I can’t accurately express how angry stuff like this makes me. Absolutely disgraceful.
I have no idea why the Post Office even exists at this point. It seems like a relict from another age that serves no function beyond those of a less than averagely good delivery company and a Pound Shop.
See also: the House of Lords, the Red Arrows, the Royal Family, Morgan cars, the BBC, the CoE and Tony Robinson.
Yes but unfortunately it is the law - because of the idiotic universal service policy imposed by a European directive (and gold-plated here) that the government hasn't scrapped because any threat to it fills MPs' mailbags like nothing else.
Wouldn't scrapping it solve that problem ?
Not really - the Post Office as well as collecting post it's also used as the banking solution for any / all places that have lost banks over the years.
That of course ignores the other issue that because of this scandal very few people now want to run post offices.
I can’t accurately express how angry stuff like this makes me. Absolutely disgraceful.
I have no idea why the Post Office even exists at this point. It seems like a relict from another age that serves no function beyond those of a less than averagely good delivery company and a Pound Shop.
See also: the House of Lords, the Red Arrows, the Royal Family, Morgan cars, the BBC, the CoE and Tony Robinson.
Yes but unfortunately it is the law - because of the idiotic universal service policy imposed by a European directive (and gold-plated here) that the government hasn't scrapped because any threat to it fills MPs' mailbags like nothing else.
Wouldn't scrapping it solve that problem ?
Not really - the Post Office as well as collecting post it's also used as the banking solution for any / all places that have lost banks over the years.
That of course ignores the other issue that because of this scandal very few people now want to run post offices.
There are quite a few companies running sub-post offices. Are/were any such affected?
On the post office scandal, what I find interesting is that they actually managed to get as many convictions as they did. Juries are usually pretty risk averse, but I guess an expert witness testified to say that the only explanation was that the postmaster was stealing the money.
I’m guessing this can’t happen, but as a start, I’d like to see those expert witnesses charged with perjury.
The story is even worse than it appears.
You see, almost all the 900 prosecutions (resulting in more than 700 wrongful convictions) were done by private prosecution. The Post Office brought the cases themselves. They held all the records: see, the system says they should have 70,000 in their bank account, but they only have 20,000... They must have stolen the rest.
And while this was going on, the Post Office was unusually profitable, as it kept discovering it had more money than it thought it did.
Nobody noticed that the extra money they seemed to have matched the amount they thought was being stolen from them.
And the Post Office would bring Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against Post masters and would strip them of their homes to repay money than was never stolen.
And then there was a monumental cover up
Another thing they did was to adopt the US tactic of aggressive plea bargaining - threatening imprisonment and dangling the offer of no prison time in exchange for guilty pleas. Faced with what had happened to so many others, it's understandable that numerous innocent people pleaded guilty.
And then they used the guilty pleas to go after their assets.
It is one of the worst scandals in British history, and yet no one seems to care.
Government's of all parties (including, shamefully, the LD's) seem to have accepted the Post Office's Board's word without question. And when they did move, moved very slowly.
What staggers me is the length of time that the scandal's gone on. I remembered reading about this in a paper (Computer Weekly?) a couple of decades ago, and a colleague's wife was a postmistress, so he talked about the fear - and it was fear - they felt. Yet the PO continued malicious prosecutions and ruining lives for years afterwards.
Morally, people from Fujitsu and the PO should be in jail over this. But what could they be charged with?
Blackmail over plea bargains and asset forfeitures?
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
I think that's wrong. What bothers Putin's Russia is that it might become a successful and prosperous democracy.
"How do you know it is nonsense? Great brains have no idea so how do you?"
+++++
That's my point. It is nonsense to presume we "know", or can "know", that we are all alone, via some fucking daft "equation" with so many imponderables and variables it is almost without utility.
What we know is that life formed, and exploded, on the one planet in our solar system able to host it. And possibly on others in this solar system, maybe several times, we dunno
There are BILLIONS of planets like ours out there, in our galaxy, and there are 200 BILLION galaxies, and we may be just one universe amongst an infinite number which may interact.....
Wild wild guess: we are not alone, we are just like the Easter Islanders, staring at the vastness of a lonely Pacific ocean, and thinking, "Oh well, just us then"
And then they saw the first Dutch Indiaman, sailing over the horizon....
Hi @Leon you have repeated the same flawed argument. Before I explain why again just let me say I have not a clue whether life exists elsewhere and although my background is as a mathematician these theories are way above anything I can understand but I accept they give credence to the likelihood of life hence my doubt one way or another.
However your assumption doesn't hold. It is flawed and I can explain why that is the case because that isn't such advanced maths. You have assumed that because life exists here and there are a huge number of stars and planets that it probably exists elsewhere. This is flawed probability because you are only able to have that thought because it is after the event. You don't exist on Mercury to have the opposite thought. So we could equally be unique. Even if the probability of life is so small that it probably won't happen you are at the after event where it did (probability of 1).Try this analogy: If you win the lottery jackpot one week you could easily be the only winner, but you don't think if I have won there has to be other winners do you? But that is exactly what you are doing.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure the lottery analogy holds up, if I'm honest. Sure, you might be the sole lucky guy who beat the odds this week in this discrete event. But you know other folk have beaten the same odds before at different times. Doesn't mean you know you will win, but it means you know it can be done.
The point is if you do the thing that leads to the incredibly unlikely thing enough times, you start to build up a cohort of instances where someone somewhere's beaten the odds.
I'm not really sure that that's much different with the emergence of life, with the only real limiting factor being that space is big. Really big. So even when it happens, noone else is nearby enough to see it.
Your last point is the kicker: space is big beyond imagination. Which means that the chance of life (of some kind) being out there is probably quite high...
...but it also means that the chances of us being able to detect or interact with any of that life out there is... very small.
There may now be untold gazillion intelligent civilizations trying to make sense of I Love Lucy, sent out to the Universe decades ago. Signals which weren't meant for us to hear, or perhaps signals simply saying "Hello!" like the Wow! signal.
Of course, "seeing" messages by light requires the observer to have developed the retina first...
There's an xkcd cartoon that's relevant (isn't there always?). The problem is the inverse-square law, which means that our TV and radio signals become very faint, very quickly - as does also the light from stars, which is why the stars we can see with the naked eye are a lot closer than people think.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
On the post office scandal, what I find interesting is that they actually managed to get as many convictions as they did. Juries are usually pretty risk averse, but I guess an expert witness testified to say that the only explanation was that the postmaster was stealing the money.
I’m guessing this can’t happen, but as a start, I’d like to see those expert witnesses charged with perjury.
The story is even worse than it appears.
You see, almost all the 900 prosecutions (resulting in more than 700 wrongful convictions) were done by private prosecution. The Post Office brought the cases themselves. They held all the records: see, the system says they should have 70,000 in their bank account, but they only have 20,000... They must have stolen the rest.
And while this was going on, the Post Office was unusually profitable, as it kept discovering it had more money than it thought it did.
Nobody noticed that the extra money they seemed to have matched the amount they thought was being stolen from them.
And the Post Office would bring Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against Post masters and would strip them of their homes to repay money than was never stolen.
And then there was a monumental cover up
Another thing they did was to adopt the US tactic of aggressive plea bargaining - threatening imprisonment and dangling the offer of no prison time in exchange for guilty pleas. Faced with what had happened to so many others, it's understandable that numerous innocent people pleaded guilty.
And then they used the guilty pleas to go after their assets.
It is one of the worst scandals in British history, and yet no one seems to care.
Government's of all parties (including, shamefully, the LD's) seem to have accepted the Post Office's Board's word without question. And when they did move, moved very slowly.
What staggers me is the length of time that the scandal's gone on. I remembered reading about this in a paper (Computer Weekly?) a couple of decades ago, and a colleague's wife was a postmistress, so he talked about the fear - and it was fear - they felt. Yet the PO continued malicious prosecutions and ruining lives for years afterwards.
Morally, people from Fujitsu and the PO should be in jail over this. But what could they be charged with?
Blackmail over plea bargains and asset forfeitures?
False accounting, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice ? The latter carries a maximum sentence of life.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
Don't say anything about the fact that Putin has a tiny pee-pee....
The reports from Canada on how peaceful protests are being dealt with, freezing people's bank accounts etc, are really concerning. That sort of thing shouldn't happen in a free society.
The government is currently legislating to make peaceful protest in the UK a potentially criminal act.
It's very widely rumoured in C of E circles that Welby pushed hard for Paula Vennells to become Bishop of London in 2017 (he has a thing about people who have held senior positions before their church careers).
Vennells should be made Archbish of Canterbury and told to apply her no-nonsense business model to the Church.
She could implement the largest branch modernisation programme in ecclesiastical history.
Failing rural parishes could be shut, vicars sent to prison on trumped-up charges.
It will really transform the C of E into a tough & lean organisation, ready to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.
“Johnson cut short his UK tour to return to London in order to convene the meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
“He is believed to have received an intelligence briefing upon his return after maintaining there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.”
From the Guardian live-blog about 20 minutes ago
Ominousness piled on onimosity. Omino-max
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
20th February, next Sunday, is one of the invasion start dates mooted (I believe because of the end of the Olympics, and the end of the exercises in Belarus).
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
Don't say anything about the fact that Putin has a tiny pee-pee....
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
I think that's wrong. What bothers Putin's Russia is that it might become a successful and prosperous democracy.
Not much chance of that. It has one of the worst performing economies in Europe since independence.
I would like to see it become so, and joining the EU may well improve it a lot, NATO less so. There also needs to be a recognition of the new borders. Crimea and the Donbass cannot return without becoming much more Russian.
The reports from Canada on how peaceful protests are being dealt with, freezing people's bank accounts etc, are really concerning. That sort of thing shouldn't happen in a free society.
Trudeau showing his true colours. Nasty, weak little man
The reports from Canada on how peaceful protests are being dealt with, freezing people's bank accounts etc, are really concerning. That sort of thing shouldn't happen in a free society.
Didn't you advocate car drivers running over peaceful Insulate Britain protesters?
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
Lots of people are guilty of wargaming this, from Boris Johnson through to a fairly well-known author.
Far too much macho-posturing, testosterone-fuelled, silver-back, behaviour on both sides.
We need women to run the world and make it a better, fairer, kinder, less aggressive place. More Jacinda's.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
Don't say anything about the fact that Putin has a tiny pee-pee....
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
I think that's wrong. What bothers Putin's Russia is that it might become a successful and prosperous democracy.
Not much chance of that. It has one of the worst performing economies in Europe since independence.
I would like to see it become so, and joining the EU may well improve it a lot, NATO less so. There also needs to be a recognition of the new borders. Crimea and the Donbass cannot return without becoming much more Russian.
Well there's zero chance of it under Russian control.
"How do you know it is nonsense? Great brains have no idea so how do you?"
+++++
That's my point. It is nonsense to presume we "know", or can "know", that we are all alone, via some fucking daft "equation" with so many imponderables and variables it is almost without utility.
What we know is that life formed, and exploded, on the one planet in our solar system able to host it. And possibly on others in this solar system, maybe several times, we dunno
There are BILLIONS of planets like ours out there, in our galaxy, and there are 200 BILLION galaxies, and we may be just one universe amongst an infinite number which may interact.....
Wild wild guess: we are not alone, we are just like the Easter Islanders, staring at the vastness of a lonely Pacific ocean, and thinking, "Oh well, just us then"
And then they saw the first Dutch Indiaman, sailing over the horizon....
Hi @Leon you have repeated the same flawed argument. Before I explain why again just let me say I have not a clue whether life exists elsewhere and although my background is as a mathematician these theories are way above anything I can understand but I accept they give credence to the likelihood of life hence my doubt one way or another.
However your assumption doesn't hold. It is flawed and I can explain why that is the case because that isn't such advanced maths. You have assumed that because life exists here and there are a huge number of stars and planets that it probably exists elsewhere. This is flawed probability because you are only able to have that thought because it is after the event. You don't exist on Mercury to have the opposite thought. So we could equally be unique. Even if the probability of life is so small that it probably won't happen you are at the after event where it did (probability of 1).Try this analogy: If you win the lottery jackpot one week you could easily be the only winner, but you don't think if I have won there has to be other winners do you? But that is exactly what you are doing.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure the lottery analogy holds up, if I'm honest. Sure, you might be the sole lucky guy who beat the odds this week in this discrete event. But you know other folk have beaten the same odds before at different times. Doesn't mean you know you will win, but it means you know it can be done.
The point is if you do the thing that leads to the incredibly unlikely thing enough times, you start to build up a cohort of instances where someone somewhere's beaten the odds.
I'm not really sure that that's much different with the emergence of life, with the only real limiting factor being that space is big. Really big. So even when it happens, noone else is nearby enough to see it.
Your last point is the kicker: space is big beyond imagination. Which means that the chance of life (of some kind) being out there is probably quite high...
...but it also means that the chances of us being able to detect or interact with any of that life out there is... very small.
There may now be untold gazillion intelligent civilizations trying to make sense of I Love Lucy, sent out to the Universe decades ago. Signals which weren't meant for us to hear, or perhaps signals simply saying "Hello!" like the Wow! signal.
Of course, "seeing" messages by light requires the observer to have developed the retina first...
There's an xkcd cartoon that's relevant (isn't there always?). The problem is the inverse-square law, which means that our TV and radio signals become very faint, very quickly - as does also the light from stars, which is why the stars we can see with the naked eye are a lot closer than people think.
Though the light from the nuclear tests has a unique signature - the core of the explosion is briefly the hottest thing in the universe. The AN602 test (aka Tsar Bomba) was the ringing of one hell of a bell. If there is anyone pointing a telescope this way for a few light years, they will see it.
“Johnson cut short his UK tour to return to London in order to convene the meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
“He is believed to have received an intelligence briefing upon his return after maintaining there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.”
From the Guardian live-blog about 20 minutes ago
Ominousness piled on onimosity. Omino-max
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Many years ago, I got hopelessly infatuated with a young Odessan woman. She directed my saucy mail to the (by then ex-)KGB headquarters.
I'm probably still on file in the 'special comedy box' of the Ukrainian intelligence services along with 100 Turkish harbour loungers whose generic portside calls of 'Natasha, Natasha' were supposedly the soundtrack of any 1990s Black Sea cruise.
“Johnson cut short his UK tour to return to London in order to convene the meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
“He is believed to have received an intelligence briefing upon his return after maintaining there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.”
From the Guardian live-blog about 20 minutes ago
Ominousness piled on onimosity. Omino-max
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
20th February, next Sunday, is one of the invasion start dates mooted (I believe because of the end of the Olympics, and the end of the exercises in Belarus).
All rather redolent of Nostradamus. Every time it doesn't happen a new date pops onto the Daily Mail front page.
I do not see how Putin can possibly succeed with a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine. It will be a limited incursion based on some kind of spurious invitation from ethnic Russian areas that have declared independence. The question then is how far the West's response will go. Anything that is less than hugely punitive and immediately consequential for those whose support Putin requires to remain in charge means he will end up getting what he wants.
US Poseidon out of Lossie about to fly over my flat.
This is great fun. I've seen Typhoons flying up through the Cuillin from the summit of Blaven, a group of Ospreys swinging past the Lawers range and Eilean Donan Castle used as a mock bombing target by two Tornados.
It's mad how close they all get to the mountains. Hercules skimming Loch Lochy was pretty cool too.
On the post office scandal, what I find interesting is that they actually managed to get as many convictions as they did. Juries are usually pretty risk averse, but I guess an expert witness testified to say that the only explanation was that the postmaster was stealing the money.
I’m guessing this can’t happen, but as a start, I’d like to see those expert witnesses charged with perjury.
The story is even worse than it appears.
You see, almost all the 900 prosecutions (resulting in more than 700 wrongful convictions) were done by private prosecution. The Post Office brought the cases themselves. They held all the records: see, the system says they should have 70,000 in their bank account, but they only have 20,000... They must have stolen the rest.
And while this was going on, the Post Office was unusually profitable, as it kept discovering it had more money than it thought it did.
Nobody noticed that the extra money they seemed to have matched the amount they thought was being stolen from them.
And the Post Office would bring Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against Post masters and would strip them of their homes to repay money than was never stolen.
And then there was a monumental cover up
Another thing they did was to adopt the US tactic of aggressive plea bargaining - threatening imprisonment and dangling the offer of no prison time in exchange for guilty pleas. Faced with what had happened to so many others, it's understandable that numerous innocent people pleaded guilty.
And then they used the guilty pleas to go after their assets.
It is one of the worst scandals in British history, and yet no one seems to care.
Government's of all parties (including, shamefully, the LD's) seem to have accepted the Post Office's Board's word without question. And when they did move, moved very slowly.
What staggers me is the length of time that the scandal's gone on. I remembered reading about this in a paper (Computer Weekly?) a couple of decades ago, and a colleague's wife was a postmistress, so he talked about the fear - and it was fear - they felt. Yet the PO continued malicious prosecutions and ruining lives for years afterwards.
Morally, people from Fujitsu and the PO should be in jail over this. But what could they be charged with?
Paula Vennels is, or at least was, a priest.
Well she’d better start praying, she was in charge when many of the prosecutions occurred, and after there had already been concerns raised as to what was going on.
I think we can guarantee Paula will be absolutely fine.
The public inquiry will conclude, "Mistakes were made but Paula did her best in difficult circumstances. She cannot be blamed for what has happened."
The Archbish will be wheeled out with his platitudes, "Paula has taken biblical inspiration from the young King Solomon, who showed humility in asking God for understanding & forgiveness ..."
And finally, we will be reminded of how she has suffered. "Paula is one of the great victims of this scandal. No one feels worse than Paula about what has happened".
To be fair, and perhaps in partial contradiction of my previous post, she has, I understand, stepped down from any priestly duties.
She finally stepped down in April 2021, after 39 of the convicted former postmasters had their convictions quashed.
She stepped down because she was becoming a public embarrassment.
The Post Office Chairman, Tim Parker, announced his retirement last week, with quite fortuitous timing a few days before the enquiry started.
We see similar stories in the police and civil service, with people under investigation allowed to retire and end the investigations. Funnily enough, so many of them turn up later as consultants in the same sector, which wouldn’t have happened if the investigations against them had continued and they’d been fired.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
I haven't seen him for ten days but my expert on Russian affairs mate last thought that if Russia was going to invade they would have invaded. He seemed to think a mix of a pragmatic Biden and significant back channel communications would see off the threat.
I can’t accurately express how angry stuff like this makes me. Absolutely disgraceful.
I have no idea why the Post Office even exists at this point. It seems like a relict from another age that serves no function beyond those of a less than averagely good delivery company and a Pound Shop.
See also: the House of Lords, the Red Arrows, the Royal Family, Morgan cars, the BBC, the CoE and Tony Robinson.
Yes but unfortunately it is the law - because of the idiotic universal service policy imposed by a European directive (and gold-plated here) that the government hasn't scrapped because any threat to it fills MPs' mailbags like nothing else.
Wouldn't scrapping it solve that problem ?
Not really - the Post Office as well as collecting post it's also used as the banking solution for any / all places that have lost banks over the years.
That of course ignores the other issue that because of this scandal very few people now want to run post offices.
I meant the MPs full mailbags...
Well, if there were no post office, the mailbags of MPs would be empty!
"How do you know it is nonsense? Great brains have no idea so how do you?"
+++++
That's my point. It is nonsense to presume we "know", or can "know", that we are all alone, via some fucking daft "equation" with so many imponderables and variables it is almost without utility.
What we know is that life formed, and exploded, on the one planet in our solar system able to host it. And possibly on others in this solar system, maybe several times, we dunno
There are BILLIONS of planets like ours out there, in our galaxy, and there are 200 BILLION galaxies, and we may be just one universe amongst an infinite number which may interact.....
Wild wild guess: we are not alone, we are just like the Easter Islanders, staring at the vastness of a lonely Pacific ocean, and thinking, "Oh well, just us then"
And then they saw the first Dutch Indiaman, sailing over the horizon....
Hi @Leon you have repeated the same flawed argument. Before I explain why again just let me say I have not a clue whether life exists elsewhere and although my background is as a mathematician these theories are way above anything I can understand but I accept they give credence to the likelihood of life hence my doubt one way or another.
However your assumption doesn't hold. It is flawed and I can explain why that is the case because that isn't such advanced maths. You have assumed that because life exists here and there are a huge number of stars and planets that it probably exists elsewhere. This is flawed probability because you are only able to have that thought because it is after the event. You don't exist on Mercury to have the opposite thought. So we could equally be unique. Even if the probability of life is so small that it probably won't happen you are at the after event where it did (probability of 1).Try this analogy: If you win the lottery jackpot one week you could easily be the only winner, but you don't think if I have won there has to be other winners do you? But that is exactly what you are doing.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure the lottery analogy holds up, if I'm honest. Sure, you might be the sole lucky guy who beat the odds this week in this discrete event. But you know other folk have beaten the same odds before at different times. Doesn't mean you know you will win, but it means you know it can be done.
The point is if you do the thing that leads to the incredibly unlikely thing enough times, you start to build up a cohort of instances where someone somewhere's beaten the odds.
I'm not really sure that that's much different with the emergence of life, with the only real limiting factor being that space is big. Really big. So even when it happens, noone else is nearby enough to see it.
Your last point is the kicker: space is big beyond imagination. Which means that the chance of life (of some kind) being out there is probably quite high...
...but it also means that the chances of us being able to detect or interact with any of that life out there is... very small.
There may now be untold gazillion intelligent civilizations trying to make sense of I Love Lucy, sent out to the Universe decades ago. Signals which weren't meant for us to hear, or perhaps signals simply saying "Hello!" like the Wow! signal.
Of course, "seeing" messages by light requires the observer to have developed the retina first...
There's an xkcd cartoon that's relevant (isn't there always?). The problem is the inverse-square law, which means that our TV and radio signals become very faint, very quickly - as does also the light from stars, which is why the stars we can see with the naked eye are a lot closer than people think.
I love Lucy was shown between 1951 to 1957.
There are 166 stars within 80 light years of the Sun.
From that point you can look at number of planets per star, chances of a planet being in a habitable orbit, chances of life occurring on a planet, chances of a modern (post 1950s say) civilization arriving at the same time we arrived there (remember dinosaurs were 240 million years ago, so that in itself is a 1 in 4 million chances).
Basically you end up looking at the numbers in detail and it becomes very hard to see two intelligent species appearing on different planets in roughly the same timeframe.
“Johnson cut short his UK tour to return to London in order to convene the meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
“He is believed to have received an intelligence briefing upon his return after maintaining there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.”
From the Guardian live-blog about 20 minutes ago
Ominousness piled on onimosity. Omino-max
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
The Western leaders are certainly making the most of it to raise their respective domestic profiles. I see the UK papers are full of Johnson and Biden, while the German news is all about Scholz and Biden. My French isn't great, but I'm betting the French news is dominated by Macron and Biden.
And yes. There was that great podcast last year about the post office which was sickening listening and we all discussed it on here then. Heads need to roll but no idea whose.
“Johnson cut short his UK tour to return to London in order to convene the meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
“He is believed to have received an intelligence briefing upon his return after maintaining there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.”
From the Guardian live-blog about 20 minutes ago
Ominousness piled on onimosity. Omino-max
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
The Western leaders are certainly making the most of it to raise their domestic profiles, though. I see the UK papers are full of Johnson and Biden, while the German news is all about Scholz and Biden. My French isn't great, but I'm betting the French news is dominated by Macron and Biden.
Absolutely.
And it's working (for now) judging by opinion polls.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
I'm sure @rcs1000 could let us know if the Kremlin IP address comes up, a bit like that one guy in Pyongyang who plays PUBG.
I can’t accurately express how angry stuff like this makes me. Absolutely disgraceful.
I have no idea why the Post Office even exists at this point. It seems like a relict from another age that serves no function beyond those of a less than averagely good delivery company and a Pound Shop.
See also: the House of Lords, the Red Arrows, the Royal Family, Morgan cars, the BBC, the CoE and Tony Robinson.
Yes but unfortunately it is the law - because of the idiotic universal service policy imposed by a European directive (and gold-plated here) that the government hasn't scrapped because any threat to it fills MPs' mailbags like nothing else.
Wouldn't scrapping it solve that problem ?
Not really - the Post Office as well as collecting post it's also used as the banking solution for any / all places that have lost banks over the years.
That of course ignores the other issue that because of this scandal very few people now want to run post offices.
I meant the MPs full mailbags...
Well, if there were no post office, the mailbags of MPs would be empty!
“Johnson cut short his UK tour to return to London in order to convene the meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
“He is believed to have received an intelligence briefing upon his return after maintaining there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.”
From the Guardian live-blog about 20 minutes ago
Ominousness piled on onimosity. Omino-max
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
20th February, next Sunday, is one of the invasion start dates mooted (I believe because of the end of the Olympics, and the end of the exercises in Belarus).
All rather redolent of Nostradamus. Every time it doesn't happen a new date pops onto the Daily Mail front page.
It's nothing like Nostradamus at all. Nostra' is about claiming long-term predictions on the basis of post-event back-projection onto a single text. Here we are trying to make short-term predictions on the basis of guesses about the motivations of a single person.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
I think that's wrong. What bothers Putin's Russia is that it might become a successful and prosperous democracy.
Not much chance of that. It has one of the worst performing economies in Europe since independence.
I would like to see it become so, and joining the EU may well improve it a lot, NATO less so. There also needs to be a recognition of the new borders. Crimea and the Donbass cannot return without becoming much more Russian.
Quite a lot of that is due to Russian interference. I spent a lot of time there before 2010
On the post office scandal, what I find interesting is that they actually managed to get as many convictions as they did. Juries are usually pretty risk averse, but I guess an expert witness testified to say that the only explanation was that the postmaster was stealing the money.
I’m guessing this can’t happen, but as a start, I’d like to see those expert witnesses charged with perjury.
The story is even worse than it appears.
You see, almost all the 900 prosecutions (resulting in more than 700 wrongful convictions) were done by private prosecution. The Post Office brought the cases themselves. They held all the records: see, the system says they should have 70,000 in their bank account, but they only have 20,000... They must have stolen the rest.
And while this was going on, the Post Office was unusually profitable, as it kept discovering it had more money than it thought it did.
Nobody noticed that the extra money they seemed to have matched the amount they thought was being stolen from them.
And the Post Office would bring Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against Post masters and would strip them of their homes to repay money than was never stolen.
And then there was a monumental cover up
Another thing they did was to adopt the US tactic of aggressive plea bargaining - threatening imprisonment and dangling the offer of no prison time in exchange for guilty pleas. Faced with what had happened to so many others, it's understandable that numerous innocent people pleaded guilty.
And then they used the guilty pleas to go after their assets.
It is one of the worst scandals in British history, and yet no one seems to care.
Government's of all parties (including, shamefully, the LD's) seem to have accepted the Post Office's Board's word without question. And when they did move, moved very slowly.
What staggers me is the length of time that the scandal's gone on. I remembered reading about this in a paper (Computer Weekly?) a couple of decades ago, and a colleague's wife was a postmistress, so he talked about the fear - and it was fear - they felt. Yet the PO continued malicious prosecutions and ruining lives for years afterwards.
Morally, people from Fujitsu and the PO should be in jail over this. But what could they be charged with?
Paula Vennels is, or at least was, a priest.
Well she’d better start praying, she was in charge when many of the prosecutions occurred, and after there had already been concerns raised as to what was going on.
I think we can guarantee Paula will be absolutely fine.
The public inquiry will conclude, "Mistakes were made but Paula did her best in difficult circumstances. She cannot be blamed for what has happened."
The Archbish will be wheeled out with his platitudes, "Paula has taken biblical inspiration from the young King Solomon, who showed humility in asking God for understanding & forgiveness ..."
And finally, we will be reminded of how she has suffered. "Paula is one of the great victims of this scandal. No one feels worse than Paula about what has happened".
To be fair, and perhaps in partial contradiction of my previous post, she has, I understand, stepped down from any priestly duties.
She finally stepped down in April 2021, after 39 of the convicted former postmasters had their convictions quashed.
She stepped down because she was becoming a public embarrassment.
Don't worry - I'm sure that they she has a bunch of non-exec 1 day a year jobs to keep her from going to Food Banks.
Plus a pension from the Post Office that can be seen from another start system.
I can’t accurately express how angry stuff like this makes me. Absolutely disgraceful.
I have no idea why the Post Office even exists at this point. It seems like a relict from another age that serves no function beyond those of a less than averagely good delivery company and a Pound Shop.
See also: the House of Lords, the Red Arrows, the Royal Family, Morgan cars, the BBC, the CoE and Tony Robinson.
Yes but unfortunately it is the law - because of the idiotic universal service policy imposed by a European directive (and gold-plated by New Labour here at the behest of their paymasters, the CWU) that the government hasn't scrapped because any threat to it fills MPs' mailbags like nothing else.
Wasn't the Post Office required to deliver to everyone long before the EU existed? Of all the things I've heard the EU blamed for, I've got to say that the Post Office is a new one. What's the alternative? No postal delivery in rural areas? A different priced stamp for every part of the country?
It's not the universal service that's so much the problem - more the uniform tariff. We should have scrapped it, if it were ever justified, in about 2000, when electronic alternatives became widespread. But instead the EU doubled down with its postal directive, gold-plated in the UK legislation.
The EU directive required each country to have a universal service to appease unions, but to appease free-marketeers they introduced competition above 350g. As so often, the result has been the worst of both worlds - a declining, heavily unionised industry on life support stifling competition and innovation.
At the time I argued for the UK blocking the directive, but there was no stomach for that fight in the government.
"How do you know it is nonsense? Great brains have no idea so how do you?"
+++++
That's my point. It is nonsense to presume we "know", or can "know", that we are all alone, via some fucking daft "equation" with so many imponderables and variables it is almost without utility.
What we know is that life formed, and exploded, on the one planet in our solar system able to host it. And possibly on others in this solar system, maybe several times, we dunno
There are BILLIONS of planets like ours out there, in our galaxy, and there are 200 BILLION galaxies, and we may be just one universe amongst an infinite number which may interact.....
Wild wild guess: we are not alone, we are just like the Easter Islanders, staring at the vastness of a lonely Pacific ocean, and thinking, "Oh well, just us then"
And then they saw the first Dutch Indiaman, sailing over the horizon....
Hi @Leon you have repeated the same flawed argument. Before I explain why again just let me say I have not a clue whether life exists elsewhere and although my background is as a mathematician these theories are way above anything I can understand but I accept they give credence to the likelihood of life hence my doubt one way or another.
However your assumption doesn't hold. It is flawed and I can explain why that is the case because that isn't such advanced maths. You have assumed that because life exists here and there are a huge number of stars and planets that it probably exists elsewhere. This is flawed probability because you are only able to have that thought because it is after the event. You don't exist on Mercury to have the opposite thought. So we could equally be unique. Even if the probability of life is so small that it probably won't happen you are at the after event where it did (probability of 1).Try this analogy: If you win the lottery jackpot one week you could easily be the only winner, but you don't think if I have won there has to be other winners do you? But that is exactly what you are doing.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure the lottery analogy holds up, if I'm honest. Sure, you might be the sole lucky guy who beat the odds this week in this discrete event. But you know other folk have beaten the same odds before at different times. Doesn't mean you know you will win, but it means you know it can be done.
The point is if you do the thing that leads to the incredibly unlikely thing enough times, you start to build up a cohort of instances where someone somewhere's beaten the odds.
I'm not really sure that that's much different with the emergence of life, with the only real limiting factor being that space is big. Really big. So even when it happens, noone else is nearby enough to see it.
Your last point is the kicker: space is big beyond imagination. Which means that the chance of life (of some kind) being out there is probably quite high...
...but it also means that the chances of us being able to detect or interact with any of that life out there is... very small.
There may now be untold gazillion intelligent civilizations trying to make sense of I Love Lucy, sent out to the Universe decades ago. Signals which weren't meant for us to hear, or perhaps signals simply saying "Hello!" like the Wow! signal.
Of course, "seeing" messages by light requires the observer to have developed the retina first...
There's an xkcd cartoon that's relevant (isn't there always?). The problem is the inverse-square law, which means that our TV and radio signals become very faint, very quickly - as does also the light from stars, which is why the stars we can see with the naked eye are a lot closer than people think.
Though the light from the nuclear tests has a unique signature - the core of the explosion is briefly the hottest thing in the universe. The AN602 test (aka Tsar Bomba) was the ringing of one hell of a bell. If there is anyone pointing a telescope this way for a few light years, they will see it.
But, even if they see it, they have to recognise it as a man-made signal rather than an exotic astrophysical source.
On the post office scandal, what I find interesting is that they actually managed to get as many convictions as they did. Juries are usually pretty risk averse, but I guess an expert witness testified to say that the only explanation was that the postmaster was stealing the money.
I’m guessing this can’t happen, but as a start, I’d like to see those expert witnesses charged with perjury.
The story is even worse than it appears.
You see, almost all the 900 prosecutions (resulting in more than 700 wrongful convictions) were done by private prosecution. The Post Office brought the cases themselves. They held all the records: see, the system says they should have 70,000 in their bank account, but they only have 20,000... They must have stolen the rest.
And while this was going on, the Post Office was unusually profitable, as it kept discovering it had more money than it thought it did.
Nobody noticed that the extra money they seemed to have matched the amount they thought was being stolen from them.
And the Post Office would bring Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against Post masters and would strip them of their homes to repay money than was never stolen.
And then there was a monumental cover up
Another thing they did was to adopt the US tactic of aggressive plea bargaining - threatening imprisonment and dangling the offer of no prison time in exchange for guilty pleas. Faced with what had happened to so many others, it's understandable that numerous innocent people pleaded guilty.
And then they used the guilty pleas to go after their assets.
It is one of the worst scandals in British history, and yet no one seems to care.
Government's of all parties (including, shamefully, the LD's) seem to have accepted the Post Office's Board's word without question. And when they did move, moved very slowly.
What staggers me is the length of time that the scandal's gone on. I remembered reading about this in a paper (Computer Weekly?) a couple of decades ago, and a colleague's wife was a postmistress, so he talked about the fear - and it was fear - they felt. Yet the PO continued malicious prosecutions and ruining lives for years afterwards.
Morally, people from Fujitsu and the PO should be in jail over this. But what could they be charged with?
Paula Vennels is, or at least was, a priest.
Well she’d better start praying, she was in charge when many of the prosecutions occurred, and after there had already been concerns raised as to what was going on.
I think we can guarantee Paula will be absolutely fine.
The public inquiry will conclude, "Mistakes were made but Paula did her best in difficult circumstances. She cannot be blamed for what has happened."
The Archbish will be wheeled out with his platitudes, "Paula has taken biblical inspiration from the young King Solomon, who showed humility in asking God for understanding & forgiveness ..."
And finally, we will be reminded of how she has suffered. "Paula is one of the great victims of this scandal. No one feels worse than Paula about what has happened".
To be fair, and perhaps in partial contradiction of my previous post, she has, I understand, stepped down from any priestly duties.
She finally stepped down in April 2021, after 39 of the convicted former postmasters had their convictions quashed.
She stepped down because she was becoming a public embarrassment.
The Post Office Chairman, Tim Parker, announced his retirement last week, with quite fortuitous timing a few days before the enquiry started.
We see similar stories in the police and civil service, with people under investigation allowed to retire and end the investigations. Funnily enough, so many of them turn up later as consultants in the same sector, which wouldn’t have happened if the investigations against them had continued and they’d been fired.
Tim Parker has done lots of things. He’s not dependent on the post office for his career
It's very widely rumoured in C of E circles that Welby pushed hard for Paula Vennells to become Bishop of London in 2017 (he has a thing about people who have held senior positions before their church careers).
Ah - so he is going for the "Outside talent to revive the Church" thing?
Has he tried selling Christianity, or is that too radical a move?
If — if — Russians have indeed folded, it will not be hard to sell at home. “Stupid foreigners wilfully misinterpreting Russia’s intentions.” Equally in west it will be sold as a major victory for US hardball info warfare and negotiation tactics. But this is still very early. https://twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/1493501273634656256
On the post office scandal, what I find interesting is that they actually managed to get as many convictions as they did. Juries are usually pretty risk averse, but I guess an expert witness testified to say that the only explanation was that the postmaster was stealing the money.
I’m guessing this can’t happen, but as a start, I’d like to see those expert witnesses charged with perjury.
The story is even worse than it appears.
You see, almost all the 900 prosecutions (resulting in more than 700 wrongful convictions) were done by private prosecution. The Post Office brought the cases themselves. They held all the records: see, the system says they should have 70,000 in their bank account, but they only have 20,000... They must have stolen the rest.
And while this was going on, the Post Office was unusually profitable, as it kept discovering it had more money than it thought it did.
Nobody noticed that the extra money they seemed to have matched the amount they thought was being stolen from them.
And the Post Office would bring Proceeds of Crime Act proceedings against Post masters and would strip them of their homes to repay money than was never stolen.
And then there was a monumental cover up
Another thing they did was to adopt the US tactic of aggressive plea bargaining - threatening imprisonment and dangling the offer of no prison time in exchange for guilty pleas. Faced with what had happened to so many others, it's understandable that numerous innocent people pleaded guilty.
And then they used the guilty pleas to go after their assets.
It is one of the worst scandals in British history, and yet no one seems to care.
Government's of all parties (including, shamefully, the LD's) seem to have accepted the Post Office's Board's word without question. And when they did move, moved very slowly.
What staggers me is the length of time that the scandal's gone on. I remembered reading about this in a paper (Computer Weekly?) a couple of decades ago, and a colleague's wife was a postmistress, so he talked about the fear - and it was fear - they felt. Yet the PO continued malicious prosecutions and ruining lives for years afterwards.
Morally, people from Fujitsu and the PO should be in jail over this. But what could they be charged with?
Blackmail over plea bargains and asset forfeitures?
In court, on multiple occasions, Post Office and Fujitsu people stated that he system was A-OK. Which means perjury as a possible issue.....
Will the Governor of @bankofengland and the head of @NCA_UK be at Cobra today? They’re more important than CDS in defending Britain against this threat.
"How do you know it is nonsense? Great brains have no idea so how do you?"
+++++
That's my point. It is nonsense to presume we "know", or can "know", that we are all alone, via some fucking daft "equation" with so many imponderables and variables it is almost without utility.
What we know is that life formed, and exploded, on the one planet in our solar system able to host it. And possibly on others in this solar system, maybe several times, we dunno
There are BILLIONS of planets like ours out there, in our galaxy, and there are 200 BILLION galaxies, and we may be just one universe amongst an infinite number which may interact.....
Wild wild guess: we are not alone, we are just like the Easter Islanders, staring at the vastness of a lonely Pacific ocean, and thinking, "Oh well, just us then"
And then they saw the first Dutch Indiaman, sailing over the horizon....
Hi @Leon you have repeated the same flawed argument. Before I explain why again just let me say I have not a clue whether life exists elsewhere and although my background is as a mathematician these theories are way above anything I can understand but I accept they give credence to the likelihood of life hence my doubt one way or another.
However your assumption doesn't hold. It is flawed and I can explain why that is the case because that isn't such advanced maths. You have assumed that because life exists here and there are a huge number of stars and planets that it probably exists elsewhere. This is flawed probability because you are only able to have that thought because it is after the event. You don't exist on Mercury to have the opposite thought. So we could equally be unique. Even if the probability of life is so small that it probably won't happen you are at the after event where it did (probability of 1).Try this analogy: If you win the lottery jackpot one week you could easily be the only winner, but you don't think if I have won there has to be other winners do you? But that is exactly what you are doing.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure the lottery analogy holds up, if I'm honest. Sure, you might be the sole lucky guy who beat the odds this week in this discrete event. But you know other folk have beaten the same odds before at different times. Doesn't mean you know you will win, but it means you know it can be done.
The point is if you do the thing that leads to the incredibly unlikely thing enough times, you start to build up a cohort of instances where someone somewhere's beaten the odds.
I'm not really sure that that's much different with the emergence of life, with the only real limiting factor being that space is big. Really big. So even when it happens, noone else is nearby enough to see it.
Your last point is the kicker: space is big beyond imagination. Which means that the chance of life (of some kind) being out there is probably quite high...
...but it also means that the chances of us being able to detect or interact with any of that life out there is... very small.
There may now be untold gazillion intelligent civilizations trying to make sense of I Love Lucy, sent out to the Universe decades ago. Signals which weren't meant for us to hear, or perhaps signals simply saying "Hello!" like the Wow! signal.
Of course, "seeing" messages by light requires the observer to have developed the retina first...
There's an xkcd cartoon that's relevant (isn't there always?). The problem is the inverse-square law, which means that our TV and radio signals become very faint, very quickly - as does also the light from stars, which is why the stars we can see with the naked eye are a lot closer than people think.
Though the light from the nuclear tests has a unique signature - the core of the explosion is briefly the hottest thing in the universe. The AN602 test (aka Tsar Bomba) was the ringing of one hell of a bell. If there is anyone pointing a telescope this way for a few light years, they will see it.
But, even if they see it, they have to recognise it as a man-made signal rather than an exotic astrophysical source.
If they have found out the fun fun properties of exotic heavy metals.... well, it will be a case of "Ah. One of those"
I do not see how Putin can possibly succeed with a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine. It will be a limited incursion based on some kind of spurious invitation from ethnic Russian areas that have declared independence. The question then is how far the West's response will go. Anything that is less than hugely punitive and immediately consequential for those whose support Putin requires to remain in charge means he will end up getting what he wants.
I think that is right, but he will take a bit more than the Russian areas -- probably most of the Eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine will lose less territory if it accepted that its present boundaries are unsupportable.
The reports from Canada on how peaceful protests are being dealt with, freezing people's bank accounts etc, are really concerning. That sort of thing shouldn't happen in a free society.
Didn't you advocate car drivers running over peaceful Insulate Britain protesters?
Yes, but there is an important distinction. Left wing environmentalists should have new laws to criminalise their behaviour and be banged up in the nick, right wing QAnon anti-vaxxers should be indulged and listened to.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
I'm sure @rcs1000 could let us know if the Kremlin IP address comes up, a bit like that one guy in Pyongyang who plays PUBG.
Mr. Borough, it does remind me of the stock market's reaction to their own 'exit poll' of the referendum, which did not necessarily prove to be accurate.
Importantly, I finished playing the FFVII Remake last night. Really rather liked it, though it's bloody odd having a modern game with much the same story as one from a quarter of a century ago.
Just look at the way one of the people convicted in the post office trials was described at the time. Certainly makes for sobering reading now. From 2012:
The Horizon scandal is absolutely appalling - worse in many ways than Enron. People went to jail. They lost homes. Families broke up. People committed suicide.
Over crimes that didn't happen.
And then the management of Fujitsu-ICL lied and tried to cover it up.
More than 700 people were convicted of crimes they didn't commit. 700. Staggering.
Final comment on this: Paula Vennells became CEO of the Post Office in 2012. By this point, there was a massive amount of evidence that the Horizon system was deeply fucked up, and that earlier convictions were unsound. (Indeed, the first articles were written on this in 2004.)
Yet under her watch the number of people prosecuted for crimes that never happened went into overdrive.
And what is insane is that she is far from the most guilty.
The difficult question is why people inflicted this on so many innocents. For must of them there couldn't have been significant personal gain involved - rather it was likely just pressure to, or even just the tendency to confirm with organisation policy.
It's not quite "just following orders", but it's not wildly dissimilar.
It is exactly just following orders. That is how just following orders begins. Authoritarians and their gophers, like HYUFD, are not benign, they are malignant. The cancer needs to be countered, or else we are well on the road to Treblinka.
Something has gone profoundly wrong with English society. All the warning signs are there.
Is English society really that much different to Scottish society?
Whataboutery. The Post Office scandal was made and nurtured in England. Hundreds, if not thousands, of English people must have known what was happening, and yet no one had the moral backbone to make a stand. Therein another lesson from history being ignored: when the cancer is pointed out, deal with it. Don’t blame other people.
If — if — Russians have indeed folded, it will not be hard to sell at home. “Stupid foreigners wilfully misinterpreting Russia’s intentions.” Equally in west it will be sold as a major victory for US hardball info warfare and negotiation tactics. But this is still very early. https://twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/1493501273634656256
Importantly it shows Putin can be faced down by a united west - hopefully the limit of his empire building
@BBCSteveR·1h One problem with the Ukraine story is that it risks pushing other key stories out of the headlines. Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny goes on trial today (inside a penal colony), charged with embezzlement & contempt of court. Could add another 10 years to his current prison term.
Just look at the way one of the people convicted in the post office trials was described at the time. Certainly makes for sobering reading now. From 2012:
The Horizon scandal is absolutely appalling - worse in many ways than Enron. People went to jail. They lost homes. Families broke up. People committed suicide.
Over crimes that didn't happen.
And then the management of Fujitsu-ICL lied and tried to cover it up.
More than 700 people were convicted of crimes they didn't commit. 700. Staggering.
Final comment on this: Paula Vennells became CEO of the Post Office in 2012. By this point, there was a massive amount of evidence that the Horizon system was deeply fucked up, and that earlier convictions were unsound. (Indeed, the first articles were written on this in 2004.)
Yet under her watch the number of people prosecuted for crimes that never happened went into overdrive.
And what is insane is that she is far from the most guilty.
The difficult question is why people inflicted this on so many innocents. For must of them there couldn't have been significant personal gain involved - rather it was likely just pressure to, or even just the tendency to confirm with organisation policy.
It's not quite "just following orders", but it's not wildly dissimilar.
It is exactly just following orders. That is how just following orders begins. Authoritarians and their gophers, like HYUFD, are not benign, they are malignant. The cancer needs to be countered, or else we are well on the road to Treblinka.
Something has gone profoundly wrong with English society. All the warning signs are there.
Is English society really that much different to Scottish society?
Whataboutery. The Post Office scandal was made and nurtured in England. Hundreds, if not thousands, of English people must have known what was happening, and yet no one had the moral backbone to make a stand. Therein another lesson from history being ignored: when the cancer is pointed out, deal with it. Don’t blame other people.
At least have the common decency to talk about "Westminster" or "Whitehall".
“Johnson cut short his UK tour to return to London in order to convene the meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
“He is believed to have received an intelligence briefing upon his return after maintaining there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.”
From the Guardian live-blog about 20 minutes ago
Ominousness piled on onimosity. Omino-max
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Many years ago, I got hopelessly infatuated with a young Odessan woman. She directed my saucy mail to the (by then ex-)KGB headquarters.
I'm probably still on file in the 'special comedy box' of the Ukrainian intelligence services along with 100 Turkish harbour loungers whose generic portside calls of 'Natasha, Natasha' were supposedly the soundtrack of any 1990s Black Sea cruise.
Odessa is the pulsing heart of the slavic porn industry. On any random day at Odessa-Glavnaya station you can see pony tailed young women from the izbas being shepherded into vans by absolute units with shaven heads and leather jackets.
I do not see how Putin can possibly succeed with a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine. It will be a limited incursion based on some kind of spurious invitation from ethnic Russian areas that have declared independence. The question then is how far the West's response will go. Anything that is less than hugely punitive and immediately consequential for those whose support Putin requires to remain in charge means he will end up getting what he wants.
I think that is right, but he will take a bit more than the Russian areas -- probably most of the Eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine will lose less territory if it accepted that its present boundaries are unsupportable.
It will lose more if it comes to a war.
There are no "Russian" areas of Ukraine. There are only Ukrainian areas. The Russian areas are inside Russia.
I do not see how Putin can possibly succeed with a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine. It will be a limited incursion based on some kind of spurious invitation from ethnic Russian areas that have declared independence. The question then is how far the West's response will go. Anything that is less than hugely punitive and immediately consequential for those whose support Putin requires to remain in charge means he will end up getting what he wants.
I think that is right, but he will take a bit more than the Russian areas -- probably most of the Eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine will lose less territory if it accepted that its present boundaries are unsupportable.
It will lose more if it comes to a war.
Ukraine’s best chance will be to fight now. The coalition will be hard to reassemble & Putin will be back for more
The reports from Canada on how peaceful protests are being dealt with, freezing people's bank accounts etc, are really concerning. That sort of thing shouldn't happen in a free society.
Nice to see your attitude to anti vaxxers has softened, you’re usually in the hang and flog the selfish bastards brigade as I recall.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
Vlad’s biggest fanboi turning against him could be the tipping point.
Just look at the way one of the people convicted in the post office trials was described at the time. Certainly makes for sobering reading now. From 2012:
The Horizon scandal is absolutely appalling - worse in many ways than Enron. People went to jail. They lost homes. Families broke up. People committed suicide.
Over crimes that didn't happen.
And then the management of Fujitsu-ICL lied and tried to cover it up.
More than 700 people were convicted of crimes they didn't commit. 700. Staggering.
Final comment on this: Paula Vennells became CEO of the Post Office in 2012. By this point, there was a massive amount of evidence that the Horizon system was deeply fucked up, and that earlier convictions were unsound. (Indeed, the first articles were written on this in 2004.)
Yet under her watch the number of people prosecuted for crimes that never happened went into overdrive.
And what is insane is that she is far from the most guilty.
The difficult question is why people inflicted this on so many innocents. For must of them there couldn't have been significant personal gain involved - rather it was likely just pressure to, or even just the tendency to confirm with organisation policy.
It's not quite "just following orders", but it's not wildly dissimilar.
It is exactly just following orders. That is how just following orders begins. Authoritarians and their gophers, like HYUFD, are not benign, they are malignant. The cancer needs to be countered, or else we are well on the road to Treblinka.
Something has gone profoundly wrong with English society. All the warning signs are there.
Is English society really that much different to Scottish society?
Well quite - the man is so full of hate for the English - and in a much nastier pernicious way than any other of the nationalist posters on here.
It is my love for England and her people that gives me the moral strength to lift my head above the parapet. There is a nasty cancer now firmly embedded deep within English society. All who care about the country have a moral duty to point it out and to help the English remove the malignancy. A malignancy frequently on public display on these threads.
I get accused of “hatred” simply for mentioning the name of a nation. Nations have distinct societies and culture. We should be allowed to discuss them. If we are not, it is just one more step down into the abyss.
The reports from Canada on how peaceful protests are being dealt with, freezing people's bank accounts etc, are really concerning. That sort of thing shouldn't happen in a free society.
Nice to see your attitude to anti vaxxers has softened, you’re usually in the hang and flog the selfish bastards brigade as I recall.
It is more interesting than that.
On many occasions, people have said - we have created legal structure X. Because of it's protections, no-one can stop actions Y under that! It's the LAW. HUMAN RIGHTS LAW even.
Problems build up, going against the wishes of a majority of the electorate.
Then the government deploys remedy Z. But, people (the original group) cry, why is such a horrible and illegal action possible or justified?
"How do you know it is nonsense? Great brains have no idea so how do you?"
+++++
That's my point. It is nonsense to presume we "know", or can "know", that we are all alone, via some fucking daft "equation" with so many imponderables and variables it is almost without utility.
What we know is that life formed, and exploded, on the one planet in our solar system able to host it. And possibly on others in this solar system, maybe several times, we dunno
There are BILLIONS of planets like ours out there, in our galaxy, and there are 200 BILLION galaxies, and we may be just one universe amongst an infinite number which may interact.....
Wild wild guess: we are not alone, we are just like the Easter Islanders, staring at the vastness of a lonely Pacific ocean, and thinking, "Oh well, just us then"
And then they saw the first Dutch Indiaman, sailing over the horizon....
Hi @Leon you have repeated the same flawed argument. Before I explain why again just let me say I have not a clue whether life exists elsewhere and although my background is as a mathematician these theories are way above anything I can understand but I accept they give credence to the likelihood of life hence my doubt one way or another.
However your assumption doesn't hold. It is flawed and I can explain why that is the case because that isn't such advanced maths. You have assumed that because life exists here and there are a huge number of stars and planets that it probably exists elsewhere. This is flawed probability because you are only able to have that thought because it is after the event. You don't exist on Mercury to have the opposite thought. So we could equally be unique. Even if the probability of life is so small that it probably won't happen you are at the after event where it did (probability of 1).Try this analogy: If you win the lottery jackpot one week you could easily be the only winner, but you don't think if I have won there has to be other winners do you? But that is exactly what you are doing.
Does that make sense?
I'm not sure the lottery analogy holds up, if I'm honest. Sure, you might be the sole lucky guy who beat the odds this week in this discrete event. But you know other folk have beaten the same odds before at different times. Doesn't mean you know you will win, but it means you know it can be done.
The point is if you do the thing that leads to the incredibly unlikely thing enough times, you start to build up a cohort of instances where someone somewhere's beaten the odds.
I'm not really sure that that's much different with the emergence of life, with the only real limiting factor being that space is big. Really big. So even when it happens, noone else is nearby enough to see it.
Your last point is the kicker: space is big beyond imagination. Which means that the chance of life (of some kind) being out there is probably quite high...
...but it also means that the chances of us being able to detect or interact with any of that life out there is... very small.
There may now be untold gazillion intelligent civilizations trying to make sense of I Love Lucy, sent out to the Universe decades ago. Signals which weren't meant for us to hear, or perhaps signals simply saying "Hello!" like the Wow! signal.
Of course, "seeing" messages by light requires the observer to have developed the retina first...
There's an xkcd cartoon that's relevant (isn't there always?). The problem is the inverse-square law, which means that our TV and radio signals become very faint, very quickly - as does also the light from stars, which is why the stars we can see with the naked eye are a lot closer than people think.
Though the light from the nuclear tests has a unique signature - the core of the explosion is briefly the hottest thing in the universe. The AN602 test (aka Tsar Bomba) was the ringing of one hell of a bell. If there is anyone pointing a telescope this way for a few light years, they will see it.
But, even if they see it, they have to recognise it as a man-made signal rather than an exotic astrophysical source.
If they have found out the fun fun properties of exotic heavy metals.... well, it will be a case of "Ah. One of those"
I'm half-way through Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary", which is a pretty entertaining read if you're a bit of a science geek. It's a substantial improvement on "Artemis".
US Poseidon out of Lossie about to fly over my flat.
This is great fun. I've seen Typhoons flying up through the Cuillin from the summit of Blaven, a group of Ospreys swinging past the Lawers range and Eilean Donan Castle used as a mock bombing target by two Tornados.
It's mad how close they all get to the mountains. Hercules skimming Loch Lochy was pretty cool too.
What about the C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate?
The reports from Canada on how peaceful protests are being dealt with, freezing people's bank accounts etc, are really concerning. That sort of thing shouldn't happen in a free society.
Didn't you advocate car drivers running over peaceful Insulate Britain protesters?
Yes, but there is an important distinction. Left wing environmentalists should have new laws to criminalise their behaviour and be banged up in the nick, right wing QAnon anti-vaxxers should be indulged and listened to.
What is happening in Canada is deeply sinister and concerning. Many of the protesters are neither Qanon nor anti vax.
As for the U.K. I never got what the govt was doing. There are already laws in place they could use against illegal protest. Why they needed further, more extreme, measures should concern us all.
If — if — Russians have indeed folded, it will not be hard to sell at home. “Stupid foreigners wilfully misinterpreting Russia’s intentions.” Equally in west it will be sold as a major victory for US hardball info warfare and negotiation tactics. But this is still very early. https://twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/1493501273634656256
The editors of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph will be ejaculating all over photos of Boris on their front pages
Some data from the ONS, concerning changes in housing tenure over time in England:
People aged 65 and over
1993
own outright: 55.7% own with mortgage: 5.8% private rental sector: 6.3% social rental sector: 32.2%
2017
own outright: 74.2% own with mortgage: 4.4% private rental sector: 5.6% social rental sector: 15.8%
People aged 16 to 64
1993
own outright: 14.0% own with mortgage: 56.2% private rental sector: 10.8% social rental sector: 19.0%
2017
own outright: 17.4% own with mortgage: 40.0% private rental sector: 25.2% social rental sector: 17.5%
In crude terms, since the Nineties owner-occupancy amongst pensioners has risen by about 20% and social rented occupancy has correspondingly declined; owner-occupancy amongst everyone else has fallen by about 15% and renting from private landlords has correspondingly risen.
+ Almost three-quarters of people aged 65 years and over in England own their home outright.
+ Younger people are less likely to own their own home than in the past and more likely to be renting. Half of people in their mid-30s to mid-40s had a mortgage in 2017, compared with two-thirds 20 years earlier.
+ People in their mid-30s to mid-40s are three times more likely to rent than 20 years ago. A third of this age group were renting from a private landlord in 2017, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 in 1997.
+ Increases in the private rental sector have been seen for all age groups apart from the very oldest, with the increase particularly pronounced in mid-life. People aged 35 to 44 years were almost three and a half times more likely to be renting in 2017 than in 1993.
+ Renting from a private landlord is most common at younger ages and decreases with age as people take out mortgages and/or receive inheritances. But for any given age, people are far more likely to be renting privately today than 10 or 20 years ago. Almost a third (28%) of people aged 35 to 44 years rented from a private landlord in 2017, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) in 1997.
+ The percentage owning with a mortgage peaks in middle age, and then declines at older ages as people finish paying off their mortgages and own their homes outright. But for almost any age, it is less common to own with a mortgage than 10 or 20 years ago. Half (50%) of people aged 35 to 44 had a mortgage in 2017, compared with more than two-thirds (68%) in 1997.
An ageing population + concentration of wealth in the hands of the elderly = gerontocracy. That's the political reality of modern Britain.
Depends where you go, in the North and Midlands and Wales for example property is still relatively cheap to buy and so more can get on the housing ladder earlier.
Note too the clear majority of over 35s still own property with a mortgage at least. As for the higher number of pensioners who own outright, that will of course generally filter down to younger generations too via inheritance
Most people inheriting from their parents are splitting it with siblings. Even those "lucky" enough to have something to inherit are not inheriting a whole property.
Lots of people don't inherit property from their parents at all...
Indeed. And those that do are inheriting these days in their mid to late 60s. Not exactly what people have in mind when you say "younger generations".
Yes we have had this argument before with @HYUFD. I'm 67 and still waiting to inherit. I might get nothing if my father needs it to pay for a home. If he doesn't need to do that it will be split with my sister which halves it. Having got to 67 I have paid off my mortgage and what I will inherit from his home is 1/10 of the value of my own home.
So none of this can be considered a transfer of property by parents to their children. At best I will inherit some money that I don't need. 40 years ago it would have been useful, but now not so much. Don't know where HYUFD gets his ideas about youngster inheriting property from their parents from. In most cases an inherited house is sold and the money split by 60+ year old children.
In the Home Counties certainly many if not most now get parental assistance with deposits in their 30s
Most will see their parents die by their mid 50s not mid 60s on average life expectancy and thus inherit too
Well that is utter nonsense because we have been here before and I went to the ONS data at the time and did the calculations. Firstly you have to live long enough to have children. Assume that is about 30. Your life expectancy at 30 is significantly higher than at birth. Then of course both parents have to die before you inherit. So l remember looking up and doing the calc for the age at death of the oldest of two individuals still alive at 30. On average that age is 95. That gives the average age of inheritance at 65.
You have used life expectancy of one individual and from birth. 5 year olds don't have children.
Re parental help with property - can you verify that stat? I know nobody that has.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova just now: “February 15, 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired.”
“Johnson cut short his UK tour to return to London in order to convene the meeting to discuss the UK’s consular response.
“He is believed to have received an intelligence briefing upon his return after maintaining there is still time for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis.”
From the Guardian live-blog about 20 minutes ago
Ominousness piled on onimosity. Omino-max
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
The Western leaders are certainly making the most of it to raise their domestic profiles, though. I see the UK papers are full of Johnson and Biden, while the German news is all about Scholz and Biden. My French isn't great, but I'm betting the French news is dominated by Macron and Biden.
Absolutely.
And it's working (for now) judging by opinion polls.
The leaders are all over the news, but I'm not sure it's doing much in polling. Not really doing much for (or against Macron), though as things stand he won't need it.
In Britain the Labour lead seems down from 10 to 4 or 5, but arguably that's because 5% of it was anti-Johnson reaction during Partygate, which may or may not return in due course.
Not working for Putin either - mass move to "dunno" and "won't vote"
Just look at the way one of the people convicted in the post office trials was described at the time. Certainly makes for sobering reading now. From 2012:
The Horizon scandal is absolutely appalling - worse in many ways than Enron. People went to jail. They lost homes. Families broke up. People committed suicide.
Over crimes that didn't happen.
And then the management of Fujitsu-ICL lied and tried to cover it up.
More than 700 people were convicted of crimes they didn't commit. 700. Staggering.
Final comment on this: Paula Vennells became CEO of the Post Office in 2012. By this point, there was a massive amount of evidence that the Horizon system was deeply fucked up, and that earlier convictions were unsound. (Indeed, the first articles were written on this in 2004.)
Yet under her watch the number of people prosecuted for crimes that never happened went into overdrive.
And what is insane is that she is far from the most guilty.
The difficult question is why people inflicted this on so many innocents. For must of them there couldn't have been significant personal gain involved - rather it was likely just pressure to, or even just the tendency to confirm with organisation policy.
It's not quite "just following orders", but it's not wildly dissimilar.
It is exactly just following orders. That is how just following orders begins. Authoritarians and their gophers, like HYUFD, are not benign, they are malignant. The cancer needs to be countered, or else we are well on the road to Treblinka.
Something has gone profoundly wrong with English society. All the warning signs are there.
Is English society really that much different to Scottish society?
Well quite - the man is so full of hate for the English - and in a much nastier pernicious way than any other of the nationalist posters on here.
It is my love for England and her people that gives me the moral strength to lift my head above the parapet. There is a nasty cancer now firmly embedded deep within English society. All who care about the country have a moral duty to point it out and to help the English remove the malignancy. A malignancy frequently on public display on these threads.
I get accused of “hatred” simply for mentioning the name of a nation. Nations have distinct societies and culture. We should be allowed to discuss them. If we are not, it is just one more step down into the abyss.
For some reason, this reminds me of a story my grandfather told of WWII
One day, a German airman parachuted into the water, just off the dock where my grandfather worked. As he watched, people, including children threw things at him as he struggled in the water. Finally he sank.
When I previously mentioned the story a somewhat nationalist Scottish gentleman of this parish waxed lyrical on the Evil of The English.
The phenomenon of senior people closing their minds to problems and pushing the damage onto those below is a well studied social structure throughout the world - and history.
The main rule seems to be - if you think it can't happen "here", it already is.
Not entirely sure I would trust them saying this but, as you know, I've never believed they intended to invade in the first place.
Johnson and Truss achieve their aim: hold the front pages.
The idea that Johnson - incompetent in nearly everything he does - has somehow engineered this situation is laughable. The government has just reacted to events.
On what basis did you disbelieve they were going to invade? I mean, given Putin's track record?
Some data from the ONS, concerning changes in housing tenure over time in England:
People aged 65 and over
1993
own outright: 55.7% own with mortgage: 5.8% private rental sector: 6.3% social rental sector: 32.2%
2017
own outright: 74.2% own with mortgage: 4.4% private rental sector: 5.6% social rental sector: 15.8%
People aged 16 to 64
1993
own outright: 14.0% own with mortgage: 56.2% private rental sector: 10.8% social rental sector: 19.0%
2017
own outright: 17.4% own with mortgage: 40.0% private rental sector: 25.2% social rental sector: 17.5%
In crude terms, since the Nineties owner-occupancy amongst pensioners has risen by about 20% and social rented occupancy has correspondingly declined; owner-occupancy amongst everyone else has fallen by about 15% and renting from private landlords has correspondingly risen.
+ Almost three-quarters of people aged 65 years and over in England own their home outright.
+ Younger people are less likely to own their own home than in the past and more likely to be renting. Half of people in their mid-30s to mid-40s had a mortgage in 2017, compared with two-thirds 20 years earlier.
+ People in their mid-30s to mid-40s are three times more likely to rent than 20 years ago. A third of this age group were renting from a private landlord in 2017, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 in 1997.
+ Increases in the private rental sector have been seen for all age groups apart from the very oldest, with the increase particularly pronounced in mid-life. People aged 35 to 44 years were almost three and a half times more likely to be renting in 2017 than in 1993.
+ Renting from a private landlord is most common at younger ages and decreases with age as people take out mortgages and/or receive inheritances. But for any given age, people are far more likely to be renting privately today than 10 or 20 years ago. Almost a third (28%) of people aged 35 to 44 years rented from a private landlord in 2017, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) in 1997.
+ The percentage owning with a mortgage peaks in middle age, and then declines at older ages as people finish paying off their mortgages and own their homes outright. But for almost any age, it is less common to own with a mortgage than 10 or 20 years ago. Half (50%) of people aged 35 to 44 had a mortgage in 2017, compared with more than two-thirds (68%) in 1997.
An ageing population + concentration of wealth in the hands of the elderly = gerontocracy. That's the political reality of modern Britain.
Depends where you go, in the North and Midlands and Wales for example property is still relatively cheap to buy and so more can get on the housing ladder earlier.
Note too the clear majority of over 35s still own property with a mortgage at least. As for the higher number of pensioners who own outright, that will of course generally filter down to younger generations too via inheritance
Most people inheriting from their parents are splitting it with siblings. Even those "lucky" enough to have something to inherit are not inheriting a whole property.
Lots of people don't inherit property from their parents at all...
Indeed. And those that do are inheriting these days in their mid to late 60s. Not exactly what people have in mind when you say "younger generations".
Yes we have had this argument before with @HYUFD. I'm 67 and still waiting to inherit. I might get nothing if my father needs it to pay for a home. If he doesn't need to do that it will be split with my sister which halves it. Having got to 67 I have paid off my mortgage and what I will inherit from his home is 1/10 of the value of my own home.
So none of this can be considered a transfer of property by parents to their children. At best I will inherit some money that I don't need. 40 years ago it would have been useful, but now not so much. Don't know where HYUFD gets his ideas about youngster inheriting property from their parents from. In most cases an inherited house is sold and the money split by 60+ year old children.
In the Home Counties certainly many if not most now get parental assistance with deposits in their 30s
Most will see their parents die by their mid 50s not mid 60s on average life expectancy and thus inherit too
Well that is utter nonsense because we have been here before and I went to the ONS data at the time and did the calculations. Firstly you have to live long enough to have children. Assume that is about 30. Your life expectancy at 30 is significantly higher than at birth. Then of course both parents have to die before you inherit. So l remember looking up and doing the calc for the age at death of the oldest of two individuals still alive at 30. On average that age is 95. That gives the average age of inheritance at 65.
You have used life expectancy of one individual and from birth. 5 year olds don't have children.
Re parental help with property - can you verify that stat? I know nobody that has.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova just now: “February 15, 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired.”
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
I think that's wrong. What bothers Putin's Russia is that it might become a successful and prosperous democracy.
Not much chance of that. It has one of the worst performing economies in Europe since independence.
I would like to see it become so, and joining the EU may well improve it a lot, NATO less so. There also needs to be a recognition of the new borders. Crimea and the Donbass cannot return without becoming much more Russian.
Well there's zero chance of it under Russian control.
Ukraine is really poor. Nominal GDP per capita is the second lowest in Europe after Moldova (IMF figures), Russia's GDP per capita is 3 times higher. If it was in the EU it would be by far the poorest country.
It's very widely rumoured in C of E circles that Welby pushed hard for Paula Vennells to become Bishop of London in 2017 (he has a thing about people who have held senior positions before their church careers).
Vennells should be made Archbish of Canterbury and told to apply her no-nonsense business model to the Church.
She could implement the largest branch modernisation programme in ecclesiastical history.
Failing rural parishes could be shut, vicars sent to prison on trumped-up charges.
It will really transform the C of E into a tough & lean organisation, ready to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.
There is enoiugh resistance to closing of churches and vicars covering multiple parishes from the Save the Parish movement.
Welby is an evangelical conservative, given the normal pattern of rotation of Archbishops of Canterbury his successor will likely be a liberal or Anglo Catholic, maybe Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York
If — if — Russians have indeed folded, it will not be hard to sell at home. “Stupid foreigners wilfully misinterpreting Russia’s intentions.” Equally in west it will be sold as a major victory for US hardball info warfare and negotiation tactics. But this is still very early. https://twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/1493501273634656256
The editors of the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph will be ejaculating all over photos of Boris on their front pages
Big Dog sends Big Bear back with his tail between his legs!
Do you think it was Bozza looking like a figure of authority in his hi viz in Scotland yesterday that did the trick?
Not entirely sure I would trust them saying this but, as you know, I've never believed they intended to invade in the first place.
Johnson and Truss achieve their aim: hold the front pages.
Incredible.
Nobody in this country takes them seriously but they just growl at Vladimir and he backs off.
What a wimp.
Being on the news every night and having Macron, Scholz, etc. come to pay court in Moscow is winning in Putin's terms. It burnishes his superpower credentials and makes Russia look relevant and pivotal to world affairs.
Speaking about Canada, it's remarkable the difference in attitude on here from the right between people blocking roads in Canada and people blocking roads in the UK. A few months ago you could read comments about how it was only ordinary people and ambulances being affected, with one commentator on here saying that it's ok to just drive into people blocking a road.
Now it's all "brave ordinary people standing up for their right to protest".
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
If Russia is no threat to Ukraine, how can Ukraine joining a defensive alliance be "aggressive"?
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
I think that's wrong. What bothers Putin's Russia is that it might become a successful and prosperous democracy.
Not much chance of that. It has one of the worst performing economies in Europe since independence.
I would like to see it become so, and joining the EU may well improve it a lot, NATO less so. There also needs to be a recognition of the new borders. Crimea and the Donbass cannot return without becoming much more Russian.
Well there's zero chance of it under Russian control.
Ukraine is really poor. Nominal GDP per capita is the second lowest in Europe after Moldova (IMF figures), Russia's GDP per capita is 3 times higher. If it was in the EU it would be by far the poorest country.
You may want to wonder how much Russia's political and military interventions over the last couple of decades has led to that situation. I mean, it's hardly conducive towards attracting inward investment, is it?
"Yes large multinational: please invest in a new plant here, only for it to be destroyed/nationalised by Russia after they invade/make us a satellite."
Truss on R4 saying the invasion of Ukraine "could be imminent".
My selection for the English cricket team "could be imminent", but I fear it isn't.
Assuming the situation in Ukraine gradually calms down, which I think it will, what will the Tories turn to next to enthuse their fans. Dowden's war on woke?
Canada becoming a little more like China. Trudeau appears to have lost his cool (again), but when his temper leads to prospective loss of important freedoms, it's a concern. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60383385
Given anti-vaccine mandate truckers have been blockading the border and some have been caught with guns not sure he had much choice
Not entirely sure I would trust them saying this but, as you know, I've never believed they intended to invade in the first place.
Johnson and Truss achieve their aim: hold the front pages.
The idea that Johnson - incompetent in nearly everything he does - has somehow engineered this situation is laughable. The government has just reacted to events.
On what basis did you disbelieve they were going to invade? I mean, given Putin's track record?
BJ lives in @Heathener's mind rent free. He also controls NATO, Russia and the Ukraine.
Come to think of it, this makes the British Empire look like a tiny operation.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
When the history of the 21st Century is written, it will be concluded that the internet itself was not the technology which transformed the course of human history. But social media. There was no more appropriate illustration than the moment a quasi anonymous poster on an obscure betting website called Vladimir Putin a pussy. A slight which precipitated the red army crossing over the shadow of the fallen iron curtain and leading to the total destruction of 17 of the last 30 European Captials of Culture. A butterfly wing that flapped more tragically than the bullet from Gavrilo Princip’s Browning.
I'm still not convinced Johnson will go before the General Election.
He's such a slippery snake. He's obviously trying to play Churchill, which includes ramping up rhetoric and getting the tabloids on board. It's not just about saving Ukraine. It's about saving Boris Johnson.
This is different but it saved Margaret Thatcher in 1981/2.
Mind you, with the Mauritius raising their flag on the Chagos Islands perhaps he could launch a Task Force to the Indian Ocean?!
Given the only reason the UK still has the Chagos Islands as an overseas territory is to house a US military base on Diego Garcia, the US are also behind Boris on that
Not entirely sure I would trust them saying this but, as you know, I've never believed they intended to invade in the first place.
Johnson and Truss achieve their aim: hold the front pages.
On what basis did you disbelieve they were going to invade? I mean, given Putin's track record?
Insufficient forces to risk a full-scale invasion. Putin is not that stupid. Russian military might is exaggerated.
I suspect him of gaming this for other gains, one of which is an assurance that Ukraine never joins NATO, which frankly I can understand from Russia's point of view.
NATO could do with sorting out its global priorities but then so could world leaders.
OTOH if Putin hasn’t invaded by Friday he’s clearly not going to and has proved himself a pussy and the world can point and laugh, and, more importantly, I still get to go to Odessa in March
Language that doesn't help anything.
As you know, I've never believed he wants to invade.
If Ukraine backed off its attempt to join NATO it would help. Understandably a very aggressive act in Russian eyes.
You think Vladimir Putin reads PB, and me calling him a “pussy” on this blog might be the final, intolerable western aggression that pushes him into total tank war in Eastern Europe?
When the history of the 21st Century is written, it will be concluded that the internet itself was not the technology which transformed the course of human history. But social media. There was no more appropriate illustration than the moment a quasi anonymous poster on an obscure betting website called Vladimir Putin a pussy. A slight which precipitated the red army crossing over the shadow of the fallen iron curtain and leading to the total destruction of 17 of the last 30 European Captials of Culture. A butterfly wing that flapped more tragically than the bullet from Gavrilo Princip’s Browning.
I was taught in Standard Grade History that it was Princip's Cheese and Pickle sandwich that was the real 🦋.
If this really is the end of the war scare – and that's still a very big if at this point – both sides can declare victory. The US can say its warnings stopped the worst fighting in Europe since World War II, and Russia can say this was all down to American hysteria
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/14/oliver-dowden-says-painful-woke-psychodrama-weakening-the-west
Some of you on here will love it but it's vile.
What bothers Putin's Russia is that it might become a successful and prosperous democracy.
The latter carries a maximum sentence of life.
She could implement the largest branch modernisation programme in ecclesiastical history.
Failing rural parishes could be shut, vicars sent to prison on trumped-up charges.
It will really transform the C of E into a tough & lean organisation, ready to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Sorry, People of Kiev.
I would like to see it become so, and joining the EU may well improve it a lot, NATO less so. There also needs to be a recognition of the new borders. Crimea and the Donbass cannot return without becoming much more Russian.
Far too much macho-posturing, testosterone-fuelled, silver-back, behaviour on both sides.
We need women to run the world and make it a better, fairer, kinder, less aggressive place. More Jacinda's.
I'm probably still on file in the 'special comedy box' of the Ukrainian intelligence services along with 100 Turkish harbour loungers whose generic portside calls of 'Natasha, Natasha' were supposedly the soundtrack of any 1990s Black Sea cruise.
This is great fun. I've seen Typhoons flying up through the Cuillin from the summit of Blaven, a group of Ospreys swinging past the Lawers range and Eilean Donan Castle used as a mock bombing target by two Tornados.
It's mad how close they all get to the mountains. Hercules skimming Loch Lochy was pretty cool too.
We see similar stories in the police and civil service, with people under investigation allowed to retire and end the investigations. Funnily enough, so many of them turn up later as consultants in the same sector, which wouldn’t have happened if the investigations against them had continued and they’d been fired.
Therefore I’m going to get support from others.
That’s aggressive?
I might ask him his view now.
I'd ban the whole lot.
There are 166 stars within 80 light years of the Sun.
From that point you can look at number of planets per star, chances of a planet being in a habitable orbit, chances of life occurring on a planet, chances of a modern (post 1950s say) civilization arriving at the same time we arrived there (remember dinosaurs were 240 million years ago, so that in itself is a 1 in 4 million chances).
Basically you end up looking at the numbers in detail and it becomes very hard to see two intelligent species appearing on different planets in roughly the same timeframe.
And it's working (for now) judging by opinion polls.
Daft sod.
Don't worry - I'm sure that they she has a bunch of non-exec 1 day a year jobs to keep her from going to Food Banks.
Plus a pension from the Post Office that can be seen from another start system.
The EU directive required each country to have a universal service to appease unions, but to appease free-marketeers they introduced competition above 350g. As so often, the result has been the worst of both worlds - a declining, heavily unionised industry on life support stifling competition and innovation.
At the time I argued for the UK blocking the directive, but there was no stomach for that fight in the government.
https://twitter.com/nchrysoloras/status/1493502372575956994
Has he tried selling Christianity, or is that too radical a move?
https://twitter.com/TomTugendhat/status/1493491624248233987?s=20&t=OWZVOOBrSzif2ystSSClPA
Ukraine will lose less territory if it accepted that its present boundaries are unsupportable.
It will lose more if it comes to a war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax
Importantly, I finished playing the FFVII Remake last night. Really rather liked it, though it's bloody odd having a modern game with much the same story as one from a quarter of a century ago.
@BBCSteveR·1h One problem with the Ukraine story is that it risks pushing other key stories out of the headlines. Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny goes on trial today (inside a penal colony), charged with embezzlement & contempt of court. Could add another 10 years to his current prison term.
https://twitter.com/BBCSteveR/status/1493475889220366340
I get accused of “hatred” simply for mentioning the name of a nation. Nations have distinct societies and culture. We should be allowed to discuss them. If we are not, it is just one more step down into the abyss.
Not entirely sure I would trust them saying this but, as you know, I've never believed they intended to invade in the first place.
Johnson and Truss achieve their aim: hold the front pages.
On many occasions, people have said - we have created legal structure X. Because of it's protections, no-one can stop actions Y under that! It's the LAW. HUMAN RIGHTS LAW even.
Problems build up, going against the wishes of a majority of the electorate.
Then the government deploys remedy Z. But, people (the original group) cry, why is such a horrible and illegal action possible or justified?
Constitutionalism vs Democracy.
As for the U.K. I never got what the govt was doing. There are already laws in place they could use against illegal protest. Why they needed further, more extreme, measures should concern us all.
'US Poseidon out of Lossie about to fly over my flat.'
Just don't make any sharp movements and you'll be ok.
https://www.mortgagefinancegazette.com/lending-news/half-first-time-buyers-35-using-bank-mum-dad-12-10-2020/
'The “bank of mum and dad” will have supported nearly half (49%) of all first-time buyer housing transactions this year, according to a forecast.'
https://www.independent.co.uk/money/bank-of-mum-and-dad-supported-49-of-firsttime-buyer-purchases-in-2021-b1943376.html
https://twitter.com/markmackinnon/status/1493501942072496129?s=20&t=R0vkYao7GH5-Ms-kwtdc3Q
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2022_French_presidential_election
Biden still underwater at abouit -10, though he and Harris are both tied vs Trump:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
Scholz also not benefiting, with CDU and Left both slightly up
https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/
In Britain the Labour lead seems down from 10 to 4 or 5, but arguably that's because 5% of it was anti-Johnson reaction during Partygate, which may or may not return in due course.
Not working for Putin either - mass move to "dunno" and "won't vote"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2026_Russian_legislative_election
Nobody in this country takes them seriously but they just growl at Vladimir and he backs off.
What a wimp.
One day, a German airman parachuted into the water, just off the dock where my grandfather worked. As he watched, people, including children threw things at him as he struggled in the water. Finally he sank.
When I previously mentioned the story a somewhat nationalist Scottish gentleman of this parish waxed lyrical on the Evil of The English.
Then I pointed out where the dock was....
The moral of the story is that such things happen everywhere. In Germany, determined efforts were made to prosecute the innocent as part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal....
The phenomenon of senior people closing their minds to problems and pushing the damage onto those below is a well studied social structure throughout the world - and history.
The main rule seems to be - if you think it can't happen "here", it already is.
On what basis did you disbelieve they were going to invade? I mean, given Putin's track record?
Could be in trouble.
SARS-CoV-2 Omicron triggers cross-reactive neutralization and Fc effector functions in previously vaccinated, but not unvaccinated individuals
https://twitter.com/medrxivpreprint/status/1493324834247487491
https://savetheparish.com/
Welby is an evangelical conservative, given the normal pattern of rotation of Archbishops of Canterbury his successor will likely be a liberal or Anglo Catholic, maybe Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York
Do you think it was Bozza looking like a figure of authority in his hi viz in Scotland yesterday that did the trick?
A few months ago you could read comments about how it was only ordinary people and ambulances being affected, with one commentator on here saying that it's ok to just drive into people blocking a road.
Now it's all "brave ordinary people standing up for their right to protest".
"Yes large multinational: please invest in a new plant here, only for it to be destroyed/nationalised by Russia after they invade/make us a satellite."
My selection for the English cricket team "could be imminent", but I fear it isn't.
Assuming the situation in Ukraine gradually calms down, which I think it will, what will the Tories turn to next to enthuse their fans. Dowden's war on woke?
Come to think of it, this makes the British Empire look like a tiny operation.
I suspect him of gaming this for other gains, one of which is an assurance that Ukraine never joins NATO, which frankly I can understand from Russia's point of view.
NATO could do with sorting out its global priorities but then so could world leaders.
Will he therefore be ok with the vaccine in another year?
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1493510555864346626?s=21