Great to see Finland and Sweden both formally confirming applications to join NATO.
In four months the Great Russian Bear has been humiliated by Slava Ukraini, pushed back first from Kyiv and then from Kherson and seen two nations famous for neutrality for decades now aligning with NATO.
And now NATO are talking openly about the possibility of Ukraine winning the war. If they do, they should join NATO themselves.
What a catastrophic humiliating screw up by Putin.
An admission that his reason for the special military operation was bollocks from the start.
https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1526175012096548864 Putin today: NATO expansion is artificial. Russia has no problems with Finland and Sweden, so their entry into NATO does not pose an immediate threat. Russia's response to the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO will depend on the expansion of the alliance's infrastructure...
Also an admission that despite all his bellicose rhetoric about NATO expansion, the defanged Russian bear has been revealed to be utterly impotent and can't do anything about expansion. While they're comprehensively failing in a war with Ukraine, they're not going to open a second front in Finland.
Now is the perfect cover for any Eastern European nations who aren't under the umbrella of NATO protection to take the opportunity to do so, fast.
There are no European Countries left who would want to be in NATO - Serbia definitely wouldn't, Bosnia probably not. Austria is neutral by treaty, Switzerland relies on he fact that you'd have to fight all the way though NATO to get to them....
A Belarus that has overthrown its dictator and seen what happened to Ukraine might....
Moldova might be getting jittery over its neutrality stance as well.
I think it was the Finnish President when discussing neutrality who pointed out that since Russia started demanding people not be able to do things, like join NATO, then that would make it no longer their choice to not be in it, and thus not really neutrality anymore.
Russia's diplomatic hysteria and trash talking seems to have made Putin feel like a big man, but made it clear neutrality may not really be neutrality anymore, it was bowing to Russian demands, and the invasion showed the potential cost of that.
That’s a very astute point by the Finnish PM. Basically Putin said Choose us or them?
President, not PM (though she probably said something similar). Fortunately they are easy to tell apart, I hate identikit politicians.
She looks like Arwen after she's been on a six week elf bender Which given her naughtiness during covid I suspect is true true true
I liked the story of her getting in a little trouble because she went out clubbing during Covid. Not because I think it is an issue that she is young enough to still be interested in going clubbing, all the merrier I say, but because she said she'd left her work phone at home when doing so - perhaps I ask too much of heads of government, but I'd hope they were contactable at all hours if necessary. At the least it shows a firm commitment in FInland to work life balance.
Imma not checking my phone there's a boy I want to bang down the club. She also has expenses issues apparently. She's a Tory. A foxy, clubby, slightly fey, party Tory
She's not a Tory, she's leader of the Finnish SDP – it's a centre-left party.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Lichfield, Wells, Ripon, Ely, Truro, Chichester, Salisbury by my reckoning Plus city of London if included as it's own entity
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
A substantial points deduction this season so they can't qualify for any European competition but don't get relegated would seem to me to be a fair compromise.
The club can't exist without Abramovich agreeing to exit, or the government extending, so what football penalties the club gets is moot.
A new Chelsea could easily exist but all precedent is start at (very near) the bottom if that is the path. And the police dealing with non league would really hate that.
Is this not about Abramovitch changing his mind about wanting his £1.6bn loan repaid? In which event is the solution not that that money gets frozen until whenever? If he doesn't agree the club goes into adminisration and then any claim he has in the insolvency gets treated the same way. It really shouldn't be insuperable.
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
A substantial points deduction this season so they can't qualify for any European competition but don't get relegated would seem to me to be a fair compromise.
Chelsea should be treated no differently to any other club. If this was a club like, for example. Wycombe Wanderers, what would happen ?
------------------------ carnforth said: » show previous quotes Whilst poor (as a student) I once bought Sainsbury's "Basics" ground coffee at £1.25 per 250g. 100% robusta. Rough as hell.
someone said: For fans of particularly bitter coffee, go to an middle-eastern store and buy Iranian coffee with green cardamom pods mixed it. Serious (but good) stuff. I once bought a bag of coffee from a pound shop. Packaged to resemble Lavazza.
And you know what? It was shit. -----------------------
If you want ultra-cheap coffee, Aldi are the place, Looking at my last receipt the 100% arabica inexpensive range is £1.09 per 8oz roast and ground, and the posh one is I think around £2.50.
Not artisan, but not unacceptable when I run out without noticing.
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
A substantial points deduction this season so they can't qualify for any European competition but don't get relegated would seem to me to be a fair compromise.
The club can't exist without Abramovich agreeing to exit, or the government extending, so what football penalties the club gets is moot.
A new Chelsea could easily exist but all precedent is start at (very near) the bottom if that is the path. And the police dealing with non league would really hate that.
Could the government confiscate the club and then sell it on and put the money into escrow?
Ultimately yes, I don't see why not. But so far we have taken the path of freezing assets rather than confiscation, which might have a bigger impact on inward investment generally.
Apart from my University years, I've lived in London most of my life.
That's not to say I don't find some parts of England spectacular but would I want to live in another part?
@Leon, I think, said you should never live anywhere until you've experienced its best and its worst. I love Cornwall but I spent one January there and that put me off. Places like Ludlow, Nantwich and Hereford in February aren't as appealing as you might hope.
Without sounding too sentimental, I have life with Mrs Stodge - anything else would just be living. The location just isn't that important.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Quite a good list of some of the nicest places to live in the UK. Look for a small cathedral city…
@HYUFD posted eloquently on how most villages are bereft of pubs, shops, cafes, anything - which is why a life in one would be anathema - for me. Because you end up spending half your life in a car, out of necessity. You have to drive for EVERYTHING
One of the main advantages of life in central-ish London is the ability to walk almost anywhere, and, failing that, there is good public transport
Though I think kjh(?) posted earlier about boring old suburbia - I've pretty much always lived in suburbia. It offers a splendid way of life. Pubs, cafes, restaurants, shops and most importantly friends are all in walking difference. There are trees and parks and open space - and open space you can actually use, because it's its job to be used by people, rather than to be farmed and looked at. And the excitement and employment opportunities of a big city are within 20 minutes by regular public transport. So you can be as drunk as a penguin all the time. Suburbs aren't boring; they are, to misquote le corbusier, one of the finest machines for living in ever invented. And that's why the best ones - your Didsburys, West Bridgfords, Gosforths, Headingleys, Cliftons, Hillheads - are so expensive. But even the cheaper ones tend to work.
Great to see Finland and Sweden both formally confirming applications to join NATO.
In four months the Great Russian Bear has been humiliated by Slava Ukraini, pushed back first from Kyiv and then from Kherson and seen two nations famous for neutrality for decades now aligning with NATO.
And now NATO are talking openly about the possibility of Ukraine winning the war. If they do, they should join NATO themselves.
What a catastrophic humiliating screw up by Putin.
An admission that his reason for the special military operation was bollocks from the start.
https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1526175012096548864 Putin today: NATO expansion is artificial. Russia has no problems with Finland and Sweden, so their entry into NATO does not pose an immediate threat. Russia's response to the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO will depend on the expansion of the alliance's infrastructure...
Also an admission that despite all his bellicose rhetoric about NATO expansion, the defanged Russian bear has been revealed to be utterly impotent and can't do anything about expansion. While they're comprehensively failing in a war with Ukraine, they're not going to open a second front in Finland.
Now is the perfect cover for any Eastern European nations who aren't under the umbrella of NATO protection to take the opportunity to do so, fast.
There are no European Countries left who would want to be in NATO - Serbia definitely wouldn't, Bosnia probably not. Austria is neutral by treaty, Switzerland relies on he fact that you'd have to fight all the way though NATO to get to them....
A Belarus that has overthrown its dictator and seen what happened to Ukraine might....
Moldova might be getting jittery over its neutrality stance as well.
I think it was the Finnish President when discussing neutrality who pointed out that since Russia started demanding people not be able to do things, like join NATO, then that would make it no longer their choice to not be in it, and thus not really neutrality anymore.
Russia's diplomatic hysteria and trash talking seems to have made Putin feel like a big man, but made it clear neutrality may not really be neutrality anymore, it was bowing to Russian demands, and the invasion showed the potential cost of that.
That’s a very astute point by the Finnish PM. Basically Putin said Choose us or them?
President, not PM (though she probably said something similar). Fortunately they are easy to tell apart, I hate identikit politicians.
She looks like Arwen after she's been on a six week elf bender Which given her naughtiness during covid I suspect is true true true
I liked the story of her getting in a little trouble because she went out clubbing during Covid. Not because I think it is an issue that she is young enough to still be interested in going clubbing, all the merrier I say, but because she said she'd left her work phone at home when doing so - perhaps I ask too much of heads of government, but I'd hope they were contactable at all hours if necessary. At the least it shows a firm commitment in FInland to work life balance.
Imma not checking my phone there's a boy I want to bang down the club. She also has expenses issues apparently. She's a Tory. A foxy, clubby, slightly fey, party Tory
She's not a Tory, she's leader of the Finnish SDP – it's a centre-left party.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Quite a good list of some of the nicest places to live in the UK. Look for a small cathedral city…
@HYUFD posted eloquently on how most villages are bereft of pubs, shops, cafes, anything - which is why a life in one would be anathema - for me. Because you end up spending half your life in a car, out of necessity. You have to drive for EVERYTHING
One of the main advantages of life in central-ish London is the ability to walk almost anywhere, and, failing that, there is good public transport
A friend of mine lives a gorgeous Oxon village that does have a pub and a shop.
However, the shop is very often closed and the pub shuts on... Saturday afternoons. Exactly when you want it to be open.
I find the whole "pop in the car" to do or buy sodding anything completely depressing and boring. A sink of time.
Shutting a pub on a weekend afternoon doesn't seem like a very bright business idea.
Indeed. The barminess is as bizarre as it is inconvenient.
There’s a pub in Cornwall called the Heron, in a village called Malpas
It has an utterly exquisite location. On a sunny weekend afternoon there are few other places in Europe where you would rather be, sipping a pint or a nice glass of Kiwi white
Until very recently it closed in the afternoon. 2-6, yep we’re shut, sorry, fuck off. Thus losing enormous amount of business. No wonder they sold it.
It was almost a puritan attitude. “People shouldn’t enjoy drinking too much” They weren’t that keen on people drinking outside, despite the peerless views over the Tresillian. Mad
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
Many people who live in towns and cities yearn for rural life. Hence programmes like 'Escape to the Country'. But those people are at least a little mistaken about Country Life. What they yearn for is the picture perfect villages they visit on a Sunday, possibly at the end of a long walk. Possibly a village in the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales or the Costwolds. A village which, due the presence of people like them, has pubs and coffee shops and cafes out of all proportion to its size. But most villages aren't like that. Most villages are small and unremarkable and dead. They might have a pub, and it might be a good pub, but it probably isn't. They might have a cafe, but it probably doesn't open very often. They might have a shop, and it might be a lovely little community owned thing where you can buy fudge and artisan coffee and vegetables at three times supermarket prices; or it may be a Happy Shopper in which nothing has changed since the 1970s. And even in the good villages, living there is very different from visiting them for the afternoon or the weekend.
I idealise the Lake District. I've whiled away man a happy hour thinking how nice it would be to live there. But even so, there are only two or three places in the Lake District I'd actually like to live: the towns. And they are only liveable because tourism gives them far more vitality than most towns of their size.
There is a third option we are all forgetting, which is suburbia.
For most people outside of central london, or the tiny few enjoying village life, life is largely the purpose built housing estate, the identikit streets, the endless ring roads, the drive to the out of town tescos.
When we speak of WFH, most aren't thinking about swapping inner city urban life for bucolic bliss, they're thinking about more time spent in their rabbit hutch three bedroom new build on the outskirts of town.
So we can assume if the majority of WFHers aren't swapping inner city life for village life, their reasons for WFH from dreary old suburbia are as follows.
1 - The person wants to spend more time at home with family / pets.
2 - The person hates office life / the commute, usually the former. They hate their co-workers, office gossip, being forced to sing "happy birthday" to some 50 year old colleague in accounts whose name they can't remember, etc. And would prefer to WFH to cut out the whole dreary saga and get on with their job.
3 - Their job, like most office jobs I've ever had, require about two hours worth of work per day, but their jobs require them to sit at their desks for 8 and pretend to look busy, lest their line manager feel the need to hand them some pointless busywork. They have therefore concluded that they can do exactly the same amount of work as they were doing in the office, but have an extra 6 hours to watch tv, play x box, work out, etc. This is not a problem with the worker - it is a problem with the job.
My guess is that most jobs are a combination of the above.
Great point with 3. Pretending to be busy is one of the biggest sources of stress at work - note it falls heaviest on the middle ranks because low grades are genuinely busy and high grades don't have to pretend - and it takes its greatest toll in an office as opposed to WFH.
In a previous job, I soon learned that doing my work quickly and asking for more work was not rewarded with a pay rise, promotion, or even extra responsibilities. I was simply handed the very worst projects of my very slowest colleagues in order to "free them up to work on their important projects", which were invariably worse than the ones I was being given.
After a few months, I stopped asking for extra work. Then they introduced timesheets, ostensibly to keep track of what everyone was doing, but all this really did was give people unfeasibly long amounts of times to complete simple tasks. One time, I was given two days to complete a job that consisted of cutting and pasting some text from one word document into another. It took me less than an hour. I took the two days allocated.
A lunchtime pint or three was essential. Even then. The boredom - I still remember it now.
There was simply no incentive to work hard, and hardly any incentive to work at all. If I was still working that job, hell yes I would want to WFH every day.
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
A substantial points deduction this season so they can't qualify for any European competition but don't get relegated would seem to me to be a fair compromise.
The club can't exist without Abramovich agreeing to exit, or the government extending, so what football penalties the club gets is moot.
A new Chelsea could easily exist but all precedent is start at (very near) the bottom if that is the path. And the police dealing with non league would really hate that.
Is this not about Abramovitch changing his mind about wanting his £1.6bn loan repaid? In which event is the solution not that that money gets frozen until whenever? If he doesn't agree the club goes into adminisration and then any claim he has in the insolvency gets treated the same way. It really shouldn't be insuperable.
Sounds like they are arguing about details of who controls the funds in the charity and where it is regulated. So Abramovich will say he has not changed his mind and the govt will say he is not meeting his public statements.
Great to see Finland and Sweden both formally confirming applications to join NATO.
In four months the Great Russian Bear has been humiliated by Slava Ukraini, pushed back first from Kyiv and then from Kherson and seen two nations famous for neutrality for decades now aligning with NATO.
And now NATO are talking openly about the possibility of Ukraine winning the war. If they do, they should join NATO themselves.
What a catastrophic humiliating screw up by Putin.
An admission that his reason for the special military operation was bollocks from the start.
https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1526175012096548864 Putin today: NATO expansion is artificial. Russia has no problems with Finland and Sweden, so their entry into NATO does not pose an immediate threat. Russia's response to the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO will depend on the expansion of the alliance's infrastructure...
Also an admission that despite all his bellicose rhetoric about NATO expansion, the defanged Russian bear has been revealed to be utterly impotent and can't do anything about expansion. While they're comprehensively failing in a war with Ukraine, they're not going to open a second front in Finland.
Now is the perfect cover for any Eastern European nations who aren't under the umbrella of NATO protection to take the opportunity to do so, fast.
There are no European Countries left who would want to be in NATO - Serbia definitely wouldn't, Bosnia probably not. Austria is neutral by treaty, Switzerland relies on he fact that you'd have to fight all the way though NATO to get to them....
A Belarus that has overthrown its dictator and seen what happened to Ukraine might....
Moldova might be getting jittery over its neutrality stance as well.
I think it was the Finnish President when discussing neutrality who pointed out that since Russia started demanding people not be able to do things, like join NATO, then that would make it no longer their choice to not be in it, and thus not really neutrality anymore.
Russia's diplomatic hysteria and trash talking seems to have made Putin feel like a big man, but made it clear neutrality may not really be neutrality anymore, it was bowing to Russian demands, and the invasion showed the potential cost of that.
That’s a very astute point by the Finnish PM. Basically Putin said Choose us or them?
President, not PM (though she probably said something similar). Fortunately they are easy to tell apart, I hate identikit politicians.
She looks like Arwen after she's been on a six week elf bender Which given her naughtiness during covid I suspect is true true true
I liked the story of her getting in a little trouble because she went out clubbing during Covid. Not because I think it is an issue that she is young enough to still be interested in going clubbing, all the merrier I say, but because she said she'd left her work phone at home when doing so - perhaps I ask too much of heads of government, but I'd hope they were contactable at all hours if necessary. At the least it shows a firm commitment in FInland to work life balance.
Imma not checking my phone there's a boy I want to bang down the club. She also has expenses issues apparently. She's a Tory. A foxy, clubby, slightly fey, party Tory
She's not a Tory, she's leader of the Finnish SDP – it's a centre-left party.
St Asaph became a city in 2012, and actually our eldest son and our daughter were born there and my great grandfather used to walk past the then workhouse every day to work
Apart from my University years, I've lived in London most of my life.
That's not to say I don't find some parts of England spectacular but would I want to live in another part?
@Leon, I think, said you should never live anywhere until you've experienced its best and its worst. I love Cornwall but I spent one January there and that put me off. Places like Ludlow, Nantwich and Hereford in February aren't as appealing as you might hope.
Without sounding too sentimental, I have life with Mrs Stodge - anything else would just be living. The location just isn't that important.
I know Cornwall and Hereford very well indeed, and have spent much time in each (including winters)
Both are nice places to live, possibly super-nice depending on your exact circumstances. Yes both can be grim in February but I would say that is true of anywhere in Northern Europe
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
And gain 3 million would never have voted Tory otherwise.
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
A substantial points deduction this season so they can't qualify for any European competition but don't get relegated would seem to me to be a fair compromise.
The club can't exist without Abramovich agreeing to exit, or the government extending, so what football penalties the club gets is moot.
A new Chelsea could easily exist but all precedent is start at (very near) the bottom if that is the path. And the police dealing with non league would really hate that.
Is this not about Abramovitch changing his mind about wanting his £1.6bn loan repaid? In which event is the solution not that that money gets frozen until whenever? If he doesn't agree the club goes into adminisration and then any claim he has in the insolvency gets treated the same way. It really shouldn't be insuperable.
Sounds like they are arguing about details of who controls the funds in the charity and where it is regulated. So Abramovich will say he has not changed his mind and the govt will say he is not meeting his public statements.
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
A substantial points deduction this season so they can't qualify for any European competition but don't get relegated would seem to me to be a fair compromise.
Chelsea should be treated no differently to any other club. If this was a club like, for example. Wycombe Wanderers, what would happen ?
That's easy. No-one would know or care if their owner was a mate of Putins or not!
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
I'd go Ripon, Ely, Durham, Southwell, Bury St Edmunds, Wells, and I'd accept Truro or Chichester as I have run out at 6.
I did, however, do a tour of 39 out of 42 some years ago in 6 weeks taken off, so I have visited nearly all the cities.
A pedant notes - Southwell not a city - don't mistake having a cathedral for being a city!
------------------------ carnforth said: » show previous quotes Whilst poor (as a student) I once bought Sainsbury's "Basics" ground coffee at £1.25 per 250g. 100% robusta. Rough as hell.
someone said: For fans of particularly bitter coffee, go to an middle-eastern store and buy Iranian coffee with green cardamom pods mixed it. Serious (but good) stuff. I once bought a bag of coffee from a pound shop. Packaged to resemble Lavazza.
And you know what? It was shit. -----------------------
If you want ultra-cheap coffee, Aldi are the place, Looking at my last receipt the 100% arabica inexpensive range is £1.09 per 8oz roast and ground, and the posh one is I think around £2.50.
Not artisan, but not unacceptable when I run out without noticing.
I love my coffee and I get Aldi's own brand beans for my machine. They're great. I think it's around £2.50 for a bag of beans.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Quite a good list of some of the nicest places to live in the UK. Look for a small cathedral city…
@HYUFD posted eloquently on how most villages are bereft of pubs, shops, cafes, anything - which is why a life in one would be anathema - for me. Because you end up spending half your life in a car, out of necessity. You have to drive for EVERYTHING
One of the main advantages of life in central-ish London is the ability to walk almost anywhere, and, failing that, there is good public transport
Though I think kjh(?) posted earlier about boring old suburbia - I've pretty much always lived in suburbia. It offers a splendid way of life. Pubs, cafes, restaurants, shops and most importantly friends are all in walking difference. There are trees and parks and open space - and open space you can actually use, because it's its job to be used by people, rather than to be farmed and looked at. And the excitement and employment opportunities of a big city are within 20 minutes by regular public transport. So you can be as drunk as a penguin all the time. Suburbs aren't boring; they are, to misquote le corbusier, one of the finest machines for living in ever invented. And that's why the best ones - your Didsburys, West Bridgfords, Gosforths, Headingleys, Cliftons, Hillheads - are so expensive. But even the cheaper ones tend to work.
Here's the secret - there are a large number of jobs where working from home does not impact productivity (or even benefits it), and there are a large number where it severely impacts it.
The workforce will - again - fragment around whether you are one of the lucky ones who needn't go into the office, or whether you will be required to go in to a (now even less well maintained) one.
Our daughter has just done a DNA match on us and my wife shows Scottish with 3% Norwegian and I have DNA that matches me to Wales, England and 11% Scotland which rather surprised me plus 2% Norwegian
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
And gain 3 million would never have voted Tory otherwise.
Just kidding. Sort of.
Its completely one sided in terms of votes. Like charitable status on private schools. More people on one side, but the only votes that change are on the people most impacted even though it is the smaller side by far.
There’s a pub in Cornwall called the Heron, in a village called Malpas
It has an utterly exquisite location. On a sunny weekend afternoon there are few other places in Europe where you would rather be, sipping a pint or a nice glass of Kiwi white
Until very recently it closed in the afternoon. 2-6, yep we’re shut, sorry, fuck off. Thus losing enormous amount of business. No wonder they sold it.
It was almost a puritan attitude. “People shouldn’t enjoy drinking too much” They weren’t that keen on people drinking outside, despite the peerless views over the Tresillian. Mad
To pick up on our previous, the last time I was in Cornwall was in February 2019. I ended up at The Pandora Inn at Mylor Bridge. That's what I call a pub.
Great to see Finland and Sweden both formally confirming applications to join NATO.
In four months the Great Russian Bear has been humiliated by Slava Ukraini, pushed back first from Kyiv and then from Kherson and seen two nations famous for neutrality for decades now aligning with NATO.
And now NATO are talking openly about the possibility of Ukraine winning the war. If they do, they should join NATO themselves.
What a catastrophic humiliating screw up by Putin.
An admission that his reason for the special military operation was bollocks from the start.
https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1526175012096548864 Putin today: NATO expansion is artificial. Russia has no problems with Finland and Sweden, so their entry into NATO does not pose an immediate threat. Russia's response to the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO will depend on the expansion of the alliance's infrastructure...
Also an admission that despite all his bellicose rhetoric about NATO expansion, the defanged Russian bear has been revealed to be utterly impotent and can't do anything about expansion. While they're comprehensively failing in a war with Ukraine, they're not going to open a second front in Finland.
Now is the perfect cover for any Eastern European nations who aren't under the umbrella of NATO protection to take the opportunity to do so, fast.
There are no European Countries left who would want to be in NATO - Serbia definitely wouldn't, Bosnia probably not. Austria is neutral by treaty, Switzerland relies on he fact that you'd have to fight all the way though NATO to get to them....
A Belarus that has overthrown its dictator and seen what happened to Ukraine might....
Moldova might be getting jittery over its neutrality stance as well.
I think it was the Finnish President when discussing neutrality who pointed out that since Russia started demanding people not be able to do things, like join NATO, then that would make it no longer their choice to not be in it, and thus not really neutrality anymore.
Russia's diplomatic hysteria and trash talking seems to have made Putin feel like a big man, but made it clear neutrality may not really be neutrality anymore, it was bowing to Russian demands, and the invasion showed the potential cost of that.
That’s a very astute point by the Finnish PM. Basically Putin said Choose us or them?
President, not PM (though she probably said something similar). Fortunately they are easy to tell apart, I hate identikit politicians.
She looks like Arwen after she's been on a six week elf bender Which given her naughtiness during covid I suspect is true true true
I liked the story of her getting in a little trouble because she went out clubbing during Covid. Not because I think it is an issue that she is young enough to still be interested in going clubbing, all the merrier I say, but because she said she'd left her work phone at home when doing so - perhaps I ask too much of heads of government, but I'd hope they were contactable at all hours if necessary. At the least it shows a firm commitment in FInland to work life balance.
She's a Tory. A foxy, clubby, slightly fey, party Tory
You could have stopped after the first sentence, you already won a lot of people over after three words.
Except for the fact that those words are untrue.
She'd obviously be a Tory here because she's a lockdown party girl.
If she were Labour, she would have just briefly paused from work for a reasonably necessary beer.
That was what I was trying to imply. Seems I was taken literally. I have mispoliticated her. No point clubbing this weekend now, I've blown my chance.
I've been to a lot of football matches and I've only ever been racially/religiously abused by fans of one club, Chelsea.
I'm not bitter, a group of other Liverpool fans heard the abuse, and formed a barrier between me and the Chelsea fans and made sure I got back to my hotel ok.
Great friendships created in the darkest of moments.
Our daughter has just done a DNA match on us and my wife shows Scottish with 3% Norwegian and I have DNA that matches me to Wales, England and 11% Scotland which rather surprised me plus 2% Norwegian
If you have watched Vikings, you will not be surprised most of us have a bit of Norwegian!
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Quite a good list of some of the nicest places to live in the UK. Look for a small cathedral city…
@HYUFD posted eloquently on how most villages are bereft of pubs, shops, cafes, anything - which is why a life in one would be anathema - for me. Because you end up spending half your life in a car, out of necessity. You have to drive for EVERYTHING
One of the main advantages of life in central-ish London is the ability to walk almost anywhere, and, failing that, there is good public transport
A friend of mine lives a gorgeous Oxon village that does have a pub and a shop.
However, the shop is very often closed and the pub shuts on... Saturday afternoons. Exactly when you want it to be open.
I find the whole "pop in the car" to do or buy sodding anything completely depressing and boring. A sink of time.
Shutting a pub on a weekend afternoon doesn't seem like a very bright business idea.
Indeed. The barminess is as bizarre as it is inconvenient.
There’s a pub in Cornwall called the Heron, in a village called Malpas
It has an utterly exquisite location. On a sunny weekend afternoon there are few other places in Europe where you would rather be, sipping a pint or a nice glass of Kiwi white
Until very recently it closed in the afternoon. 2-6, yep we’re shut, sorry, fuck off. Thus losing enormous amount of business. No wonder they sold it.
It was almost a puritan attitude. “People shouldn’t enjoy drinking too much” They weren’t that keen on people drinking outside, despite the peerless views over the Tresillian. Mad
I once went into a bar in New England's inner depths and there was a large sign that read: "Customers are reminded there is a limit of two drinks."
Here's the secret - there are a large number of jobs where working from home does not impact productivity (or even benefits it), and there are a large number where it severely impacts it.
The workforce will - again - fragment around whether you are one of the lucky ones who needn't go into the office, or whether you will be required to go in to a (now even less well maintained) one.
Hardly a secret even for an Angelino.
Many jobs contain both elements and it's getting the balance between the two right which is important as well as individual preference.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
I'd go Ripon, Ely, Durham, Southwell, Bury St Edmunds, Wells, and I'd accept Truro or Chichester as I have run out at 6.
I did, however, do a tour of 39 out of 42 some years ago in 6 weeks taken off, so I have visited nearly all the cities.
A pedant notes - Southwell not a city - don't mistake having a cathedral for being a city!
I was using a more appropriate definition of city .
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Quite a good list of some of the nicest places to live in the UK. Look for a small cathedral city…
@HYUFD posted eloquently on how most villages are bereft of pubs, shops, cafes, anything - which is why a life in one would be anathema - for me. Because you end up spending half your life in a car, out of necessity. You have to drive for EVERYTHING
One of the main advantages of life in central-ish London is the ability to walk almost anywhere, and, failing that, there is good public transport
A friend of mine lives a gorgeous Oxon village that does have a pub and a shop.
However, the shop is very often closed and the pub shuts on... Saturday afternoons. Exactly when you want it to be open.
I find the whole "pop in the car" to do or buy sodding anything completely depressing and boring. A sink of time.
Shutting a pub on a weekend afternoon doesn't seem like a very bright business idea.
Indeed. The barminess is as bizarre as it is inconvenient.
There’s a pub in Cornwall called the Heron, in a village called Malpas
It has an utterly exquisite location. On a sunny weekend afternoon there are few other places in Europe where you would rather be, sipping a pint or a nice glass of Kiwi white
Until very recently it closed in the afternoon. 2-6, yep we’re shut, sorry, fuck off. Thus losing enormous amount of business. No wonder they sold it.
It was almost a puritan attitude. “People shouldn’t enjoy drinking too much” They weren’t that keen on people drinking outside, despite the peerless views over the Tresillian. Mad
I once went into a bar in New England's inner depths and there was a large sign that read: "Customers are reminded there is a limit of two drinks."
A bottle of wine and a half bottle of whiskey please.
There’s a pub in Cornwall called the Heron, in a village called Malpas
It has an utterly exquisite location. On a sunny weekend afternoon there are few other places in Europe where you would rather be, sipping a pint or a nice glass of Kiwi white
Until very recently it closed in the afternoon. 2-6, yep we’re shut, sorry, fuck off. Thus losing enormous amount of business. No wonder they sold it.
It was almost a puritan attitude. “People shouldn’t enjoy drinking too much” They weren’t that keen on people drinking outside, despite the peerless views over the Tresillian. Mad
To pick up on our previous, the last time I was in Cornwall was in February 2019. I ended up at The Pandora Inn at Mylor Bridge. That's what I call a pub.
The Pandora is lush. What a location - tho it is in Restronguet not Mylor
If you want to do something extremely fun, rent a kayak at actual Mylor, then paddle to the Pandora (takes about 1-2 hours, depending on your vigour). Haul up the kayaks and have a boozy lunch, mussels and chips, the works, then paddle back drunk. You’d have to work hard to get into trouble, it’s so sheltered
The food can be variable tho. Avoid the “risotto”. Otherwise: superb
Our daughter has just done a DNA match on us and my wife shows Scottish with 3% Norwegian and I have DNA that matches me to Wales, England and 11% Scotland which rather surprised me plus 2% Norwegian
Big G if you read up on these, in particular Adam Rutherford does a good dismantling of them, or apply a bit of maths, you will find out they are utter bollocks.
Apart from my University years, I've lived in London most of my life.
That's not to say I don't find some parts of England spectacular but would I want to live in another part?
@Leon, I think, said you should never live anywhere until you've experienced its best and its worst. I love Cornwall but I spent one January there and that put me off. Places like Ludlow, Nantwich and Hereford in February aren't as appealing as you might hope.
Without sounding too sentimental, I have life with Mrs Stodge - anything else would just be living. The location just isn't that important.
I know Cornwall and Hereford very well indeed, and have spent much time in each (including winters)
Both are nice places to live, possibly super-nice depending on your exact circumstances. Yes both can be grim in February but I would say that is true of anywhere in Northern Europe
Cornwall *very* much depends on which part you are occupying.
Trivia question: is there not somewhere in Cornwall a memorial to local people taken into slavery by the Barbary Slavers?
I think that backlogs in a lot of areas undoubtedly increased during lockdowns (although that itself is some evidence that WFH is simply not as efficient for adminstrative tasks); the public sector had extremely cautious isolation protocols so the time staff were off skyrocketed and of course a lot of people were ill. But its time to pull a finger out, several in fact.
Another issue is that Covid hasn't gone away, and returning to the office undoubtedly increases the frequency with which staff are off because they've caught it. I have a colleague - about 40, very fit - who has been off work for more than a week with high fever and constant coughing. If staying at home makes my team less likely to catch it *and* they prefer it *and* they're delivering what I ask of them, then I really don't object. If we have something that is best done in the office, then I'd like them to come in. But not just to tick a box.
The underlying problem is that the Government appears to be trying to win back core votes simply by slagging off the civil service. I simply don't believe that Johnson (or Rees-Mogg) have enough insight into the detailed work done by the civil service to form a sound judgment on whether their individual jobs are best done in the office. Nor is it particularly good management to muse publcly that you're thinking of getting rid of a fifth of your workforce, without actually intiating the process of consultation and redundancy.
Is this a core vote thing? I reckon they might have realised their levelling-up plans are kaput if the town centres they want to revitalise are denuded of workers.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Lichfield, Wells, Ripon, Ely, Truro, Chichester, Salisbury by my reckoning Plus city of London if included as it's own entity
I missed Durham, assuming it was larger. Durham plus 7 plus city of London Hereford is slightly over at 60,000 or so
The DUP want the protocol gone not just changed , clearly they won’t be returning to the assembly anytime soon .
The suspicion is they want to take the chance of another election and hope they can become the first party then as they can’t bear not having the first minister.
They’ll say no to everything and aren’t interested even if the EU make compromises .
Our daughter has just done a DNA match on us and my wife shows Scottish with 3% Norwegian and I have DNA that matches me to Wales, England and 11% Scotland which rather surprised me plus 2% Norwegian
Big G if you read up on these, in particular Adam Rutherford does a good dismantling of them, or apply a bit of maths, you will find out they are utter bollocks.
Maybe but they do fit the family profile and ancestry
Apart from my University years, I've lived in London most of my life.
That's not to say I don't find some parts of England spectacular but would I want to live in another part?
@Leon, I think, said you should never live anywhere until you've experienced its best and its worst. I love Cornwall but I spent one January there and that put me off. Places like Ludlow, Nantwich and Hereford in February aren't as appealing as you might hope.
Without sounding too sentimental, I have life with Mrs Stodge - anything else would just be living. The location just isn't that important.
I know Cornwall and Hereford very well indeed, and have spent much time in each (including winters)
Both are nice places to live, possibly super-nice depending on your exact circumstances. Yes both can be grim in February but I would say that is true of anywhere in Northern Europe
Cornwall *very* much depends on which part you are occupying.
Trivia question: is there not somewhere in Cornwall a memorial to local people taken into slavery by the Barbary Slavers?
Do you know where it is - I can never remember.
Without Googling I’d guess it is on the south coast, maybe Mousehole, Penzance or Falmouth? Or in the Roseland?
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
Many people who live in towns and cities yearn for rural life. Hence programmes like 'Escape to the Country'. But those people are at least a little mistaken about Country Life. What they yearn for is the picture perfect villages they visit on a Sunday, possibly at the end of a long walk. Possibly a village in the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales or the Costwolds. A village which, due the presence of people like them, has pubs and coffee shops and cafes out of all proportion to its size. But most villages aren't like that. Most villages are small and unremarkable and dead. They might have a pub, and it might be a good pub, but it probably isn't. They might have a cafe, but it probably doesn't open very often. They might have a shop, and it might be a lovely little community owned thing where you can buy fudge and artisan coffee and vegetables at three times supermarket prices; or it may be a Happy Shopper in which nothing has changed since the 1970s. And even in the good villages, living there is very different from visiting them for the afternoon or the weekend.
I idealise the Lake District. I've whiled away man a happy hour thinking how nice it would be to live there. But even so, there are only two or three places in the Lake District I'd actually like to live: the towns. And they are only liveable because tourism gives them far more vitality than most towns of their size.
There is a third option we are all forgetting, which is suburbia.
For most people outside of central london, or the tiny few enjoying village life, life is largely the purpose built housing estate, the identikit streets, the endless ring roads, the drive to the out of town tescos.
When we speak of WFH, most aren't thinking about swapping inner city urban life for bucolic bliss, they're thinking about more time spent in their rabbit hutch three bedroom new build on the outskirts of town.
So we can assume if the majority of WFHers aren't swapping inner city life for village life, their reasons for WFH from dreary old suburbia are as follows.
1 - The person wants to spend more time at home with family / pets.
2 - The person hates office life / the commute, usually the former. They hate their co-workers, office gossip, being forced to sing "happy birthday" to some 50 year old colleague in accounts whose name they can't remember, etc. And would prefer to WFH to cut out the whole dreary saga and get on with their job.
3 - Their job, like most office jobs I've ever had, require about two hours worth of work per day, but their jobs require them to sit at their desks for 8 and pretend to look busy, lest their line manager feel the need to hand them some pointless busywork. They have therefore concluded that they can do exactly the same amount of work as they were doing in the office, but have an extra 6 hours to watch tv, play x box, work out, etc. This is not a problem with the worker - it is a problem with the job.
My guess is that most jobs are a combination of the above.
Great point with 3. Pretending to be busy is one of the biggest sources of stress at work - note it falls heaviest on the middle ranks because low grades are genuinely busy and high grades don't have to pretend - and it takes its greatest toll in an office as opposed to WFH.
In a previous job, I soon learned that doing my work quickly and asking for more work was not rewarded with a pay rise, promotion, or even extra responsibilities. I was simply handed the very worst projects of my very slowest colleagues in order to "free them up to work on their important projects", which were invariably worse than the ones I was being given.
After a few months, I stopped asking for extra work. Then they introduced timesheets, ostensibly to keep track of what everyone was doing, but all this really did was give people unfeasibly long amounts of times to complete simple tasks. One time, I was given two days to complete a job that consisted of cutting and pasting some text from one word document into another. It took me less than an hour. I took the two days allocated.
A lunchtime pint or three was essential. Even then. The boredom - I still remember it now.
There was simply no incentive to work hard, and hardly any incentive to work at all. If I was still working that job, hell yes I would want to WFH every day.
I can so relate. I was in Mgt Con for a while and used to get a rocket for doing things quickly - the business model being to rack up the billable hours by creating problems not solving them. Was told to look busy but go slow. My technique was jacket on chair and go to the cinema because trying to look busy with people watching is totally exhausting plus you feel bad inside.
Apart from my University years, I've lived in London most of my life.
That's not to say I don't find some parts of England spectacular but would I want to live in another part?
@Leon, I think, said you should never live anywhere until you've experienced its best and its worst. I love Cornwall but I spent one January there and that put me off. Places like Ludlow, Nantwich and Hereford in February aren't as appealing as you might hope.
Without sounding too sentimental, I have life with Mrs Stodge - anything else would just be living. The location just isn't that important.
Good post. I like the sentiment very much. I don't agree that location doesn't matter. If you enjoy feasting your eyes on people and places and all things aesthetic you wouldn't be in London. You'd be on the Mediterranean probably France. The aesthetics in London of people and places just doesn't compare.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Lichfield, Wells, Ripon, Ely, Truro, Chichester, Salisbury by my reckoning Plus city of London if included as it's own entity
I missed Durham, assuming it was larger. Durham plus 7 plus city of London Hereford is slightly over at 60,000 or so
I think Durham is probably over - afaics 48k in 2011.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
Many people who live in towns and cities yearn for rural life. Hence programmes like 'Escape to the Country'. But those people are at least a little mistaken about Country Life. What they yearn for is the picture perfect villages they visit on a Sunday, possibly at the end of a long walk. Possibly a village in the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales or the Costwolds. A village which, due the presence of people like them, has pubs and coffee shops and cafes out of all proportion to its size. But most villages aren't like that. Most villages are small and unremarkable and dead. They might have a pub, and it might be a good pub, but it probably isn't. They might have a cafe, but it probably doesn't open very often. They might have a shop, and it might be a lovely little community owned thing where you can buy fudge and artisan coffee and vegetables at three times supermarket prices; or it may be a Happy Shopper in which nothing has changed since the 1970s. And even in the good villages, living there is very different from visiting them for the afternoon or the weekend.
I idealise the Lake District. I've whiled away man a happy hour thinking how nice it would be to live there. But even so, there are only two or three places in the Lake District I'd actually like to live: the towns. And they are only liveable because tourism gives them far more vitality than most towns of their size.
There is a third option we are all forgetting, which is suburbia.
For most people outside of central london, or the tiny few enjoying village life, life is largely the purpose built housing estate, the identikit streets, the endless ring roads, the drive to the out of town tescos.
When we speak of WFH, most aren't thinking about swapping inner city urban life for bucolic bliss, they're thinking about more time spent in their rabbit hutch three bedroom new build on the outskirts of town.
So we can assume if the majority of WFHers aren't swapping inner city life for village life, their reasons for WFH from dreary old suburbia are as follows.
1 - The person wants to spend more time at home with family / pets.
2 - The person hates office life / the commute, usually the former. They hate their co-workers, office gossip, being forced to sing "happy birthday" to some 50 year old colleague in accounts whose name they can't remember, etc. And would prefer to WFH to cut out the whole dreary saga and get on with their job.
3 - Their job, like most office jobs I've ever had, require about two hours worth of work per day, but their jobs require them to sit at their desks for 8 and pretend to look busy, lest their line manager feel the need to hand them some pointless busywork. They have therefore concluded that they can do exactly the same amount of work as they were doing in the office, but have an extra 6 hours to watch tv, play x box, work out, etc. This is not a problem with the worker - it is a problem with the job.
My guess is that most jobs are a combination of the above.
Great point with 3. Pretending to be busy is one of the biggest sources of stress at work - note it falls heaviest on the middle ranks because low grades are genuinely busy and high grades don't have to pretend - and it takes its greatest toll in an office as opposed to WFH.
In a previous job, I soon learned that doing my work quickly and asking for more work was not rewarded with a pay rise, promotion, or even extra responsibilities. I was simply handed the very worst projects of my very slowest colleagues in order to "free them up to work on their important projects", which were invariably worse than the ones I was being given.
After a few months, I stopped asking for extra work. Then they introduced timesheets, ostensibly to keep track of what everyone was doing, but all this really did was give people unfeasibly long amounts of times to complete simple tasks. One time, I was given two days to complete a job that consisted of cutting and pasting some text from one word document into another. It took me less than an hour. I took the two days allocated.
A lunchtime pint or three was essential. Even then. The boredom - I still remember it now.
There was simply no incentive to work hard, and hardly any incentive to work at all. If I was still working that job, hell yes I would want to WFH every day.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
I recall at school discussion of how to define villages, towns, cities etc, and different countries doing so differently. On the basis of judging them by amenity provision it was pointed out it could be argued a Norwegian 'town' might be 200 people, while some 'villages' in poorer areas of the Africa say could be tens of thousands. That would be a pretty ridiculous approach in fairness.
I think up to a couple of thousand can generally get classed as a 'large village' in this country (if not too dense, eg a massive new settlement on the edge of a larger town) - often it is a historic core village identity, and then larger areas of modern development which call themselves part of the village as it is less council tax. There are certainly parishes which have upwards of 7k people in them, across a number of settlements perhaps, which I'd argue is really stretching it.
Generally in most Western countries a city is usually over 100,000 people, a small city or large town is 50 to 100,000, a small town is under 50,000 people and in the UK a village is under 10,000 people and a hamlet under 1,000 people
I don't think that's right in the UK. A city is a city of the queen says it is and a town is a town if the queen says it is. Villages and hamlets ISTR depend on the presence of a church, though few people will slap you down too furiously for getting it wrong.
A city in the UK tends to have a cathedral but the vast majority of cathedral cities have over 50,000 people anyway except for a few in Wales.
Barely any hamlets have a church and many villages no longer have a pub, active church or even a shop and primary school. Churches are often shared with other parishes or have services only once a month and village schoolchildren often have a fair drive to go to school
I make it 7 English cathedral cities with populations under 50,000 fwiw
Ooh, let's have a go: Ripon, Ely, Truro, Durham, Hereford... Chichester? Chester? By hamlets and villages depend on the presence of a church, I meant villages have one (or did once) and hamlets don't. I think the definitions are fairly nebulous but inasmuch as one exists it's something along those lines.
Lichfield, Wells, Ripon, Ely, Truro, Chichester, Salisbury by my reckoning Plus city of London if included as it's own entity
I missed Durham, assuming it was larger. Durham plus 7 plus city of London Hereford is slightly over at 60,000 or so
I think Durham is probably over - afaics 48k in 2011.
Here's the secret - there are a large number of jobs where working from home does not impact productivity (or even benefits it), and there are a large number where it severely impacts it.
The workforce will - again - fragment around whether you are one of the lucky ones who needn't go into the office, or whether you will be required to go in to a (now even less well maintained) one.
More importantly we are already seeing considerable movement of people away from companies that require them to be in the office and towards those who allow them a choice or do more hybrid working. This is a massive issue for companies in Aberdeen right now and they are all being forced to come done on the side of hybrid working because they are losing staff hand over fist if they don't.
The job market is extremely fluid right now and it is a workers market rather the an employers. Those companies still trying to operate as they did 5 years ago are going to lose out badly.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
Many people who live in towns and cities yearn for rural life. Hence programmes like 'Escape to the Country'. But those people are at least a little mistaken about Country Life. What they yearn for is the picture perfect villages they visit on a Sunday, possibly at the end of a long walk. Possibly a village in the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales or the Costwolds. A village which, due the presence of people like them, has pubs and coffee shops and cafes out of all proportion to its size. But most villages aren't like that. Most villages are small and unremarkable and dead. They might have a pub, and it might be a good pub, but it probably isn't. They might have a cafe, but it probably doesn't open very often. They might have a shop, and it might be a lovely little community owned thing where you can buy fudge and artisan coffee and vegetables at three times supermarket prices; or it may be a Happy Shopper in which nothing has changed since the 1970s. And even in the good villages, living there is very different from visiting them for the afternoon or the weekend.
I idealise the Lake District. I've whiled away man a happy hour thinking how nice it would be to live there. But even so, there are only two or three places in the Lake District I'd actually like to live: the towns. And they are only liveable because tourism gives them far more vitality than most towns of their size.
There is a third option we are all forgetting, which is suburbia.
For most people outside of central london, or the tiny few enjoying village life, life is largely the purpose built housing estate, the identikit streets, the endless ring roads, the drive to the out of town tescos.
When we speak of WFH, most aren't thinking about swapping inner city urban life for bucolic bliss, they're thinking about more time spent in their rabbit hutch three bedroom new build on the outskirts of town.
So we can assume if the majority of WFHers aren't swapping inner city life for village life, their reasons for WFH from dreary old suburbia are as follows.
1 - The person wants to spend more time at home with family / pets.
2 - The person hates office life / the commute, usually the former. They hate their co-workers, office gossip, being forced to sing "happy birthday" to some 50 year old colleague in accounts whose name they can't remember, etc. And would prefer to WFH to cut out the whole dreary saga and get on with their job.
3 - Their job, like most office jobs I've ever had, require about two hours worth of work per day, but their jobs require them to sit at their desks for 8 and pretend to look busy, lest their line manager feel the need to hand them some pointless busywork. They have therefore concluded that they can do exactly the same amount of work as they were doing in the office, but have an extra 6 hours to watch tv, play x box, work out, etc. This is not a problem with the worker - it is a problem with the job.
My guess is that most jobs are a combination of the above.
I think you have forgotten farm shops.
And arrangements such as the one near here where veg are sold from a flatbed trailer in a farm field entrance on Saturday mornings.
Fine - certain farm shops are full of chutney, manuka honey and bread at £4-5 a loaf being sold to nobs and refugees from London.
Mrs Thatcher will be spinning in her grave that a Conservative Prime Minister, A CONSERVATIVE PRIME MINISTER, is telling businesses how to employ staff.
Olot, the Spanish city where I got my huge and delicious free meal, has only 35,000 residents.
I must remember to write a TripAdvisor review for that restaurant. I want to finish it with, "In a nutshell, the best value meal I had on my whole trip"
The government says " you have the right to 28 days holiday" but doesn't set a minimum.
GS is saying "you must take at least 15 days including five consecutive" but (for senior staff) isn't setting a maximum.
Banks and some other financial services companies are required by the regulator to ensure that employees have a minimum of a certain number of consecutive days' holiday annually. It's a bit of an oddity. The reason for it something to do with fraud being easier to cover up if a dishonest employee never takes holiday.
Yup, classic sign of covering up losses or fraud is being there before everyone arrives and after everyone leaves and not taking any holidays. One of the seniors who got embroiled in an investigation of one his reports for hiding losses said he spotted it from the holiday pattern as this person would still be working on UK bank holidays that didn't align to US public holidays.
Seems Abramovich is ready to see Chelsea go under according to the telegraph
Government will blink first. They are being unnecessarily fussy anyway, considering how much oligarch money funded them down the years they won’t give back.
I do not think they will
Why not? Football is a huge English industry, the ramifications of Chelsea bust because of government fussyness is huge ramifications for government, for one thing it will throw unnecessary attention on the governments own pre war oligarch funding, they would be daft to get people all emotional and invite that attention wouldn’t they?
Abramovich is right to suspect government have to blink first.
I don't think your response is logically coherent. Football is indeed a huge English industry and that's why the government should hold firm, because Chelsea is just one of the top clubs among a number of other top clubs. It can risk pissing off Chelsea fans precisely because the top league would still be huge without them, if it came to that.
I'm sure the government will blink first, but I think they could tough it out.
If Chelsea went bust I would expect an increase of somewhere between 100k-300k who would not vote Tory again in the next 10-20 years. Abramovich will be doing a similar calculation. Stalemate and endless extensions until the war is over is possibly the only plausible path.
And about 10 million more who go "Get in Boris!"
I doubt it, maybe a few Spurs fans. A lot of mild dislike for Chelsea elsewhere, but not enough to want them to go bust. Relegated sure. Football fans generally don't even want direct rivals to go bust.
There's a lot of football folk who despise bought success. Especially when that money originates from the Russian kleptocracy. Few tears would be shed.
Apart from my University years, I've lived in London most of my life.
That's not to say I don't find some parts of England spectacular but would I want to live in another part?
@Leon, I think, said you should never live anywhere until you've experienced its best and its worst. I love Cornwall but I spent one January there and that put me off. Places like Ludlow, Nantwich and Hereford in February aren't as appealing as you might hope.
Without sounding too sentimental, I have life with Mrs Stodge - anything else would just be living. The location just isn't that important.
Good post. I like the sentiment very much. I don't agree that location doesn't matter. If you enjoy feasting your eyes on people and places and all things aesthetic you wouldn't be in London. You'd be on the Mediterranean probably France. The aesthetics in London of people and places just doesn't compare.
Jeez, Rog, stop with the remarkable new opinions that come out of nowhere. It’s hard to keep pace. Always the zingers!
How do you manage to stay so interesting and fresh? And full of vivid new takes on life? A lot of us find it difficult to be constantly innovative and full of mental life, yet every hour, despite your age and mental decline, you seem to have some incredible, newly minted perspective, that no one would have expected from you
Next thing, you’ll be criticizing Boris Johnson or saying Brexit is bad or you prefer France or you met an interesting Lyft driver who agrees with you despite being working class, one never knows with Rog!
Mrs Thatcher will be spinning in her grave that a Conservative Prime Minister, A CONSERVATIVE PRIME MINISTER, is telling businesses how to employ staff.
Boris Johnson is a socialist, further proof.
He's only doing it because one of his aides says it played well in a focus group the other day. This entire government is just driven by press release.
Meanwhile, the economic clouds darkening considerably. The balance of payments is at appalling levels.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
------------------------ carnforth said: » show previous quotes Whilst poor (as a student) I once bought Sainsbury's "Basics" ground coffee at £1.25 per 250g. 100% robusta. Rough as hell.
someone said: For fans of particularly bitter coffee, go to an middle-eastern store and buy Iranian coffee with green cardamom pods mixed it. Serious (but good) stuff. I once bought a bag of coffee from a pound shop. Packaged to resemble Lavazza.
And you know what? It was shit. -----------------------
If you want ultra-cheap coffee, Aldi are the place, Looking at my last receipt the 100% arabica inexpensive range is £1.09 per 8oz roast and ground, and the posh one is I think around £2.50.
Not artisan, but not unacceptable when I run out without noticing.
I love my coffee and I get Aldi's own brand beans for my machine. They're great. I think it's around £2.50 for a bag of beans.
My local artisan roaster, who roast about a tonne per week so it is always fresh, start prices at about £6.50-£7.00 per 250g or half that if you buy 1kg amounts as 'wholesale' of a limited range (a trick I've never tried, but I'm just starting a cafe). They are on the Chesterfield-Pennines road.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
I've been to a lot of football matches and I've only ever been racially/religiously abused by fans of one club, Chelsea.
I'm not bitter, a group of other Liverpool fans heard the abuse, and formed a barrier between me and the Chelsea fans and made sure I got back to my hotel ok.
Great friendships created in the darkest of moments.
Haven't you been to Leeds? When I used to go to away matches Leeds were always the worst. Behaviour racism anything else you can bring to mind. I remember a guy peeing over anyone near him like he was using a sten gun. That was my last trip to Leeds
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Utterly disgraceful and sadly not remotely surprising.
There has been some real leadership in this issue from some EU nations but sadly not Germany or France who have been utterly atrocious. Stopping Nordstream 2 was the bare minimum that should have been done and at least it was, but beyond that they're backsliding badly.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
There might be some causal correlation between being pro-Ukrainian and anti-German right now, don't you think? 🤔
Today is start of candidate filing week in Washington State for the August 2022 primary.
Your's truly has just filed for office, and received email notification that my filing has been approved, meaning my voter registration has been verified.
The office I'm seeking is Democratic Party Precinct Committee Officer. IF no other candidate files for this position, then I'm elected automatically (if not by acclamation!) and DPCO position is NOT on the ballot (which saves the county $ in printing costs).
Other offices on the 2022 Primary ballot in my bailiwick included US Senator, US Representative, state senator and two state representatives (separate positions nominated & ultimately elected separately).
Incumbent Democrats US Sen. Patty Murray & US Rep. Pramila Jayapal are sure bets to make the Top Two and advance to the general election ballot; Patty may have some head winds but is highly likely to win re-election for 6th term, while Jayapal's re-election is about 99.46% certain.
(BTW, one of my first memories of Patty Murray, was from 1992, when she was one-term state senator who was thinking about running for US Senate. She came to local Democratic district meeting, where they were holding a fund-raising baked-goods raffle. So Patty brought a cake, that she'd obviously baked herself. At least it looked just like the kind of cake my mom would have baked for a bake sale.)
Local state legislative delegation (one senator, two reps) is rock-solid Democratic, only question is WHICH Democrat? Our incumbent senator is NOT running again, so one of the state reps is going for it (pays the same BUT state senate term is 4 years versus 2 for state house); the other rep is running for re-election which should be no problem for her.
SO there are two-open seat races. And a number of announced & possible candidates for each, with this week being the Moment of Truth. Republican(s) may file but will NOT make it out of the Top Two primary unless the Dem field is super crowded.
Thus most likely primary outcome in these two contested leg races, is that the two top Democratic vote-getters will top the entire field, and advance to the general election. Then the final showdown will be decided based upon dynamics & demographic of: a) progressive-moderate split, b) personality & resume; c) grassroots versus $$$; d) all or some of the above.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
If true that is pretty outrageous. The EU is wobbling. But we need some verification?
Just on the point about opening bank accounts - if it is Total the parent company being allowed to open a bank account in Roubles with a Russian bank in Russia, then that is clearly against sanctions. If it is about the Russian subsidiary being allowed to open a bank account in Roubles with a Russian bank in Russia... well that falls outside the sanctions (as it does for Shell or BP's Russian subsidiary). So we do need to know a little but more about what exactly was said, because the two are very different scenarios.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
Like PB then?
It won't matter to you whether this story is true or not; you'll defend France and Germany either way.
I've been to a lot of football matches and I've only ever been racially/religiously abused by fans of one club, Chelsea.
I'm not bitter, a group of other Liverpool fans heard the abuse, and formed a barrier between me and the Chelsea fans and made sure I got back to my hotel ok.
Great friendships created in the darkest of moments.
Haven't you been to Leeds? When I used to go to away matches Leeds were always the worst. Behaviour racism anything else you can bring to mind. I remember a guy peeing over anyone near him like he was using a sten gun. That was my last trip to Leeds
The DUP want the protocol gone not just changed , clearly they won’t be returning to the assembly anytime soon .
The suspicion is they want to take the chance of another election and hope they can become the first party then as they can’t bear not having the first minister.
They’ll say no to everything and aren’t interested even if the EU make compromises .
If the EU compromises the Protocol will be gone.
Whatever replaces it may be sensible, but lets wait until the EU actually compromises before we pre-judge. Still waiting.
Again though under the terms of the GFA if the DUP as representatives of the unionist community aren't happy, then Stormont shuts down. So what is your proposal to make the DUP happy? Or is your proposal just to tell the DUP to go to hell and to hell with the Good Friday Agreement too?
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
There might be some causal correlation between being pro-Ukrainian and anti-German right now, don't you think? 🤔
Sure, but I'd agree with @Leon that some scepticism is probably advisable.
Great to see Finland and Sweden both formally confirming applications to join NATO.
In four months the Great Russian Bear has been humiliated by Slava Ukraini, pushed back first from Kyiv and then from Kherson and seen two nations famous for neutrality for decades now aligning with NATO.
And now NATO are talking openly about the possibility of Ukraine winning the war. If they do, they should join NATO themselves.
What a catastrophic humiliating screw up by Putin.
An admission that his reason for the special military operation was bollocks from the start.
https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1526175012096548864 Putin today: NATO expansion is artificial. Russia has no problems with Finland and Sweden, so their entry into NATO does not pose an immediate threat. Russia's response to the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO will depend on the expansion of the alliance's infrastructure...
Also an admission that despite all his bellicose rhetoric about NATO expansion, the defanged Russian bear has been revealed to be utterly impotent and can't do anything about expansion. While they're comprehensively failing in a war with Ukraine, they're not going to open a second front in Finland.
Now is the perfect cover for any Eastern European nations who aren't under the umbrella of NATO protection to take the opportunity to do so, fast.
There are no European Countries left who would want to be in NATO - Serbia definitely wouldn't, Bosnia probably not. Austria is neutral by treaty, Switzerland relies on he fact that you'd have to fight all the way though NATO to get to them....
A Belarus that has overthrown its dictator and seen what happened to Ukraine might....
Moldova might be getting jittery over its neutrality stance as well.
I think it was the Finnish President when discussing neutrality who pointed out that since Russia started demanding people not be able to do things, like join NATO, then that would make it no longer their choice to not be in it, and thus not really neutrality anymore.
Russia's diplomatic hysteria and trash talking seems to have made Putin feel like a big man, but made it clear neutrality may not really be neutrality anymore, it was bowing to Russian demands, and the invasion showed the potential cost of that.
That’s a very astute point by the Finnish PM. Basically Putin said Choose us or them?
President, not PM (though she probably said something similar). Fortunately they are easy to tell apart, I hate identikit politicians.
She looks like Arwen after she's been on a six week elf bender Which given her naughtiness during covid I suspect is true true true
I liked the story of her getting in a little trouble because she went out clubbing during Covid. Not because I think it is an issue that she is young enough to still be interested in going clubbing, all the merrier I say, but because she said she'd left her work phone at home when doing so - perhaps I ask too much of heads of government, but I'd hope they were contactable at all hours if necessary. At the least it shows a firm commitment in FInland to work life balance.
She's a Tory. A foxy, clubby, slightly fey, party Tory
You could have stopped after the first sentence, you already won a lot of people over after three words.
Except for the fact that those words are untrue.
That was immaterial to whether said words would make people like or dislike someone.
EuCo growth forecasts for 22 & 23 published. Optimistic?
So - @EU_Commission 's new Spring forecast out - not bad with 2.7% GDP growth in 2022 and 2.3% in 2023 well above potential, unemployment ⬇️to 6.5% in 2023 (7% in EA) and deficits dropping to an within #SGP 2.5% in 2023. 🧵on EU econ policy reform outlook
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
There might be some causal correlation between being pro-Ukrainian and anti-German right now, don't you think? 🤔
Sure, but I'd agree with @Leon that some scepticism is probably advisable.
I've been to a lot of football matches and I've only ever been racially/religiously abused by fans of one club, Chelsea.
I'm not bitter, a group of other Liverpool fans heard the abuse, and formed a barrier between me and the Chelsea fans and made sure I got back to my hotel ok.
Great friendships created in the darkest of moments.
Haven't you been to Leeds? When I used to go to away matches Leeds were always the worst. Behaviour racism anything else you can bring to mind. I remember a guy peeing over anyone near him like he was using a sten gun. That was my last trip to Leeds
Anyone listening to the governor of the Bank of England being questioned by the Treasury Select Committee would not be comforted by his comments, as the combination of the Ukraine war with it's effect on the supply of wheat to the world, to the likelyhood of oil and gas price hikes continuing for an inderminnate period as reliance on Russia as a supplier is sidelined, and the looming disaster of the effects of covid and China's zero covid policy, leaves them virtually powerless to mitigate the economic damage in a meaningful way
I think I'm right in saying UK inflation was at 5% before the Ukraine crisis started, partly as a result of Bailey cranking up the money printing machine to bankroll Johnson and Sunak.
You would think the tory MPs would be grateful. Now they want to put Bailey in the dock. Imagine if Bailey had refused to keep printing at some point.
Nonsense. The government are not to blame for inflation, the bottom line is the Bank of England is INDEPENDENT.
An INDEPENDENT institution messing up its main job controlling inflation, and hypocrites trying to blame government for this.
So, you’re a “Lib Dem” are you?
You fail the duck test.
Oh dear you are having a terrible afternoon bulldozey, wrong with every post. Maybe you should log off log back in again to see if your posts can be any better. What I posted is 100% accurate - Bank of England independent, it’s main responsibility control inflation - unless you want to state Boris can move interest rates up an down?
In what persons mind are Lib Dems ever left wing? libdems is all right of centre stuff, individual choice individual freedom, and liberalism, in every way, life, love and money. Like all my posts 🙂
The BoE has limited operational independence. To call an institution wholly owned by government, and completely subject to directions from government 'independent', without serious qualification, is somewhere between misleading and plain wrong.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
I've been to a lot of football matches and I've only ever been racially/religiously abused by fans of one club, Chelsea.
I'm not bitter, a group of other Liverpool fans heard the abuse, and formed a barrier between me and the Chelsea fans and made sure I got back to my hotel ok.
Great friendships created in the darkest of moments.
Haven't you been to Leeds? When I used to go to away matches Leeds were always the worst. Behaviour racism anything else you can bring to mind. I remember a guy peeing over anyone near him like he was using a sten gun. That was my last trip to Leeds
EuCo growth forecasts for 22 & 23 published. Optimistic?
So - @EU_Commission 's new Spring forecast out - not bad with 2.7% GDP growth in 2022 and 2.3% in 2023 well above potential, unemployment ⬇️to 6.5% in 2023 (7% in EA) and deficits dropping to an within #SGP 2.5% in 2023. 🧵on EU econ policy reform outlook
On thread - as we often do, we're at risk of generalising from ourselves. Most people do not have the option of working from home. Most people, however are customers of organisations who are working from home and whose efficiency they perceived as having declined (like, for example, the passport office). I don't see this stance as necessarily a vote loser.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
Like PB then?
It won't matter to you whether this story is true or not; you'll defend France and Germany either way.
There are four or five Tory posters who pile in on any criticism of Germany and France and I'm bored out of my head withthe ugly and unnecessary racism. I've done more work in Germany than any other single country and I'm a big fan of the people and the way they work. Lets put our own house in order first. No?
On thread - as we often do, we're at risk of generalising from ourselves. Most people do not have the option of working from home. Most people, however are customers of organisations who are working from home and whose efficiency they perceived as having declined (like, for example, the passport office). I don't see this stance as necessarily a vote loser.
Just because something is a vote winner does not necessarily make it the right thing to do.
Having the state intervening in the market place out of pure populism is not the right thing to do. The Conservative Party should be better than that. 👎
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
Like PB then?
It won't matter to you whether this story is true or not; you'll defend France and Germany either way.
There are four or five Tory posters who pile in on any criticism of Germany and France and I'm bored out of my head withthe ugly and unnecessary racism. I've done more work in Germany than any other single country and I'm a big fan of the people and the way they work. Lets put our own house in order first. No?
Another extraordinary, unprecedented and game-changing intervention from @Roger
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
Are the inhabitants pleased with your habit of addressing them as medieval peasants ?
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
Many people who live in towns and cities yearn for rural life. Hence programmes like 'Escape to the Country'. But those people are at least a little mistaken about Country Life. What they yearn for is the picture perfect villages they visit on a Sunday, possibly at the end of a long walk. Possibly a village in the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales or the Costwolds. A village which, due the presence of people like them, has pubs and coffee shops and cafes out of all proportion to its size. But most villages aren't like that. Most villages are small and unremarkable and dead. They might have a pub, and it might be a good pub, but it probably isn't. They might have a cafe, but it probably doesn't open very often. They might have a shop, and it might be a lovely little community owned thing where you can buy fudge and artisan coffee and vegetables at three times supermarket prices; or it may be a Happy Shopper in which nothing has changed since the 1970s. And even in the good villages, living there is very different from visiting them for the afternoon or the weekend.
I idealise the Lake District. I've whiled away man a happy hour thinking how nice it would be to live there. But even so, there are only two or three places in the Lake District I'd actually like to live: the towns. And they are only liveable because tourism gives them far more vitality than most towns of their size.
There is a third option we are all forgetting, which is suburbia.
For most people outside of central london, or the tiny few enjoying village life, life is largely the purpose built housing estate, the identikit streets, the endless ring roads, the drive to the out of town tescos.
When we speak of WFH, most aren't thinking about swapping inner city urban life for bucolic bliss, they're thinking about more time spent in their rabbit hutch three bedroom new build on the outskirts of town.
So we can assume if the majority of WFHers aren't swapping inner city life for village life, their reasons for WFH from dreary old suburbia are as follows.
1 - The person wants to spend more time at home with family / pets.
2 - The person hates office life / the commute, usually the former. They hate their co-workers, office gossip, being forced to sing "happy birthday" to some 50 year old colleague in accounts whose name they can't remember, etc. And would prefer to WFH to cut out the whole dreary saga and get on with their job.
3 - Their job, like most office jobs I've ever had, require about two hours worth of work per day, but their jobs require them to sit at their desks for 8 and pretend to look busy, lest their line manager feel the need to hand them some pointless busywork. They have therefore concluded that they can do exactly the same amount of work as they were doing in the office, but have an extra 6 hours to watch tv, play x box, work out, etc. This is not a problem with the worker - it is a problem with the job.
My guess is that most jobs are a combination of the above.
Great point with 3. Pretending to be busy is one of the biggest sources of stress at work - note it falls heaviest on the middle ranks because low grades are genuinely busy and high grades don't have to pretend - and it takes its greatest toll in an office as opposed to WFH.
In a previous job, I soon learned that doing my work quickly and asking for more work was not rewarded with a pay rise, promotion, or even extra responsibilities. I was simply handed the very worst projects of my very slowest colleagues in order to "free them up to work on their important projects", which were invariably worse than the ones I was being given.
After a few months, I stopped asking for extra work. Then they introduced timesheets, ostensibly to keep track of what everyone was doing, but all this really did was give people unfeasibly long amounts of times to complete simple tasks. One time, I was given two days to complete a job that consisted of cutting and pasting some text from one word document into another. It took me less than an hour. I took the two days allocated.
A lunchtime pint or three was essential. Even then. The boredom - I still remember it now.
There was simply no incentive to work hard, and hardly any incentive to work at all. If I was still working that job, hell yes I would want to WFH every day.
UK productivity failure in a nutshell?
I honestly wish I could say it was a one off, but I could name half a dozen jobs either I or a friend has done that amounts to the same thing.
Perhaps it is a symptom of being "in the middle", where the junior staff have loads to do (and are still learning, which takes time in itself) and the more senior staff are busy doing the actual important things.
But I can name a frightening number of white collar jobs that either I've worked, or a friend has worked, where we've been paid to do the square root of bugger all, and the hardest part of the job was finding ways to pass the time.
As I say, going looking for work in any of those jobs wasn't rewarded, so eventually I stopped.
The Northern Ireland protocol is part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement signed by Johnson in 2019. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement agreed in 2020 by the two sides allows British goods tariff-free access to EU markets.
Mrs Thatcher will be spinning in her grave that a Conservative Prime Minister, A CONSERVATIVE PRIME MINISTER, is telling businesses how to employ staff.
Boris Johnson is a socialist, further proof.
I don't think it's socialism or statism, or any form of ideology, I just think the hallmark of Boris' time in office is being told what to do. Changes in policy are dictated by more important people telling Boris what to do than the people who he was being told what to do by before. He may do what he's told by monied Russian oligarchs giving money to the Tories, until he's told by the Americans in no uncertain terms to kick Russia in the goolies. The DUP tell him what to do, but the American Senators are telling him to do something else, so deadlock. It's a game of top trumps in the telling Boris what to do stakes. At the moment, it seems like concerned owners of commercial property are dictating this drivel on WFH.
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
Like PB then?
It won't matter to you whether this story is true or not; you'll defend France and Germany either way.
There are four or five Tory posters who pile in on any criticism of Germany and France and I'm bored out of my head withthe ugly and unnecessary racism. I've done more work in Germany than any other single country and I'm a big fan of the people and the way they work. Lets put our own house in order first. No?
You think critique of a nation's government's dodgy dealings is racist?
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
Visegrad24 is a highly partisan, pro-Ukrainian site. I’m not sure this story quite stacks up as it is being presented
Visegrad24 does often seem to find anti-German angles.
Like PB then?
It won't matter to you whether this story is true or not; you'll defend France and Germany either way.
There are four or five Tory posters who pile in on any criticism of Germany and France and I'm bored out of my head withthe ugly and unnecessary racism. I've done more work in Germany than any other single country and I'm a big fan of the people and the way they work. Lets put our own house in order first. No?
You think critique of a nation's government's dodgy dealings is racist?
I think that makes you an auto-racist.
He compared, the other day, Britain under Johnson to Zimbabwe under Mugabe and Iraq under Saddam. So is clearly somewhat confused.
The Northern Ireland protocol is part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement signed by Johnson in 2019. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement agreed in 2020 by the two sides allows British goods tariff-free access to EU markets.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
Are the inhabitants pleased with your habit of addressing them as medieval peasants ?
And counting their fingers to see if they have six on each paw.
This story, from more than ten years ago in the Washington Post, makes me think that the discussion here of best places to live is missing something important:
A young single mother in DC was worried about her two boys, thinking that they would soon be old enough to be tempted by the gang culture of that city. So she decided to move to a safer place, a small town in . . . Montana.
When she visited to check it out, she stopped at the local restaurant, which is often the social center in such towns, and was a little disturbed that a group of people seemed to be discussing her.
She moved there anyway, and when she got to know some of the people, she asked them about that scene in the restaurant. They explained that, having seen an attractive, single black woman, they were trying to decide whether to call the single black guy in the area, and tell him to come in so he could meet her.
The locals were match making, one of the favorite hobbies in small town America.
So, for those discussing the best places to live in Britain, this question: Where are the best places in Britain to raise children?
The Northern Ireland protocol is part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement signed by Johnson in 2019. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement agreed in 2020 by the two sides allows British goods tariff-free access to EU markets.
It depends. I am actually not sure that the Brexit agreement covers what to do if one side decides to unilaterally tear up a part of it. In that instance under normal treaty law as covered by the Vienna convention, the whole treaty is null and void so the EU could basically do what the hell they liked dependent on their own political and trade preferences.
What the Guardian appear to referring to is what the EU (or the UK) could do if one side or the other invokes article 16. Under that circumstance there is a clear procedure to be followed (which is not as simple as just rescinding the Protocol as a whole) which does include targeted trade sanctions as a response. The problem Johnson has is that invoking Article 16 sets in train a series of procedures that may not play (probably will not) play well for the UK government. Hence their threats to renege on the treaty as a whole (which is what they are actually threatening even if they don't realise that themselves yet)
For Finland and Sweden to join Nato, all 30 existing members must say yes. But for now, one is saying no.
President Erdogan says he won’t agree to admit countries which apply sanctions on Turkey.
Sweden suspended arms sales to Turkey three years ago, following Ankara’s military intervention in Syria. And according to the official Turkish news agency, both Finland and Sweden have rejected dozens of requests to extradite Kurdish militants who Turkey describes as terrorists.
Both countries are sending delegations to Ankara to try and solve the problem, but President Erdogan says they shouldn’t bother
For Finland and Sweden to join Nato, all 30 existing members must say yes. But for now, one is saying no.
President Erdogan says he won’t agree to admit countries which apply sanctions on Turkey.
Sweden suspended arms sales to Turkey three years ago, following Ankara’s military intervention in Syria. And according to the official Turkish news agency, both Finland and Sweden have rejected dozens of requests to extradite Kurdish militants who Turkey describes as terrorists.
Both countries are sending delegations to Ankara to try and solve the problem, but President Erdogan says they shouldn’t bother
I've also read some stuff from Turks about PKK being found with Swedish weapons.
Mr. Dean, remote working makes it much more viable to live in remoter, more rural areas (provided there's sufficient comms infrastructure). If you demand everyone goes into an office for vague and mystical reasons then that just returns to the pattern of cramming people into and near cities.
The internet might yet be the first thing in history that (through success rather than collapse) leads to cities diminishing and villages proliferating. But it needs remote working to happen.
Who wants to live in a fucking village? Inbred nerds
Anyone who wants to keep away from towny twats like yourself.
If the peak of your ambition in life is to live in, and work in, a village, then you have the mindset of a medieval peasant and you should get the equivalent wage
Indeed, I am pretty sure this is what will happen. People who WFH will end up earning less and less, because they are demonstrably less efficient, until the inferior wages and opportunities are such a deterrent they go back to the office for most of the week
Only really senior people will get the option to WFH at full salary. A perk and an incentive
I'm all for getting people back to the office, but I am amused at the idea a preference for 'village life', whatever that means, is akin to being a medieval peasant. I think far fewer would yearn for village life if it was in any way alike that of a medieval village!
I live in a settlement of 9,000 people. Always some debate whether that is a town or a village. I mostly WFH (1 day a week in the office at the moment). The "village" has a full size Tesco, a leisure centre with a swimming pool and 2 High Schools (it's West Scotland of course). Hardly the peasant life.
9000 inhabitants is not a “village” by any standard. Who the heck calls that a village?!
I am right how sitting in a Greek village having a beer. This is what a village looks like
About 30 houses. Maybe 100 inhabitants. Two tavernas and a church
Are the inhabitants pleased with your habit of addressing them as medieval peasants ?
There are villages of over 9,000 eg Tiptree in North Essex, population 9,182.
10,000 is generally the cutoff point before it becomes a town
Comments
Plus city of London if included as it's own entity
Machine not here yet.
But I did spot this FPPPPPT comment:
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carnforth said:
» show previous quotes
Whilst poor (as a student) I once bought Sainsbury's "Basics" ground coffee at £1.25 per 250g. 100% robusta. Rough as hell.
someone said:
For fans of particularly bitter coffee, go to an middle-eastern store and buy Iranian coffee with green cardamom pods mixed it. Serious (but good) stuff.
I once bought a bag of coffee from a pound shop. Packaged to resemble Lavazza.
And you know what? It was shit.
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If you want ultra-cheap coffee, Aldi are the place, Looking at my last receipt the 100% arabica inexpensive range is £1.09 per 8oz roast and ground, and the posh one is I think around £2.50.
Not artisan, but not unacceptable when I run out without noticing.
That's not to say I don't find some parts of England spectacular but would I want to live in another part?
@Leon, I think, said you should never live anywhere until you've experienced its best and its worst. I love Cornwall but I spent one January there and that put me off. Places like Ludlow, Nantwich and Hereford in February aren't as appealing as you might hope.
Without sounding too sentimental, I have life with Mrs Stodge - anything else would just be living. The location just isn't that important.
So you can be as drunk as a penguin all the time.
Suburbs aren't boring; they are, to misquote le corbusier, one of the finest machines for living in ever invented.
And that's why the best ones - your Didsburys, West Bridgfords, Gosforths, Headingleys, Cliftons, Hillheads - are so expensive. But even the cheaper ones tend to work.
It has an utterly exquisite location. On a sunny weekend afternoon there are few other places in Europe where you would rather be, sipping a pint or a nice glass of Kiwi white
Until very recently it closed in the afternoon. 2-6, yep we’re shut, sorry, fuck off. Thus losing enormous amount of business. No wonder they sold it.
The new owners are more enlightened
http://www.heroninnmalpas.co.uk/
It was almost a puritan attitude. “People shouldn’t enjoy drinking too much” They weren’t that keen on people drinking outside, despite the peerless views over the Tresillian. Mad
And lawyers will get very rich.
BBC News - St Asaph in north Wales named Diamond Jubilee city
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-east-wales-17365580
Both are nice places to live, possibly super-nice depending on your exact circumstances. Yes both can be grim in February but I would say that is true of anywhere in Northern Europe
Just kidding. Sort of.
Here's the secret - there are a large number of jobs where working from home does not impact productivity (or even benefits it), and there are a large number where it severely impacts it.
The workforce will - again - fragment around whether you are one of the lucky ones who needn't go into the office, or whether you will be required to go in to a (now even less well maintained) one.
I have mispoliticated her.
No point clubbing this weekend now, I've blown my chance.
I'm not bitter, a group of other Liverpool fans heard the abuse, and formed a barrier between me and the Chelsea fans and made sure I got back to my hotel ok.
Great friendships created in the darkest of moments.
Many jobs contain both elements and it's getting the balance between the two right which is important as well as individual preference.
If you want to do something extremely fun, rent a kayak at actual Mylor, then paddle to the Pandora (takes about 1-2 hours, depending on your vigour). Haul up the kayaks and have a boozy lunch, mussels and chips, the works, then paddle back drunk. You’d have to work hard to get into trouble, it’s so sheltered
The food can be variable tho. Avoid the “risotto”. Otherwise: superb
Trivia question: is there not somewhere in Cornwall a memorial to local people taken into slavery by the Barbary Slavers?
Do you know where it is - I can never remember.
Hereford is slightly over at 60,000 or so
The DUP want the protocol gone not just changed , clearly they won’t be returning to the assembly anytime soon .
The suspicion is they want to take the chance of another election and hope they can become the first party then as they can’t bear not having the first minister.
They’ll say no to everything and aren’t interested even if the EU make compromises .
productivitytraining failure in a nutshell?The job market is extremely fluid right now and it is a workers market rather the an employers. Those companies still trying to operate as they did 5 years ago are going to lose out badly.
And arrangements such as the one near here where veg are sold from a flatbed trailer in a farm field entrance on Saturday mornings.
Fine - certain farm shops are full of chutney, manuka honey and bread at £4-5 a loaf being sold to nobs and refugees from London.
But others are not.
Boris Johnson is a socialist, further proof.
I must remember to write a TripAdvisor review for that restaurant. I want to finish it with, "In a nutshell, the best value meal I had on my whole trip"
How do you manage to stay so interesting and fresh? And full of vivid new takes on life? A lot of us find it difficult to be constantly innovative and full of mental life, yet every hour, despite your age and mental decline, you seem to have some incredible, newly minted perspective, that no one would have expected from you
Next thing, you’ll be criticizing Boris Johnson or saying Brexit is bad or you prefer France or you met an interesting Lyft driver who agrees with you despite being working class, one never knows with Rog!
Meanwhile, the economic clouds darkening considerably. The balance of payments is at appalling levels.
BREAKING:
European Commission, France and Germany all announced that European energy companies should be allowed to pay for gas in rubles at a closed meeting between EC representatives and EU diplomats in Brussels on late Friday evening.
Poland & the Netherlands were outraged.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki says that he is disappointed by how the EU is handling the issue and says that Russia unilaterally cut Poland off from Russian gas in breech of the contract signed between the two.
Source: PAP (The Polish Press Agency)
https://businessinsider.com.pl/gospodarka/komisja-europejska-tlumaczy-jak-placic-za-gaz-w-rublach-morawiecki-krytykuje/ps6e3dw.amp
At the meeting, the French side went even further and said that European companies could open bank accounts in rubles in Russian banks without this being an act that goes against EU sanctions.
The German diplomat told the EC he had consulted the EC’s new position with all German companies importing Russian energy & that they were pleased with the new stance.
The Polish diplomat wondered how the German had managed to consult them all within minutes of the announcement.
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1526266440684388352
https://www.northern-tea.com/shop/coffee/
The EU - and France and Germany in particular - have given unnecessary succor to Putin. If they had made it clear that they would not do this, it would put further pressure on the Putin regime from inside Russia.
There has been some real leadership in this issue from some EU nations but sadly not Germany or France who have been utterly atrocious. Stopping Nordstream 2 was the bare minimum that should have been done and at least it was, but beyond that they're backsliding badly.
Today is start of candidate filing week in Washington State for the August 2022 primary.
Your's truly has just filed for office, and received email notification that my filing has been approved, meaning my voter registration has been verified.
The office I'm seeking is Democratic Party Precinct Committee Officer. IF no other candidate files for this position, then I'm elected automatically (if not by acclamation!) and DPCO position is NOT on the ballot (which saves the county $ in printing costs).
Other offices on the 2022 Primary ballot in my bailiwick included US Senator, US Representative, state senator and two state representatives (separate positions nominated & ultimately elected separately).
Incumbent Democrats US Sen. Patty Murray & US Rep. Pramila Jayapal are sure bets to make the Top Two and advance to the general election ballot; Patty may have some head winds but is highly likely to win re-election for 6th term, while Jayapal's re-election is about 99.46% certain.
(BTW, one of my first memories of Patty Murray, was from 1992, when she was one-term state senator who was thinking about running for US Senate. She came to local Democratic district meeting, where they were holding a fund-raising baked-goods raffle. So Patty brought a cake, that she'd obviously baked herself. At least it looked just like the kind of cake my mom would have baked for a bake sale.)
Local state legislative delegation (one senator, two reps) is rock-solid Democratic, only question is WHICH Democrat? Our incumbent senator is NOT running again, so one of the state reps is going for it (pays the same BUT state senate term is 4 years versus 2 for state house); the other rep is running for re-election which should be no problem for her.
SO there are two-open seat races. And a number of announced & possible candidates for each, with this week being the Moment of Truth. Republican(s) may file but will NOT make it out of the Top Two primary unless the Dem field is super crowded.
Thus most likely primary outcome in these two contested leg races, is that the two top Democratic vote-getters will top the entire field, and advance to the general election. Then the final showdown will be decided based upon dynamics & demographic of: a) progressive-moderate split, b) personality & resume; c) grassroots versus $$$; d) all or some of the above.
Whatever replaces it may be sensible, but lets wait until the EU actually compromises before we pre-judge. Still waiting.
Again though under the terms of the GFA if the DUP as representatives of the unionist community aren't happy, then Stormont shuts down. So what is your proposal to make the DUP happy? Or is your proposal just to tell the DUP to go to hell and to hell with the Good Friday Agreement too?
So -
@EU_Commission
's new Spring forecast out - not bad with 2.7% GDP growth in 2022 and 2.3% in 2023 well above potential, unemployment ⬇️to 6.5% in 2023 (7% in EA) and deficits dropping to an within #SGP 2.5% in 2023. 🧵on EU econ policy reform outlook
https://twitter.com/jfkirkegaard/status/1526256572632125441
https://ec.europa.eu/info/system/files/economy-finance/ip173_en.pdf
I thought Wombledon used to be quite bad.
To call an institution wholly owned by government, and completely subject to directions from government 'independent', without serious qualification, is somewhere between misleading and plain wrong.
Having the state intervening in the market place out of pure populism is not the right thing to do. The Conservative Party should be better than that. 👎
Perhaps it is a symptom of being "in the middle", where the junior staff have loads to do (and are still learning, which takes time in itself) and the more senior staff are busy doing the actual important things.
But I can name a frightening number of white collar jobs that either I've worked, or a friend has worked, where we've been paid to do the square root of bugger all, and the hardest part of the job was finding ways to pass the time.
As I say, going looking for work in any of those jobs wasn't rewarded, so eventually I stopped.
The Northern Ireland protocol is part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement signed by Johnson in 2019. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement agreed in 2020 by the two sides allows British goods tariff-free access to EU markets.
If the UK overrides some or all of the Northern Ireland protocol, the EU could impose tariffs on British goods or even suspend the entire trade agreement. Diplomats say they need to see the kind of action the UK takes before deciding on the nature and scale of retaliatory action.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2022/may/16/boris-johnson-northern-ireland-protocol-brexit-uk-politics-latest?CMP=share_btn_tw&page=with:block-62820fb48f083b856379b68e#block-62820fb48f083b856379b68e
I thought it was more tightly drawn than that.
I think that makes you an auto-racist.
Although I suspect this bill gets gutted in the House of Lords as to be ineffective.
It'll be a curious addition to the Salisbury-Addison convention, the Lords insists the government sticks to its manifesto pledge.
A young single mother in DC was worried about her two boys, thinking that they would soon be old enough to be tempted by the gang culture of that city. So she decided to move to a safer place, a small town in . . . Montana.
When she visited to check it out, she stopped at the local restaurant, which is often the social center in such towns, and was a little disturbed that a group of people seemed to be discussing her.
She moved there anyway, and when she got to know some of the people, she asked them about that scene in the restaurant. They explained that, having seen an attractive, single black woman, they were trying to decide whether to call the single black guy in the area, and tell him to come in so he could meet her.
The locals were match making, one of the favorite hobbies in small town America.
So, for those discussing the best places to live in Britain, this question: Where are the best places in Britain to raise children?
What the Guardian appear to referring to is what the EU (or the UK) could do if one side or the other invokes article 16. Under that circumstance there is a clear procedure to be followed (which is not as simple as just rescinding the Protocol as a whole) which does include targeted trade sanctions as a response. The problem Johnson has is that invoking Article 16 sets in train a series of procedures that may not play (probably will not) play well for the UK government. Hence their threats to renege on the treaty as a whole (which is what they are actually threatening even if they don't realise that themselves yet)
BBC
For Finland and Sweden to join Nato, all 30 existing members must say yes. But for now, one is saying no.
President Erdogan says he won’t agree to admit countries which apply sanctions on Turkey.
Sweden suspended arms sales to Turkey three years ago, following Ankara’s military intervention in Syria. And according to the official Turkish news agency, both Finland and Sweden have rejected dozens of requests to extradite Kurdish militants who Turkey describes as terrorists.
Both countries are sending delegations to Ankara to try and solve the problem, but President Erdogan says they shouldn’t bother
The first good news Putin has had in weeks
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-61461805
10,000 is generally the cutoff point before it becomes a town
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiptree
https://www.ft.com/content/e90cd692-b3a3-4cb8-b9ea-ab47cd99424b
Thinks the UK govt should buy a golden share and 25.1% of ARM to prevent Softbank taking it public on the Nasdaq.