they vote for the same approach the Essex voted for in the 80s? Once upon a time it seemed ludicrous that working class voters in Harlow and Basildon and Canvey Island would vote for Thatcher. Why wouldn't voters in Bishop Auckland and Walsall and North East Derbyshire be interested in a similar small state approach? These aren't areas of high unemployment. These are areas of high home ownership. These are people who don't want to be dependent on the state. They may not be as rich as people in Surrey or Buckinghamshire. But that was true of Essex once, too, no?
No, Essex votes for Tory governments. Most Essex seats even voted for Macmillan and Heath, with Thatcher they just became even more conservative as she won new towns like Harlow and Basildon from Labour.
The North however is far more public sector dependent and far more pro big state and likely always will be. The redwall never even voted for Thatcher, Boris is the only Tory leader it ever voted for
It's not so simple.
The top 4 regions by Public Sector expenditure per head are London, NI, Scotland, Wales.
They should have admitted to all the parties at once. In a nineteen hour press conference, with some absurd excuse for the entire lot
This slow attrition is much worse
What in the name of Holy Fucketty Fuck-Fuck did they think they were doing? It makes Dom's eye test drivel look like a modest, understandable transgression of the rules
Even worse - what did the clown think he was doing standing up in Parliament expressing faux outrage at what his staff had been up to?
We’ve all been speculating what revelation might come next, for many weeks. Did he not stop to consider the same question, with the ever-so-slight advantage of being able to know?
One frontbencher said: “I think this is the worst exposed the prime minister has ever been by these leaks. There’s no explanation, there’s no way to distance himself. His only saviour is if the public has given up caring.”
I think the public is bored of lockdown breaking stories now
I think that the public is thoroughly bored of everything to do with Covid; that might be a factor behind the drop off in the booster rate, alongside the fact that we're getting into the younger cohorts obviously.
On the one hand, this should relieve some of the pressure on him from the party stories. On the other, once all the masks and petty rules finally (we fervently hope) disappear, it'll be a matter of breathing a collective sigh of relief and moving on immediately. I doubt that the Government will get much credit for it.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
The best time to be alive is now - and it is up to us to ensure that the future is bright for all our little 'uns. It's in our hands, it's our resonsibility.
They should have admitted to all the parties at once. In a nineteen hour press conference, with some absurd excuse for the entire lot
This slow attrition is much worse
What in the name of Holy Fucketty Fuck-Fuck did they think they were doing? It makes Dom's eye test drivel look like a modest, understandable transgression of the rules
Even worse - what did the clown think he was doing standing up in Parliament expressing faux outrage at what his staff had been up to?
We’ve all been speculating what revelation might come next, for many weeks. Did he not stop to consider the same question, with the ever-so-slight advantage of being able to know?
Perhaps some combination of the following is behind the PM's response...
* coughing to all the transgressions in one go would've generated a really enormous hoo-hah - might've been enough to trigger action to remove him * was probably hoping that this story wouldn't come out/is keeping his fingers crossed that the others won't * calculation that public might eventually get bored with steady stream of revelations
They should have admitted to all the parties at once. In a nineteen hour press conference, with some absurd excuse for the entire lot
This slow attrition is much worse
What in the name of Holy Fucketty Fuck-Fuck did they think they were doing? It makes Dom's eye test drivel look like a modest, understandable transgression of the rules
Even worse - what did the clown think he was doing standing up in Parliament expressing faux outrage at what his staff had been up to?
We’ve all been speculating what revelation might come next, for many weeks. Did he not stop to consider the same question, with the ever-so-slight advantage of being able to know?
Perhaps some combination of the following is behind the PM's response...
* coughing to all the transgressions in one go would've generated a really enormous hoo-hah - might've been enough to trigger action to remove him * was probably hoping that this story wouldn't come out/is keeping his fingers crossed that the others won't * calculation that public might eventually get bored with steady stream of revelations
???
If you look back at his long and storied history, I think it's more that he doesn't give a damn. When he's lost a job in a scandal he's always moved onto bigger and better things.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
That we can read it every day, almost in real time, and discuss it across the world in real time, is part of why.
Hell, I can remember getting excited when my office trialled some bulletin board thing that meant I could write something for the guy at the other end of the same office without walking over there. God knows how long ago that was.
Basically, bet on Boris staying. Without an obvious replacement, I just can't see MPs pulling the trigger.
Have you never heard of Rishi Sunak?
Can’t see it myself.
Can’t see that he would be better?
If they replaced Boris with the Bishop of Bath and Wells from Blackadder it would be better.
It was clear that Major was going to lead the Conservative Party to a poor result in 1997 (albeit few forecast exactly how poor), and he wasn't replaced.
Being shit is a necessary but not sufficient condition for MPs to dump their leader.
The Conservatives can still win the next election if they replace Boris and handle the credit crunch well. That’s what is driving this Robert, Conservatives don’t believe Boris leadership and policy handles the credit crunch well. Basically they want to take back control of policy to stand a chance in the next election, not write it off like they did in 97.
Which raises the question. How? What is Sunakism? Apart from a bloody good Scrabble score?
There was something brilliantly calm about Sunak when I watched him in action and then spoke to him. Knew what he was doing, knew he had a superb team working for him, was human and charming and alarmingly sexier than a 4 foot 2 man should be.
He's a northern Tory, he gets the need to offer the north more than HYUFD's "we don't need your vote cos you aren't really Tories", knows that as a gazillionaire he won't be swayed by the desperate need to line his own pockets like Peppa, and can point to almost unbelievable heroics throwing oceans of cash at business to keep people on jobs when the alternative was mass bankruptcies and unemployment.
The only hypothetical voting intention under Sunak had the Tories still trailing Starmer Labour by 3%. Sunak made zero net gains from Labour, only slight gains he made were from London and Southern LDs
You keep desperately flailing about posting this same shit. It's as if Conservative voters no longer care about conservation. Good governance. The British way. Principles. You keep saying "as long as we lift restrictions" - people vote on a lot more than that.
Red wall voters don't give a toss about conservation or fiscal conservatism, after all the only Tory leader they ever voted for was big spending Boris as he promised to get Brexit done
Red wall voters value honestly, integrity, fairness, and above all else not to be taken for granted with one rule for them and one for everyone else
You really are blind to that which is staring you in the face
No Redwall voters back a big state, the only reason they voted Tory in 2019 for the first time in their lives was big spending Boris promised to get Brexit done.
They would vote Labour again now Brexit is done rather than Sunak fiscal conservatism
You have no idea how the red wall would react to the end of Boris and his sleeze and a new fresh conservative leader
Neither do you if you think the redwall will ever vote for austerity
Why wouldn't voters in the red wall vote for a small state? Why wouldn't they vote for the same approach the Essex voted for in the 80s? Once upon a time it seemed ludicrous that working class voters in Harlow and Basildon and Canvey Island would vote for Thatcher. Why wouldn't voters in Bishop Auckland and Walsall and North East Derbyshire be interested in a similar small state approach? These aren't areas of high unemployment. These are areas of high home ownership. These are people who don't want to be dependent on the state. They may not be as rich as people in Surrey or Buckinghamshire. But that was true of Essex once, too, no?
Except that the genius of 2019 was to co-opt older voters in the Red Wall. Almost by definition, their prime interest will be pensions, health, social care and making the streets look nice. Spending increases over tax cuts.
The three reasons the Red Wall switched to support Johnson in 2019 were BREXIT, BREXIT and BREXIT.
With or without Johnson at the helm I suspect many of those votes will be going back to Labour in 2024
No. There were two reasons: Brexit and Corbyn.
Brexit was very much "The country voted to Leave; why have we not left yet?". Answer: because of a poisonous rearguard campaign being fought to undermine the vote.
Corbyn was a variety of reasons. Around here - a reasonably important military recruitment area - it was probably in part his willingness to give succour to terrorists and a hearing to their representatives, whilst snubbing their victims. Many round here have people known to them who have been murdered / targeted / threatened by terrorist organisations and their proxies. I had a schoolfriend who's brother, for example, who was in the Droppin Well hotel when it was blown up by INLA.
Add in stuff such as his silly posturing on Defence, the toleration (at least) and facilitation (arguably) of racism, and the rest - and there was plenty of reason to vote for other parties.
They should have admitted to all the parties at once. In a nineteen hour press conference, with some absurd excuse for the entire lot
This slow attrition is much worse
What in the name of Holy Fucketty Fuck-Fuck did they think they were doing? It makes Dom's eye test drivel look like a modest, understandable transgression of the rules
Even worse - what did the clown think he was doing standing up in Parliament expressing faux outrage at what his staff had been up to?
We’ve all been speculating what revelation might come next, for many weeks. Did he not stop to consider the same question, with the ever-so-slight advantage of being able to know?
Perhaps some combination of the following is behind the PM's response...
* coughing to all the transgressions in one go would've generated a really enormous hoo-hah - might've been enough to trigger action to remove him * was probably hoping that this story wouldn't come out/is keeping his fingers crossed that the others won't * calculation that public might eventually get bored with steady stream of revelations
???
I’m not convinced he thinks beyond the next shit. Or even that far.
Blaming it on the staff was the best of a range of excuses that popped into his head at the time. That’ll do.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
That we can read it every day, almost in real time, and discuss it across the world in real time, is part of why.
Hell, I can remember getting excited when my office trialled some bulletin board thing that meant I could write something for the guy at the other end of the same office without walking over there. God knows how long ago that was.
Indeed. Thanks to instant news and social media that amplifies bad things, and is designed to make people angry and ‘engaging’, there’s a bigger disconnect than ever between what’s actually going on and our perception of it.
We all put too much emphasis on opinion and emotion, and not enough on data. Something that’s been driven home by the experiences of the past 24 months.
Another plug for Harvard psycologist Steven Pinker’s book Rationality, which discusses these concepts in depth.
They should have admitted to all the parties at once. In a nineteen hour press conference, with some absurd excuse for the entire lot
This slow attrition is much worse
What in the name of Holy Fucketty Fuck-Fuck did they think they were doing? It makes Dom's eye test drivel look like a modest, understandable transgression of the rules
Even worse - what did the clown think he was doing standing up in Parliament expressing faux outrage at what his staff had been up to?
We’ve all been speculating what revelation might come next, for many weeks. Did he not stop to consider the same question, with the ever-so-slight advantage of being able to know?
Perhaps some combination of the following is behind the PM's response...
* coughing to all the transgressions in one go would've generated a really enormous hoo-hah - might've been enough to trigger action to remove him * was probably hoping that this story wouldn't come out/is keeping his fingers crossed that the others won't * calculation that public might eventually get bored with steady stream of revelations
???
I’m not convinced he thinks beyond the next shit. Or even that far.
Blaming it on the staff was the best of a range of excuses that popped into his head at the time. That’ll do.
I think that this is what will cost votes whilst BJ is at the top.
Every time voters reflect on how 10s of K of people were not able properly to say goodbye to their relatives before they died, particularly amongst relatives and friends, and then remember Boris having a knees-up with his friends in violation of the regulations he had imposed that caused it, it will cut to the quick.
That's the type of thing that is correctly not forgotten or forgiven.
I wonder if Boris is capable of making himself as untouchable as Corbyn was?
RIP. I have no idea how this may (or may not) affect EU politics.
Sad news indeed, RIP.
From that article, there was already an election scheduled to replace Mr Sassoon, for later this month, so there shouldn’t be too much discontinuity. Presumably the Parliament will elect someone of a similar outlook to their predecessor.
Basically, bet on Boris staying. Without an obvious replacement, I just can't see MPs pulling the trigger.
Have you never heard of Rishi Sunak?
Can’t see it myself.
Can’t see that he would be better?
If they replaced Boris with the Bishop of Bath and Wells from Blackadder it would be better.
It was clear that Major was going to lead the Conservative Party to a poor result in 1997 (albeit few forecast exactly how poor), and he wasn't replaced.
Being shit is a necessary but not sufficient condition for MPs to dump their leader.
The Conservatives can still win the next election if they replace Boris and handle the credit crunch well. That’s what is driving this Robert, Conservatives don’t believe Boris leadership and policy handles the credit crunch well. Basically they want to take back control of policy to stand a chance in the next election, not write it off like they did in 97.
Which raises the question. How? What is Sunakism? Apart from a bloody good Scrabble score?
There was something brilliantly calm about Sunak when I watched him in action and then spoke to him. Knew what he was doing, knew he had a superb team working for him, was human and charming and alarmingly sexier than a 4 foot 2 man should be.
He's a northern Tory, he gets the need to offer the north more than HYUFD's "we don't need your vote cos you aren't really Tories", knows that as a gazillionaire he won't be swayed by the desperate need to line his own pockets like Peppa, and can point to almost unbelievable heroics throwing oceans of cash at business to keep people on jobs when the alternative was mass bankruptcies and unemployment.
The only hypothetical voting intention under Sunak had the Tories still trailing Starmer Labour by 3%. Sunak made zero net gains from Labour, only slight gains he made were from London and Southern LDs
You keep desperately flailing about posting this same shit. It's as if Conservative voters no longer care about conservation. Good governance. The British way. Principles. You keep saying "as long as we lift restrictions" - people vote on a lot more than that.
Red wall voters don't give a toss about conservation or fiscal conservatism, after all the only Tory leader they ever voted for was big spending Boris as he promised to get Brexit done
Red wall voters value honestly, integrity, fairness, and above all else not to be taken for granted with one rule for them and one for everyone else
You really are blind to that which is staring you in the face
No Redwall voters back a big state, the only reason they voted Tory in 2019 for the first time in their lives was big spending Boris promised to get Brexit done.
They would vote Labour again now Brexit is done rather than Sunak fiscal conservatism
You have no idea how the red wall would react to the end of Boris and his sleeze and a new fresh conservative leader
Neither do you if you think the redwall will ever vote for austerity
Why wouldn't voters in the red wall vote for a small state? Why wouldn't they vote for the same approach the Essex voted for in the 80s? Once upon a time it seemed ludicrous that working class voters in Harlow and Basildon and Canvey Island would vote for Thatcher. Why wouldn't voters in Bishop Auckland and Walsall and North East Derbyshire be interested in a similar small state approach? These aren't areas of high unemployment. These are areas of high home ownership. These are people who don't want to be dependent on the state. They may not be as rich as people in Surrey or Buckinghamshire. But that was true of Essex once, too, no?
Not all "red wall" is the same, the big link with my (And my prior) Bassetlaw/NE Derbyshire constituencies to Labour was the mining link. Labour could win here again, but I'd say it's about as likely as a win in somewhere like Dover, which obviously isn't "red wall".
I think we generalise too much - the red wall is made up of a lot of different types of people, in particular people who've moved there relatively recently because you can get a nice house relatively cheaply. Just as many Londoners moving out take their Laour politics with them, so Tories moving north to retire take their politics along.
I doubt if many non-political people anywhere think in terms of "big state" or "small state" - those are abstract terms. But if you translate it into a specific service - most obviously the NHS, but also decent schools, buses and trains - then people are mostly quite keen on a big state.
I agree. This is the big flaw for those wanting Singapore on Thames: most people, even in the south of England, love the big state. The tide of history is for ever bigger tax intakes.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
The only bit of JT you couldn't do now is maybe Afghanistan and Iran (if you're American or British). It would be easy to miss Afghanistan out by crossing the Iran/Pakistan border near Gwadar. This route also keeps you out of the FATA.
I think he had long term depression brought on by choosing to do it on a Triumph fucking Tiger. I recall from the first book he gets as far as Coventry before it develops an oil leak.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
An odd thread really. HYUFD demonstrating just how wrong one man can be about so many things at the same time.
Firstly the Red Wall will not vote for Boris in 2024. Dismissing all other leaders because "they will only vote for Boris" is utterly ludicrous when the polls show they won't vote for Boris.
Secondly pretty much everyone here is lined up with the basics of right and wrong. Two months into Covid restrictions the government giving a 3pm "you will not meet with other people" instruction and a 5pm "everyone round to number 10, bring a bottle, we deserve a party" is demonstrably indefensible. Never mind the political optics, it's indefensible to anyone with a brain, a conscience or morals.
So perhaps he of the high church lecturing the rest of us about Christian values may consider the plank in his own eye. I haven't seen such screaming hypocrisy since IDS claimed to be a man of God before proceeding to smash the poor as hard as humanly possible.
Finally, what the red wall voted for. Yes Boris was a bit of a lad, the anti-politician anti-Tory. But they bought that principally because he offered the solution to their problems. Which wasn't Brexit, it was the reason why they voted for Brexit
There are many planks to this. Some voted to get rid of all the foreigners. Some because they wanted money for the NHS. Some to kick the government. And so many more because they wanted their town and their community and their family to have a chance in life that they unfairly were being denied. Fairness is something very high on the agenda of people in the red wall. So the idea they will still vote for the lying cheating mocking incompetent corrupt charlatan is breathtaking.
Boris Johnson is over. The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I think the last paragraph is very true. When I moved to London at 18, I was naive - but it was a wonderful naivety. On my first Saturday, I went into London clubbing, aiming for the Astoria (RIP). It opened at ten, and the queue went down a dinghy alleyway. There were two queues in fact, and I joined one because it seemed to have more pretty girls in it.
I had been queuing for five minutes, chatting to a bloke, before he pointed out that it was the queue for the ?Milk Bar?, a gay club, and the Astoria's queue was the other one. So I joined the queue for the Astoria - which had fewer pretty girls in it - and danced until six in the morning. And got myself a girlfriend.
Although I soon learned that 'gay' and 'straight' nights were pretty much irrelevant in most central London clubs - people just went where they wanted.
There is no way on God's Earth I would ever find myself in that sort of situation again, sadly - at least in the UK. Middle-aged naivety tends towards money and kids...
From Brexit to these despicable parties, the whole administration is built on bullshit, arrogance & shamelessness. What never ceases to amaze is the way his supporters embrace the absolute contempt in which he must hold them. Especially the client journalists. https://twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1480660178357964803
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
For sure. And true of almost any travel experience, imagined as a solo voyage of adventure but experienced as part of a crowd of people all doing the same thing inspired by the same book or blog or newspaper article. Which is partly why travel in 2020, which I was lucky enough to do during the September window between virus crises, was so remarkable. No-one else was doing it. Well, not many.
One thing about Now and Then is the difference with student grants etc. Mrs C and I finished our studies, see my previous post, with not a lot, but at least we started our working lives clear. Neither of my two elder grandchildren seem overly bothered about their loans, but it is a reduction in their income, and does seem something of an emotional drag. However, both have done some sort of voluntary work 'abroad'. One way and another, we have two grandchildren in their early thirties, then four in the mid to late 'teens, the eldest of whom is now at University. I hope Mrs C and I live long enough to see how student life, and the first couple of post-Uni years, turn out for them!
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
On the other hand, some parts of the world are much easier to explore. Russia, China, Indochina, but also Uganda etc.
There is a loss of spontaneity in modern travel, in that things are pre-booked. When I travelled across Asia in 1990 for some months, I would just pick up in a strange city and wait to be accosted by hostel touts. As far as my parents could tell, I disappeared for 3 months, until arriving back at Heathrow.
I think being born between 1955 and 1975 was probably best for opportunity and quality of life. I think that those born after the millenium are going to be poorer than their parents generation in a number of ways as well as financially.
The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
On the other hand, some parts of the world are much easier to explore. Russia, China, Indochina, but also Uganda etc.
There is a loss of spontaneity in modern travel, in that things are pre-booked. When I travelled across Asia in 1990 for some months, I would just pick up in a strange city and wait to be accosted by hostel touts. As far as my parents could tell, I disappeared for 3 months, until arriving back at Heathrow.
I think being born between 1955 and 1975 was probably best for opportunity and quality of life. I think that those born after the millenium are going to be poorer than their parents generation in a number of ways as well as financially.
Plenty on the other side, though.
People born after 1975, for example, will have grown up with far superior healthcare, central heating, and double glazing.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
On the other hand, some parts of the world are much easier to explore. Russia, China, Indochina, but also Uganda etc.
There is a loss of spontaneity in modern travel, in that things are pre-booked. When I travelled across Asia in 1990 for some months, I would just pick up in a strange city and wait to be accosted by hostel touts. As far as my parents could tell, I disappeared for 3 months, until arriving back at Heathrow.
I think being born between 1955 and 1975 was probably best for opportunity and quality of life. I think that those born after the millenium are going to be poorer than their parents generation in a number of ways as well as financially.
I fear you're looking at it from your own perspective, as someone who has become a successful and well-off doctor. I knew two men, born in the sixties, who went to school in a mining area in the late 1970s. Both were told by teachers not to bother with schooling as they'd end up working around or down the pit. Their teachers felt there was no reason to educate them, as they'd just be miners - at a time when that industry was regularly in strife, and a decade or so before it imploded.
Their kids and (now) grandkids have much better prospects.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
For sure. And true of almost any travel experience, imagined as a solo voyage of adventure but experienced as part of a crowd of people all doing the same thing inspired by the same book or blog or newspaper article. Which is partly why travel in 2020, which I was lucky enough to do during the September window between virus crises, was so remarkable. No-one else was doing it. Well, not many.
We've done quite a bit of our travelling as Seniors. And my wife has been heard to lament on occasion 'where have you brought me to NOW?'. A road trip across Cambodia features quite highly in those memories.
An odd thread really. HYUFD demonstrating just how wrong one man can be about so many things at the same time.
Firstly the Red Wall will not vote for Boris in 2024. Dismissing all other leaders because "they will only vote for Boris" is utterly ludicrous when the polls show they won't vote for Boris.
Secondly pretty much everyone here is lined up with the basics of right and wrong. Two months into Covid restrictions the government giving a 3pm "you will not meet with other people" instruction and a 5pm "everyone round to number 10, bring a bottle, we deserve a party" is demonstrably indefensible. Never mind the political optics, it's indefensible to anyone with a brain, a conscience or morals.
So perhaps he of the high church lecturing the rest of us about Christian values may consider the plank in his own eye. I haven't seen such screaming hypocrisy since IDS claimed to be a man of God before proceeding to smash the poor as hard as humanly possible.
Finally, what the red wall voted for. Yes Boris was a bit of a lad, the anti-politician anti-Tory. But they bought that principally because he offered the solution to their problems. Which wasn't Brexit, it was the reason why they voted for Brexit
There are many planks to this. Some voted to get rid of all the foreigners. Some because they wanted money for the NHS. Some to kick the government. And so many more because they wanted their town and their community and their family to have a chance in life that they unfairly were being denied. Fairness is something very high on the agenda of people in the red wall. So the idea they will still vote for the lying cheating mocking incompetent corrupt charlatan is breathtaking.
Boris Johnson is over. The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
What I don’t get is I look at the sub samples for the levelling up areas and think oh boy, Boris is screwed. Ben you Chen looks at the sub samples and goes better get a times header as I’m screwed and HYUFD goes nowt to worry about, Boris is going to win by a mile.
Ps the last sub samples were labour 44%, tories 33% it’s going to take a lot to fix that.
And before anyone again says people don’t return to Labour I refer you to Redcar. Don’t deliver, the people vote Labour as at least they get something.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
Good morning
Life seemed to be much more carefree 50 plus years ago than today and maybe that is because we had less and certainly did not have 24/7 social media and the complexity of todays world
My wife and I have decided to start sorting out the huge amount of old photos and memorabilia from years ago and we have been reading the wonderful love letters between my grandparents circa the late 1870 to WW1 and the pure romance in the letters is charming and of course were sent daily between each other. I should say my grandfather was a professional soldier and was away from my grandmother quite often.
We also came across a wedding photo of my parents in 1935 with a copy of my mothers wedding dress invoice in the amount of £2 7s 6p
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
On the other hand, some parts of the world are much easier to explore. Russia, China, Indochina, but also Uganda etc.
There is a loss of spontaneity in modern travel, in that things are pre-booked. When I travelled across Asia in 1990 for some months, I would just pick up in a strange city and wait to be accosted by hostel touts. As far as my parents could tell, I disappeared for 3 months, until arriving back at Heathrow.
I think being born between 1955 and 1975 was probably best for opportunity and quality of life. I think that those born after the millenium are going to be poorer than their parents generation in a number of ways as well as financially.
The isolation of travel has certainly gone.
As a student I spent a summer in Israel; hardly the darkest wilderness, yet my only contact with home was a couple of phone box calls, brief but hugely expensive, and a hassle to find and set up.
Ten years back I was out in Rwanda with a load of VSO volunteers - which in my youth would have been most remarkable isolation - but all of them were tweeting, blogging, and on Zoom and Skype calls to friends and family almost daily. The opportunity to be ‘lost in the jungle’ has receded hugely.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
On the other hand, some parts of the world are much easier to explore. Russia, China, Indochina, but also Uganda etc.
There is a loss of spontaneity in modern travel, in that things are pre-booked. When I travelled across Asia in 1990 for some months, I would just pick up in a strange city and wait to be accosted by hostel touts. As far as my parents could tell, I disappeared for 3 months, until arriving back at Heathrow.
I think being born between 1955 and 1975 was probably best for opportunity and quality of life. I think that those born after the millenium are going to be poorer than their parents generation in a number of ways as well as financially.
I fear you're looking at it from your own perspective, as someone who has become a successful and well-off doctor. I knew two men, born in the sixties, who went to school in a mining area in the late 1970s. Both were told by teachers not to bother with schooling as they'd end up working around or down the pit. Their teachers felt there was no reason to educate them, as they'd just be miners - at a time when that industry was regularly in strife, and a decade or so before it imploded.
Their kids and (now) grandkids have much better prospects.
On a somewhat similar trajectory, my dad was a Council Architect in the early 1970s, and he had accounts of committee meetings where mining councillors would argue against any need for insulation in houses because so many people had free coal from work, or via relatives, so there was no benefit.
An odd thread really. HYUFD demonstrating just how wrong one man can be about so many things at the same time.
Firstly the Red Wall will not vote for Boris in 2024. Dismissing all other leaders because "they will only vote for Boris" is utterly ludicrous when the polls show they won't vote for Boris.
Secondly pretty much everyone here is lined up with the basics of right and wrong. Two months into Covid restrictions the government giving a 3pm "you will not meet with other people" instruction and a 5pm "everyone round to number 10, bring a bottle, we deserve a party" is demonstrably indefensible. Never mind the political optics, it's indefensible to anyone with a brain, a conscience or morals.
So perhaps he of the high church lecturing the rest of us about Christian values may consider the plank in his own eye. I haven't seen such screaming hypocrisy since IDS claimed to be a man of God before proceeding to smash the poor as hard as humanly possible.
Finally, what the red wall voted for. Yes Boris was a bit of a lad, the anti-politician anti-Tory. But they bought that principally because he offered the solution to their problems. Which wasn't Brexit, it was the reason why they voted for Brexit
There are many planks to this. Some voted to get rid of all the foreigners. Some because they wanted money for the NHS. Some to kick the government. And so many more because they wanted their town and their community and their family to have a chance in life that they unfairly were being denied. Fairness is something very high on the agenda of people in the red wall. So the idea they will still vote for the lying cheating mocking incompetent corrupt charlatan is breathtaking.
Boris Johnson is over. The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
Good summary. I especially liked the concept of smashing the Tory party into pieces.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
Good morning
Life seemed to be much more carefree 50 plus years ago than today and maybe that is because we had less and certainly did not have 24/7 social media and the complexity of todays world
My wife and I have decided to start sorting out the huge amount of old photos and memorabilia from years ago and we have been reading the wonderful love letters between my grandparents circa the late 1870 to WW1 and the pure romance in the letters is charming and of course were sent daily between each other. I should say my grandfather was a professional soldier and was away from my grandmother quite often.
We also came across a wedding photo of my parents in 1935 with a copy of my mothers wedding dress invoice in the amount of £2 7s 6p
Our first home, a flat over an 'open all hours' shop half way up the Pennines cost us £2 per week! Did have an outside toilet though; a step across from the back door. My mother was a pharmacist who, in the 30's opened her own pharmacy, and I've got her cash book. Meticulous accounting, down the ha'penny!
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Yes, I think that valid. Even in the heyday of "the Hippie Trail" it was very small numbers and a few definite meeting points such as the Istanbul Pudding Shop.
He has certainly missed a heck of a lot of Cobra meetings. The man has very strange priorities. Apart from being boorish, corrupt, negligent and incompetent, his chief characteristic is bone idleness. One of his teachers at Eton wrote a fine summary of the youth who became the spoilt man-child.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Yes, I think that valid. Even in the heyday of "the Hippie Trail" it was very small numbers and a few definite meeting points such as the Istanbul Pudding Shop.
Very small numbers then in Khao San Road, Bangkok, I believe. Crowded the last time we had a look.
An odd thread really. HYUFD demonstrating just how wrong one man can be about so many things at the same time.
Firstly the Red Wall will not vote for Boris in 2024. Dismissing all other leaders because "they will only vote for Boris" is utterly ludicrous when the polls show they won't vote for Boris.
Secondly pretty much everyone here is lined up with the basics of right and wrong. Two months into Covid restrictions the government giving a 3pm "you will not meet with other people" instruction and a 5pm "everyone round to number 10, bring a bottle, we deserve a party" is demonstrably indefensible. Never mind the political optics, it's indefensible to anyone with a brain, a conscience or morals.
So perhaps he of the high church lecturing the rest of us about Christian values may consider the plank in his own eye. I haven't seen such screaming hypocrisy since IDS claimed to be a man of God before proceeding to smash the poor as hard as humanly possible.
Finally, what the red wall voted for. Yes Boris was a bit of a lad, the anti-politician anti-Tory. But they bought that principally because he offered the solution to their problems. Which wasn't Brexit, it was the reason why they voted for Brexit
There are many planks to this. Some voted to get rid of all the foreigners. Some because they wanted money for the NHS. Some to kick the government. And so many more because they wanted their town and their community and their family to have a chance in life that they unfairly were being denied. Fairness is something very high on the agenda of people in the red wall. So the idea they will still vote for the lying cheating mocking incompetent corrupt charlatan is breathtaking.
Boris Johnson is over. The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
So, what odds are you offering on Boris leading the Tories into the next election and getting a majority?
The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
That’s a tough choice, for sure. For us.
For those of us who want a change of government it would be great if Boris Johnson wasn't over. Keep him in there digging the pit deeper and deeper and deeper.
Just the problem that he is doing serious damage to the UK - both in the immediate term and in the prospects for its very survival. And serious damage to politics as a whole.
So keeping it going has a serious price to pay that in my opinion isn't worth it. We have to have basic morality and decency and the rule of law or we have nothing.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
On the other hand, some parts of the world are much easier to explore. Russia, China, Indochina, but also Uganda etc.
There is a loss of spontaneity in modern travel, in that things are pre-booked. When I travelled across Asia in 1990 for some months, I would just pick up in a strange city and wait to be accosted by hostel touts. As far as my parents could tell, I disappeared for 3 months, until arriving back at Heathrow.
I think being born between 1955 and 1975 was probably best for opportunity and quality of life. I think that those born after the millenium are going to be poorer than their parents generation in a number of ways as well as financially.
I fear you're looking at it from your own perspective, as someone who has become a successful and well-off doctor. I knew two men, born in the sixties, who went to school in a mining area in the late 1970s. Both were told by teachers not to bother with schooling as they'd end up working around or down the pit. Their teachers felt there was no reason to educate them, as they'd just be miners - at a time when that industry was regularly in strife, and a decade or so before it imploded.
Their kids and (now) grandkids have much better prospects.
Well, I am not convinced by that. Certainly people had hard lives and many still do, but they had opportunities that their parents didn't, and the ability to find secure well paid work that supports a family that many of their children will never have.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
For sure. And true of almost any travel experience, imagined as a solo voyage of adventure but experienced as part of a crowd of people all doing the same thing inspired by the same book or blog or newspaper article. Which is partly why travel in 2020, which I was lucky enough to do during the September window between virus crises, was so remarkable. No-one else was doing it. Well, not many.
We've done quite a bit of our travelling as Seniors. And my wife has been heard to lament on occasion 'where have you brought me to NOW?'. A road trip across Cambodia features quite highly in those memories.
Tell her just to be pleased that each time you bring her back….
The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
That’s a tough choice, for sure. For us.
For those of us who want a change of government it would be great if Boris Johnson wasn't over. Keep him in there digging the pit deeper and deeper and deeper.
Just the problem that he is doing serious damage to the UK - both in the immediate term and in the prospects for its very survival. And serious damage to politics as a whole.
So keeping it going has a serious price to pay that in my opinion isn't worth it. We have to have basic morality and decency and the rule of law or we have nothing.
As Trump has done serious damage to Brand America internationally, so Johnson is damaging Brand GB.
Just the problem that he is doing serious damage to the UK - both in the immediate term and in the prospects for its very survival. And serious damage to politics as a whole.
So keeping it going has a serious price to pay that in my opinion isn't worth it. We have to have basic morality and decency and the rule of law or we have nothing.
But maybe that is already sunk cost.
Our International reputation can't sink much lower (can it?)
The office of the PM has been debased as far as is possible (hasn't it?)
What did happen to “all the rules were followed” - which we can vaguely remember was the clown’s first excuse, before we moved onto “it was all down to my naughty staff” and now “she’s investigating so sadly I can’t say anything”?
Every generation has existential fears and often these are tested to the point of near realisation: the rise of fascism, communism, nuclear holocaust; etc etc. The 1990s were an abberation, but were I to be around then I am pretty sure I would be worrying about something, maybe lost nuclear weapons in the former soviet union....
You have to somehow keep going, and not give up.
But what I have found interesting is the panic about climate change; the greater problem that I can foresee is that humans are allowing themselves to live under surveillance by overwhelmingly powerful yet imperfect machines. These processes and the technology involved is expanding in an almost completely unregulated way. This is actually fundamentally altering human nature, manifesting itself in the continual sacrifice of freedom for safety, and the desire to allow machines to take decisions for us.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Yes, I think that valid. Even in the heyday of "the Hippie Trail" it was very small numbers and a few definite meeting points such as the Istanbul Pudding Shop.
Very small numbers then in Khao San Road, Bangkok, I believe. Crowded the last time we had a look.
I stopped by there in 1990, but even then it was very crowded, with travellers clutching their copies of "SE Asia on a Shoestring" as if deviating from the yellow book would leave them lost. It was handy though for booking onward journeys.
It's a different travel experience now, as @IanB2 says of his experience of Rwanda. The isolation of travel has gone with the rise of smartphones and social media. That isolation, and even boredom, was part of the experience of self discovery.
As he applauded NHS on 21 May, 2020 they were probably still removing the empties from the party in the Downing Street Garden the night before. Sue Gray was appointed on Dec 17 to complete the Inquiry into whether lockdown rules were broken. It does not require Hercule Poirot. https://twitter.com/patrickwintour/status/1480806887549542404
What did happen to “all the rules were followed” - which we can vaguely remember was the clown’s first excuse, before we moved onto “it was all down to my naughty staff” and now “she’s investigating so sadly I can’t say anything”?
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Indeed. My dad, born in 1920s, considered a holiday in the Channel Islands to be an exotic and exciting event. Now folk would consider you barking mad if you raved about the wonders of Jersey.
The most “exotic” place I’ve ever been is Bali, and it was pretty rubbish. Jam packed full of Aussies, for whom it seems to be their equivalent of Tenerife.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
Good morning
Life seemed to be much more carefree 50 plus years ago than today and maybe that is because we had less and certainly did not have 24/7 social media and the complexity of todays world
My wife and I have decided to start sorting out the huge amount of old photos and memorabilia from years ago and we have been reading the wonderful love letters between my grandparents circa the late 1870 to WW1 and the pure romance in the letters is charming and of course were sent daily between each other. I should say my grandfather was a professional soldier and was away from my grandmother quite often.
We also came across a wedding photo of my parents in 1935 with a copy of my mothers wedding dress invoice in the amount of £2 7s 6p
Our first home, a flat over an 'open all hours' shop half way up the Pennines cost us £2 per week! Did have an outside toilet though; a step across from the back door. My mother was a pharmacist who, in the 30's opened her own pharmacy, and I've got her cash book. Meticulous accounting, down the ha'penny!
I had a chat with my lettings agent last week about rents for students in a Midlands' city near here.
The University is charging self-catering rents of between about 160-225 per week in student halls, typically on ~45 week contracts. Towards the expensive end, or a bit more expensive, there are things like inclusive private gyms. Apparently 7-8 years after some of these were built, they are still having to give cashbacks to fill the later rooms.
For me, my self-catering accommodation on campus in West Yorkshire was £17 a week in the first year - mid 1980s.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Yes, I think that valid. Even in the heyday of "the Hippie Trail" it was very small numbers and a few definite meeting points such as the Istanbul Pudding Shop.
Very small numbers then in Khao San Road, Bangkok, I believe. Crowded the last time we had a look.
I stopped by there in 1990, but even then it was very crowded, with travellers clutching their copies of "SE Asia on a Shoestring" as if deviating from the yellow book would leave them lost. It was handy though for booking onward journeys.
It's a different travel experience now, as @IanB2 says of his experience of Rwanda. The isolation of travel has gone with the rise of smartphones and social media. That isolation, and even boredom, was part of the experience of self discovery.
Agree; both sons went 'abroad' as part of their degrees (late 80's, Germany and the US) and while we had email for the younger, contacts with Eldest Granddaughter, who went round the world in 2015 or so were much much more frequent.
As he applauded NHS on 21 May, 2020 they were probably still removing the empties from the party in the Downing Street Garden the night before. Sue Gray was appointed on Dec 17 to complete the Inquiry into whether lockdown rules were broken. It does not require Hercule Poirot. https://twitter.com/patrickwintour/status/1480806887549542404
The deeper they dig, the more they will find. Investigative journalism not quite dead yet.
An odd thread really. HYUFD demonstrating just how wrong one man can be about so many things at the same time.
Firstly the Red Wall will not vote for Boris in 2024. Dismissing all other leaders because "they will only vote for Boris" is utterly ludicrous when the polls show they won't vote for Boris.
Secondly pretty much everyone here is lined up with the basics of right and wrong. Two months into Covid restrictions the government giving a 3pm "you will not meet with other people" instruction and a 5pm "everyone round to number 10, bring a bottle, we deserve a party" is demonstrably indefensible. Never mind the political optics, it's indefensible to anyone with a brain, a conscience or morals.
So perhaps he of the high church lecturing the rest of us about Christian values may consider the plank in his own eye. I haven't seen such screaming hypocrisy since IDS claimed to be a man of God before proceeding to smash the poor as hard as humanly possible.
Finally, what the red wall voted for. Yes Boris was a bit of a lad, the anti-politician anti-Tory. But they bought that principally because he offered the solution to their problems. Which wasn't Brexit, it was the reason why they voted for Brexit
There are many planks to this. Some voted to get rid of all the foreigners. Some because they wanted money for the NHS. Some to kick the government. And so many more because they wanted their town and their community and their family to have a chance in life that they unfairly were being denied. Fairness is something very high on the agenda of people in the red wall. So the idea they will still vote for the lying cheating mocking incompetent corrupt charlatan is breathtaking.
Boris Johnson is over. The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
So, what odds are you offering on Boris leading the Tories into the next election and getting a majority?
Not offering the odds - but my finger in the air says 4/1, maybe 5/1
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Indeed. My dad, born in 1920s, considered a holiday in the Channel Islands to be an exotic and exciting event. Now folk would consider you barking mad if you raved about the wonders of Jersey.
The most “exotic” place I’ve ever been is Bali, and it was pretty rubbish. Jam packed full of Aussies, for whom it seems to be their equivalent of Tenerife.
How far did you explore Bali? It's easy to escape Australia's "Benidorm" (Kuta/Legian)
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Yes, I think that valid. Even in the heyday of "the Hippie Trail" it was very small numbers and a few definite meeting points such as the Istanbul Pudding Shop.
Very small numbers then in Khao San Road, Bangkok, I believe. Crowded the last time we had a look.
I stopped by there in 1990, but even then it was very crowded, with travellers clutching their copies of "SE Asia on a Shoestring" as if deviating from the yellow book would leave them lost. It was handy though for booking onward journeys.
It's a different travel experience now, as @IanB2 says of his experience of Rwanda. The isolation of travel has gone with the rise of smartphones and social media. That isolation, and even boredom, was part of the experience of self discovery.
I passed through there in 2002. I did the same thing, going around south east asia meeting lots of people from all around the world quoting the lonely planet guidebook at each other. The freedom can never be recreated and is something that I am nostalgic for, but objectively not much has truly been lost. The internet has made such travel infinetly more efficient, but no more purposeful.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
Good morning
Life seemed to be much more carefree 50 plus years ago than today and maybe that is because we had less and certainly did not have 24/7 social media and the complexity of todays world
My wife and I have decided to start sorting out the huge amount of old photos and memorabilia from years ago and we have been reading the wonderful love letters between my grandparents circa the late 1870 to WW1 and the pure romance in the letters is charming and of course were sent daily between each other. I should say my grandfather was a professional soldier and was away from my grandmother quite often.
We also came across a wedding photo of my parents in 1935 with a copy of my mothers wedding dress invoice in the amount of £2 7s 6p
Our first home, a flat over an 'open all hours' shop half way up the Pennines cost us £2 per week! Did have an outside toilet though; a step across from the back door. My mother was a pharmacist who, in the 30's opened her own pharmacy, and I've got her cash book. Meticulous accounting, down the ha'penny!
I had a chat with my lettings agent last week about rents for students in a Midlands' city near here.
The University is charging self-catering rents of between about 160-225 per week in student halls, typically on ~45 week contracts. Towards the expensive end, or a bit more expensive, there are things like inclusive private gyms. Apparently 7-8 years after some of these were built, they are still having to give cashbacks to fill the later rooms.
For me, my self-catering accommodation on campus in West Yorkshire was £17 a week in the first year - mid 1980s.
The big cost-rise was the Oil Price Rise in 1973. All sorts of prices increased overnight. And, in this country, decimalisation drove up prices, as a result of the City's inability to count to two.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
On the other hand, some parts of the world are much easier to explore. Russia, China, Indochina, but also Uganda etc.
There is a loss of spontaneity in modern travel, in that things are pre-booked. When I travelled across Asia in 1990 for some months, I would just pick up in a strange city and wait to be accosted by hostel touts. As far as my parents could tell, I disappeared for 3 months, until arriving back at Heathrow.
I think being born between 1955 and 1975 was probably best for opportunity and quality of life. I think that those born after the millenium are going to be poorer than their parents generation in a number of ways as well as financially.
I fear you're looking at it from your own perspective, as someone who has become a successful and well-off doctor. I knew two men, born in the sixties, who went to school in a mining area in the late 1970s. Both were told by teachers not to bother with schooling as they'd end up working around or down the pit. Their teachers felt there was no reason to educate them, as they'd just be miners - at a time when that industry was regularly in strife, and a decade or so before it imploded.
Their kids and (now) grandkids have much better prospects.
Well, I am not convinced by that. Certainly people had hard lives and many still do, but they had opportunities that their parents didn't, and the ability to find secure well paid work that supports a family that many of their children will never have.
That's the point: THEY DID NOT HAVE OPPORTUNITIES.
As far as others were concerned, they were going to work in mining, and there was no point in educating them beyond the very basics. When the mines closed, they ended up on the sick for the rest of their lives, like many of their friends.
One of them had two kids: one was the first in their family to go to uni, and the other has a good office job working for the council.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Yes, I think that valid. Even in the heyday of "the Hippie Trail" it was very small numbers and a few definite meeting points such as the Istanbul Pudding Shop.
Very small numbers then in Khao San Road, Bangkok, I believe. Crowded the last time we had a look.
For over a decade I used to go to the Adventure Travel event at Olympia each winter, a mix of travel exhibition and travel university, with talks from various travellers and adventurers - it was an enjoyable way to spend a weekend and how I got to hear Ted Simon and many others recount their adventures.
But the contrast between some of the (particularly older) stories of "just go off and do it" adventures and the exhibition was striking. For "adventure travel" is now an industry - with full careers for a surprisingly wide range of people, not just travel agents but trainers, logistics planners, bloggers, writers (with a crowd of young wannabees desperate to make connections on the way to becoming the next Simon Reeve) - and 'customers', offered packaged adventures by 'overland travel' companies - essentially coach tours for young people where you have to help with the cooking - or, for those that go solo/independent, all manner of companies that will arrange your visas, convert and equip your vehicle, sort your kit, plan your route and logistics, train you to cope with hazards and danger, handle your comms, even come and do the journey with you.
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
Good morning
Life seemed to be much more carefree 50 plus years ago than today and maybe that is because we had less and certainly did not have 24/7 social media and the complexity of todays world
My wife and I have decided to start sorting out the huge amount of old photos and memorabilia from years ago and we have been reading the wonderful love letters between my grandparents circa the late 1870 to WW1 and the pure romance in the letters is charming and of course were sent daily between each other. I should say my grandfather was a professional soldier and was away from my grandmother quite often.
We also came across a wedding photo of my parents in 1935 with a copy of my mothers wedding dress invoice in the amount of £2 7s 6p
Our first home, a flat over an 'open all hours' shop half way up the Pennines cost us £2 per week! Did have an outside toilet though; a step across from the back door. My mother was a pharmacist who, in the 30's opened her own pharmacy, and I've got her cash book. Meticulous accounting, down the ha'penny!
I had a chat with my lettings agent last week about rents for students in a Midlands' city near here.
The University is charging self-catering rents of between about 160-225 per week in student halls, typically on ~45 week contracts. Towards the expensive end, or a bit more expensive, there are things like inclusive private gyms. Apparently 7-8 years after some of these were built, they are still having to give cashbacks to fill the later rooms.
For me, my self-catering accommodation on campus in West Yorkshire was £17 a week in the first year - mid 1980s.
Nine grand a year, per person, for a self catering hall of residence? That’s nuts, and so many of the students are borrowing money that will never be paid back for this.
Surely that amount rents a three-bed house, anywhere north of about Milton Keynes?
Let me put this politely: it is not *entirely clear* why the Prime Minister needs to wait for Sue Gray's report to find out if he went to a party in his own garden
"A government minister" will be on R4 in ten minutes to explain everything. Doesn't sound like it's a big name. Or they are still in the Green Room arguing who it will be?
"A government minister" will be on R4 in ten minutes to explain everything. Doesn't sound like it's a big name. Or they are still in the Green Room arguing who it will be?
The idea of a computer built using an array of processors may have first arisen in 1952.
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
I had a tour of the Met Office sometime around 1993, when it was at the old location in Bracknell. They had a couple of “supercomputers” there, known affectionately as “The Cray Twins”, which had less processing power than my phone does now, 30 years later.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the early to mid 1920s, and were male, you stood a good chance of fighting in WWII. No thanks. If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks. In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks. My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
Oh indeed, the very best time to be alive is right now - despite what we might read every day, about how awful everything in the world is at the moment.
Fascinating thread, and I'm sure Big G and I could share memories.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
There was an innocence and simplicity about past times that has been lost, for sure. And a human peculiarity is that living through shared hardship tends to make people quite happy, at least in retrospect.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I read the first Ted Simon, and enjoyed it; didn't know about the second. I think one is possibly less likely to be treated as an interesting curiosity, as Simon was able to be, nowadays, and part of that is because there are more people doing, if not exactly what he did, something similar. Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
Yes, I think that valid. Even in the heyday of "the Hippie Trail" it was very small numbers and a few definite meeting points such as the Istanbul Pudding Shop.
Very small numbers then in Khao San Road, Bangkok, I believe. Crowded the last time we had a look.
I stopped by there in 1990, but even then it was very crowded, with travellers clutching their copies of "SE Asia on a Shoestring" as if deviating from the yellow book would leave them lost. It was handy though for booking onward journeys.
It's a different travel experience now, as @IanB2 says of his experience of Rwanda. The isolation of travel has gone with the rise of smartphones and social media. That isolation, and even boredom, was part of the experience of self discovery.
Agree; both sons went 'abroad' as part of their degrees (late 80's, Germany and the US) and while we had email for the younger, contacts with Eldest Granddaughter, who went round the world in 2015 or so were much much more frequent.
The converse of that, is that today’s parents are expecting to hear from their travelling kids every couple of days, rather than every few weeks in the days before we had ubiquitous personal communications.
For many kids in the past, being free of their parents for weeks on end was part of the reason for their adventures in the first place!
Comments
I doubt if many non-political people anywhere think in terms of "big state" or "small state" - those are abstract terms. But if you translate it into a specific service - most obviously the NHS, but also decent schools, buses and trains - then people are mostly quite keen on a big state.
Before he’s sent to the wall, and hung up to dry.
But don't worry, it will generate lots of revenue for Bechtel.
The most striking memory of the lead up to Brexit vote was an chap in Stoke of Asian heritage being interviewed and getting the you will be £x worse off if you vote to leave and him pointing to some shit housing going you might be, but i won't, its shit round here, it always been shit around here forever, what the hell have I got to lose.
From my perspective, someone whose life spanned from 1882 to 1952 lived through the bigger change. 1882 seems almost unimaginably distant. Two world wars away; hell, they didn't even have a real democracy back then. 1952 is a long way away but my parents had both been born then, into houses which were recently built and look unremarkable today. 1952 doesn't feel that unreachable. It was even in colour. But maybe that's just recency bias.
However I agree the only votes for austerity were in 2010 and 2015 of recent elections and 2015 the only recent election where a majority narrowly voted for austerity (sweetened by promises of further tax cuts and the EU referendum for Leavers). In 2017 the Tories lost their majority on a continued austerity platform and needed the big spending DUP to retain office
Almost everyone wants more money for public services if that money comes from someone else, particularly if you feel it's only fair as they've been diddling the rest of us for years.
But delivering on the lie is really, really difficult. You can do a bit of repaving etc, but that's polishing the turd and it's not very clear how much time that buys you.
I know miniature pig can grow very big. I researched it. When she found that I conceded is no real thing as miniature pig.
I found myself saying if Wilbur did over a year or so get bit big for a flat in Chelsea - a 3 bed flat so he will have his own room - we could maybe drive him to my Dads. Say goodbye And leave him there.
Then I realised I Couldn’t leave him with anyone else if you love him so much, they might eat him.
The fall of the Anglo-American Empire
The birth of the internet (the most significant human means of communication ever)
The birth of the smartphone (the most significant human tech device ever)
Climate change becoming tangible
The rise of China
Lots of wars, yawn
The biggest pandemic in a century
And that's so far
In the next 50-70 years we will see
Climate change becoming epochal
China supreme (then toppled?)
Medical science defeating endless diseases, maybe even stopping ageing
but way beyond these, we will see:
Artificial General Intelligence, the machines outthink us, with all that entails from the arts to science to education to daily life at every level, onwards to religion
Maybe final and serious proof of non-human intelligence, interacting with us
It could easily be the most significant 70 years in the entire history of homo sapiens
Night night
Today, the world's most powerful supercomputer has a processing capacity of 442 petaFLOPS, 442,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.
The first operational computer weather forecast produced by the Met Office in 1965 was run on a computer called Comet that could perform 60,000 arithmetic operations per second.
However, the first experimental forecast was produced in 1952, on EDSAC, which could manage 167 multiplications per second, or 667 other operations.
The current Met Office supercomputer is due for replacement, but can still manage a creditable 16 petaflops - about 100 million million times faster than the machine they borrowed use of in 1952.
As for time to be alive, maybe born in the 1920s or 30s, and going from electricity being novel to the internet being ubiquitous.
If you were born in the 1930s, you faced living through the war as a child or teenager. No thanks.
In the 1990s, I knew a youngish lady who had had polio that had affected her walking. Heck, I believe my mum got polio, fortunately with no long-term effects. No thanks.
My grandparents were using an outside toilet into their eighties, in the 1990s (despite my dad and their other kids offering to build one attached to the house for them). (They had an indoors toilet upstairs, but if downstairs would go to the outside one.) No thanks.
We look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Much of the past was sh*t.
Here's a prediction: worldwide, in the long term, the Covid outbreak will end up saving more lives than it has cost, as the progress in vaccination and treatment technology will end up saving lives.
I see a better future for my little 'un than I, or any of my ancestors, had. Despite Covid (*), the time to be alive is now.
(*) After all, influenza-style outbreaks, and of other diseases, were hardly unknown.
The top 4 regions by Public Sector expenditure per head are London, NI, Scotland, Wales.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04033/
We’ve all been speculating what revelation might come next, for many weeks. Did he not stop to consider the same question, with the ever-so-slight advantage of being able to know?
On the one hand, this should relieve some of the pressure on him from the party stories. On the other, once all the masks and petty rules finally (we fervently hope) disappear, it'll be a matter of breathing a collective sigh of relief and moving on immediately. I doubt that the Government will get much credit for it.
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
The best time to be alive is now - and it is up to us to ensure that the future is bright for all our little 'uns. It's in our hands, it's our resonsibility.
* coughing to all the transgressions in one go would've generated a really enormous hoo-hah - might've been enough to trigger action to remove him
* was probably hoping that this story wouldn't come out/is keeping his fingers crossed that the others won't
* calculation that public might eventually get bored with steady stream of revelations
???
David Sassoli: European Parliament president dies aged 65
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59947211
RIP. I have no idea how this may (or may not) affect EU politics.
He shouldn't. He probably will.
Hell, I can remember getting excited when my office trialled some bulletin board thing that meant I could write something for the guy at the other end of the same office without walking over there. God knows how long ago that was.
Brexit was very much "The country voted to Leave; why have we not left yet?". Answer: because of a poisonous rearguard campaign being fought to undermine the vote.
Corbyn was a variety of reasons. Around here - a reasonably important military recruitment area - it was probably in part his willingness to give succour to terrorists and a hearing to their representatives, whilst snubbing their victims. Many round here have people known to them who have been murdered / targeted / threatened by terrorist organisations and their proxies. I had a schoolfriend who's brother, for example, who was in the Droppin Well hotel when it was blown up by INLA.
Add in stuff such as his silly posturing on Defence, the toleration (at least) and facilitation (arguably) of racism, and the rest - and there was plenty of reason to vote for other parties.
Blaming it on the staff was the best of a range of excuses that popped into his head at the time. That’ll do.
I'm not quite sure, though, now IS the best time to be alive; our adult (or nearly adult) grandchildren seem to have more concerns than Mrs C and I did. It's our 60th anniversary later this year and I think that, while life is materially better for our two elder grandchildren (one married, one in what appears to be pretty stable relationship), the optimism isn't quite there. Climate change is going to bring about something of a 'reset' in living patterns!
We all put too much emphasis on opinion and emotion, and not enough on data. Something that’s been driven home by the experiences of the past 24 months.
Another plug for Harvard psycologist Steven Pinker’s book Rationality, which discusses these concepts in depth.
Every time voters reflect on how 10s of K of people were not able properly to say goodbye to their relatives before they died, particularly amongst relatives and friends, and then remember Boris having a knees-up with his friends in violation of the regulations he had imposed that caused it, it will cut to the quick.
That's the type of thing that is correctly not forgotten or forgiven.
I wonder if Boris is capable of making himself as untouchable as Corbyn was?
From that article, there was already an election scheduled to replace Mr Sassoon, for later this month, so there shouldn’t be too much discontinuity. Presumably the Parliament will elect someone of a similar outlook to their predecessor.
Surely it was more exciting, and less damaging, to be aged 11 and find a picture from Playboy in the school toilet than to be watching some hardcore BDSM on your iPhone at the same age?
I once went to a talk that Ted Simon gave about his motorcycle travels, and bought both the Jupiter books on the back of it. They’re not works of literature but the first one is an engaging story of a young guy who sets off round the world on his motorcycle, all his adventures and the friendship and hospitality he receives.
In the second one, he tries to retrace his steps in middle age. It’s quite a poignant read; of course, the world isn’t the same, much that he enjoyed has gone or changed beyond recognition - and the world isn’t open to the middle aged in the way that it is to the young. So it’s a sad read from the aspect of his ageing, and his own transformation in outlook, well on the way toward becoming victor meldrew, but it’s also reflection on how much of the wonder, and relative safety, of the world has disappeared over recent decades. Indeed since the second book was written, it probably isn’t safe for a westerner to make the trip any more, thanks to terrorism and various local crises.
I think he had long term depression brought on by choosing to do it on a Triumph fucking Tiger. I recall from the first book he gets as far as Coventry before it develops an oil leak.
Simon wrote not too long after the end of National Service, a time when many young men had had their fill of foreign travel. My fiancée and I were considered quite adventurous when, in 1961, we used the last of our college cash to have a couple of weeks in Guernsey before starting work.
The public already know he lies to them.
And they love him for it
Firstly the Red Wall will not vote for Boris in 2024. Dismissing all other leaders because "they will only vote for Boris" is utterly ludicrous when the polls show they won't vote for Boris.
Secondly pretty much everyone here is lined up with the basics of right and wrong. Two months into Covid restrictions the government giving a 3pm "you will not meet with other people" instruction and a 5pm "everyone round to number 10, bring a bottle, we deserve a party" is demonstrably indefensible. Never mind the political optics, it's indefensible to anyone with a brain, a conscience or morals.
So perhaps he of the high church lecturing the rest of us about Christian values may consider the plank in his own eye. I haven't seen such screaming hypocrisy since IDS claimed to be a man of God before proceeding to smash the poor as hard as humanly possible.
Finally, what the red wall voted for. Yes Boris was a bit of a lad, the anti-politician anti-Tory. But they bought that principally because he offered the solution to their problems. Which wasn't Brexit, it was the reason why they voted for Brexit
There are many planks to this. Some voted to get rid of all the foreigners. Some because they wanted money for the NHS. Some to kick the government. And so many more because they wanted their town and their community and their family to have a chance in life that they unfairly were being denied. Fairness is something very high on the agenda of people in the red wall. So the idea they will still vote for the lying cheating mocking incompetent corrupt charlatan is breathtaking.
Boris Johnson is over. The Tory party can either accept this, replace him with someone who represents the values of both the party and the country and have a chance, or keep him and not only lose the election but smash the party into pieces.
Today
I didn’t attend and followed the rules at all times
Wednesday
Reynolds resigns
Thursday
New Variant ( tell Sir Chris and Sir Patrick to be ready at 5pm )
Friday
Lord Martin Reynolds
Saturday
Met police drop the investigation with no evidence
👍
https://twitter.com/GNev2/status/1480758908830502919
I had been queuing for five minutes, chatting to a bloke, before he pointed out that it was the queue for the ?Milk Bar?, a gay club, and the Astoria's queue was the other one. So I joined the queue for the Astoria - which had fewer pretty girls in it - and danced until six in the morning. And got myself a girlfriend.
Although I soon learned that 'gay' and 'straight' nights were pretty much irrelevant in most central London clubs - people just went where they wanted.
There is no way on God's Earth I would ever find myself in that sort of situation again, sadly - at least in the UK. Middle-aged naivety tends towards money and kids...
https://twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1480660178357964803
He tells @SkyNews it’s “absolutely right” Sue Gray is looking at the No10 parties. He says he doesn't know about the allegations but he understands people will be “upset and angry”
https://twitter.com/LizzyBuchan/status/1480798950760361985
One way and another, we have two grandchildren in their early thirties, then four in the mid to late 'teens, the eldest of whom is now at University. I hope Mrs C and I live long enough to see how student life, and the first couple of post-Uni years, turn out for them!
There is a loss of spontaneity in modern travel, in that things are pre-booked. When I travelled across Asia in 1990 for some months, I would just pick up in a strange city and wait to be accosted by hostel touts. As far as my parents could tell, I disappeared for 3 months, until arriving back at Heathrow.
I think being born between 1955 and 1975 was probably best for opportunity and quality of life. I think that those born after the millenium are going to be poorer than their parents generation in a number of ways as well as financially.
People born after 1975, for example, will have grown up with far superior healthcare, central heating, and double glazing.
Their kids and (now) grandkids have much better prospects.
A road trip across Cambodia features quite highly in those memories.
https://twitter.com/Brooksie19811/status/1480664595417214979
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1480801785954680832/photo/1
Ps the last sub samples were labour 44%, tories 33% it’s going to take a lot to fix that.
And before anyone again says people don’t return to Labour I refer you to Redcar. Don’t deliver, the people vote Labour as at least they get something.
Life seemed to be much more carefree 50 plus years ago than today and maybe that is because we had less and certainly did not have 24/7 social media and the complexity of todays world
My wife and I have decided to start sorting out the huge amount of old photos and memorabilia from years ago and we have been reading the wonderful love letters between my grandparents circa the late 1870 to WW1 and the pure romance in the letters is charming and of course were sent daily between each other. I should say my grandfather was a professional soldier and was away from my grandmother quite often.
We also came across a wedding photo of my parents in 1935 with a copy of my mothers wedding dress invoice in the amount of £2 7s 6p
As a student I spent a summer in Israel; hardly the darkest wilderness, yet my only contact with home was a couple of phone box calls, brief but hugely expensive, and a hassle to find and set up.
Ten years back I was out in Rwanda with a load of VSO volunteers - which in my youth would have been most remarkable isolation - but all of them were tweeting, blogging, and on Zoom and Skype calls to friends and family almost daily. The opportunity to be ‘lost in the jungle’ has receded hugely.
The legacy scheme still exists:
https://www.gov.uk/national-concessionary-fuel-scheme
My mother was a pharmacist who, in the 30's opened her own pharmacy, and I've got her cash book. Meticulous accounting, down the ha'penny!
2 minutes which should cause outrage across the country
Not only did Boris Johnson deny any parties took place at NO 10 during lockdown Government Ministers actually fell over themselves to back him!
This whole rotten Government needs to go https://twitter.com/PeterStefanovi2/status/1480785995205423110/video/1
Just the problem that he is doing serious damage to the UK - both in the immediate term and in the prospects for its very survival. And serious damage to politics as a whole.
So keeping it going has a serious price to pay that in my opinion isn't worth it. We have to have basic morality and decency and the rule of law or we have nothing.
Our International reputation can't sink much lower (can it?)
The office of the PM has been debased as far as is possible (hasn't it?)
You have to somehow keep going, and not give up.
But what I have found interesting is the panic about climate change; the greater problem that I can foresee is that humans are allowing themselves to live under surveillance by overwhelmingly powerful yet imperfect machines. These processes and the technology involved is expanding in an almost completely unregulated way. This is actually fundamentally altering human nature, manifesting itself in the continual sacrifice of freedom for safety, and the desire to allow machines to take decisions for us.
Not Peter Stefanovic!
How ever will Boris survive?
The man gives single issue fanatics a bad name.....
It's a different travel experience now, as @IanB2 says of his experience of Rwanda. The isolation of travel has gone with the rise of smartphones and social media. That isolation, and even boredom, was part of the experience of self discovery.
https://twitter.com/patrickwintour/status/1480806887549542404
The most “exotic” place I’ve ever been is Bali, and it was pretty rubbish. Jam packed full of Aussies, for whom it seems to be their equivalent of Tenerife.
Are some people sweating this morning?
The University is charging self-catering rents of between about 160-225 per week in student halls, typically on ~45 week contracts. Towards the expensive end, or a bit more expensive, there are things like inclusive private gyms. Apparently 7-8 years after some of these were built, they are still having to give cashbacks to fill the later rooms.
For me, my self-catering accommodation on campus in West Yorkshire was £17 a week in the first year - mid 1980s.
A drink after work really isn’t a “Party”, by any definition of the term.
https://twitter.com/GavinBarwell/status/1480686671310073864
As far as others were concerned, they were going to work in mining, and there was no point in educating them beyond the very basics. When the mines closed, they ended up on the sick for the rest of their lives, like many of their friends.
One of them had two kids: one was the first in their family to go to uni, and the other has a good office job working for the council.
But the contrast between some of the (particularly older) stories of "just go off and do it" adventures and the exhibition was striking. For "adventure travel" is now an industry - with full careers for a surprisingly wide range of people, not just travel agents but trainers, logistics planners, bloggers, writers (with a crowd of young wannabees desperate to make connections on the way to becoming the next Simon Reeve) - and 'customers', offered packaged adventures by 'overland travel' companies - essentially coach tours for young people where you have to help with the cooking - or, for those that go solo/independent, all manner of companies that will arrange your visas, convert and equip your vehicle, sort your kit, plan your route and logistics, train you to cope with hazards and danger, handle your comms, even come and do the journey with you.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-guidance-on-spending-time-outdoors
We were coming out of lockdown in May 2020, like many we had a garden drinks with neighbours 8 May (for VE Day) - it is in my diary.
Just saying.
The faux outrage from the clown and the lies is the thing.
Surely that amount rents a three-bed house, anywhere north of about Milton Keynes?
https://twitter.com/GavinBarwell/status/1480686671310073864?s=20
People will also be able to see one person from another household, as long as they follow social distance guidance
So 1 person at a distance of 2 metres.
It was May 20th the same day as this press conference https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=press+conderence+may+20+2020&docid=608030170881006000&mid=6A10D7957EE1AA6DB0716A10D7957EE1AA6DB071&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
And a tweet from the Met Police saying meeting more than 1 person its a crime and you need to remain 2 metres apart.
So apart from admitting to breaking the rules in May 2020 I'm not sure what you are saying there.
For many kids in the past, being free of their parents for weeks on end was part of the reason for their adventures in the first place!