I would contend that I have earned more since 18 than most people have in their lives, I've probably paid more tax too.
And you’re complaining about your lot in life?
Fuck you
I am complaining about how people my age are treated.
You are a touchy prick aren't you?
You started the fuck yous
How are people of my age (45) treated better?
Aren't you a Tory? Why not ask your mates
Only once you’ve told me the last joke you and Jeremy shared, when you were mates
I’m a postie. I have to try to work at least 45 hours a week to pay my rent, bills and food (and beer), and have enough left over to get my overdraft down a bit. I have no savings at all
I do usually support the Tories. I don’t really support anyone at the moment. I don’t like SKS more than I don’t like Sunak. I pity Rishi a bit, he is a mate after all
Are you still doing Aldbourne, Blanche ?
No, but occasionally training other people there on bits of Aldbourne. My old route has been cut up to make other routes longer. I switch between two routes in Marlborough now. But did Shalbourne yesterday for the first time
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
Around 1,000 people in the UK died from Covid on its own, the rest died "with Covid".
By that metric, though, AIDS kills barely anyone.
If the questions are, were the restrictions in place too long, were they (mostly) too strict, were we too slow to react to new information from abroad, and was there insufficient risk segmentation?
Then the answers are probably, yes,yes,yes,yes.
But that doesn't mean that Covid wasn't a major killer.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
Although the "cyclists need insurance" brigade do have a point. Liability insurance for cyclists is quite sensible.
Adult cyclists who cycle on pavements, which is unlawful, with a "get out of my way, pedestrian scum" attitude, being too wimpy and scared to ride on the roads, need bans slapped on them by magistrates. (It would only take a few Cambridge fellows to feel the long arm of the law for the others to feel "encouraged".)
Guidance from the Police Chief's Association accepts that adults cycling on pavements is OK, when the road is too dangerous, and it is done considerately - as in the vast majority of cases. Guidance was issued in 1999 by the Home Secretary when it became an "offence", and reaffirmed in 2014. The recent case of the manslaughter of the elderly cyclist demonstrates the need, until such time as we have safe facilities everywhere:
The "cyclists need insurance" brigade have no point whatsoever, except in their own sawdust-filled heads.
Lability insurance for people riding bikes usually comes for free with a home contents policy. Some of us have extra insurance via memberships or specialist policies. I have that because I know many motorist vehicle drivers will lie to the police and then lie to the court, and I will need ferocious lawyers should the worst happen, potentially for a civil claim.
These insurance companies include liability insurance in their Home Contents policies:
Apologies for introducing evidence to the debate.
Normally placid people go absolutely bonkers when it comes to cyclists. It's utterly barmy and baffling.
It's jealously. Motorists see my calf muscles go momentarily insane.
I had a shout-off with some driver in a huge fuck off (but white) Jeep Cherokee this morning. I just think many drivers resent the freedom of movement of cyclists. They don't like cyclists filtering either which I think is part of this.
Unless its a London thing, I think cyclists overestimate how much drivers dislike them. Some drivers are just douchebags, some cyclists are just douchebags, and I'm more likely to get into an argument with another driver than a cyclist.
This morning I had a shout-off (or exchange of banged horns) after I indicated to show I was pulling into the right hand lane, the driver behind in the right hand-lane saw my indicator and took that as a dare to close the gap instead of letting me in, and I pulled in safely anyway. Day before I shouted at another road user to use their indicator after they went around a roundabout in a dangerous manner without using their indicator.
Before that I hadn't been annoyed with any other road use in months and its an extremely long time since a cyclist has pissed me off (red light as almost always).
Sometimes people just don't like other road users for how they're acting. Whether that be people who ride through red lights, or people who don't use their indicator or those who take the indicator as a challenge, its not about cyclist or driver per se.
It's a numbers game, really. As a cyclist you spend a lot of time being overtaken by cars for obvious reasons. So 99 go past perfectly normally and 1 idiot comes too close or shouts at you just for being there, and that's the one you remember. It's easy to feel like everyone hates you because that's just how memory works.
This applies to lots of other situations too, of course. The memorability of extreme examples the main engine of all polarisation.
I'm just back from a cycling holiday and we only had one bad pass the whole time out of hundreds. We were on a Sustrans route and we even had drivers stopping and asking us how we were getting on, telling us about good pubs etc.
That one pass nearly killed us though, so it does stick in the mind.
There's quite an amusing and slightly blunt Irish camera cyclist called RighttoBikeIt who has his rear facing camera showing his "equipment" and his quadriceps, which probably does make people jealous.
At present there is little alternative much of the time other than to cycle on the roads, as there are few safe mobility (used to be called cycle-) tracks, and the entire public footpath, bridleway and cycleway network is littered with tens of thousands (literally) of illegal (under Equality Act 2010) anti-access barriers pandering to the myth that they keep 'motobikes' out, which ban disabled and many elderly people from much of the countryside.
This is one just built project (just finished by Plymouth Council) which excludes people in wheelchairs and elderly people in mobility scooters from a "strategic walking and cycling route", which is illegal. They considered a ramp, but wanted to save money.
I've seen that on Twitter, and I'd like to see a little more detail on where it is, and what sort of path it is. It *may* be a reasonable compromise; it may not.
Leaving the steps aside, what sort of speed should cyclists be going down that path, if it is shared? 5 MPH max?
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Re: your mortgage affordability I have great sympathy but without meaning to pry I shall pry and ask whether you are interest only or repayment?
I've only ever had a interest-only mortgage and consequently have very low monthly costs with large tolerance for rates increasing - and I reduce capital in chunks on an ad hoc basis. I'm wondering whether people with repayment mortgages realise this is an option with lenders (there may need to be some equity in the property). The other thing to consider is extending the term.
The clown likely inherited a house and has nothing to pay , just a whining git. I would love to know these people he gave up his life for, nothing short of an absolute bellend.
Touched a nerve did I? Diddums
Look you are a dullard and a clown , an idiot like you could never touch a nerve with an intelligent person like me. Put your dummy tit back in and give us peace from your whining.
You are utterly hopeless.
You and foreskin should have a Sad Git Bores convention. I bet pubs empty when your mushes come through the door.
lol. More projection. I wonder how many times he can manage it? Anyway, I'd better get back to some work. I wish Malcolm would let us know when his trolley shift is at Tescos or Halfords (or wherever it is that is mad enough to employ sweaty grumpy swiveleyed old farts) so that we can enjoy this site without his moronic playground interventions
Don't let the thick old git wind you up CHB. Just laugh at him, he probably is scratching away at his hemorrhoids - you should feel sorry for the angry old git. He has probably lost his latest pair of NHS false teeth when he started ranting a few mins ago! lol
@BlancheLivermore I haven't complained about being bullied since my mental health issues have been resolved - I was in a difficult place and reacted too strongly but I would hope for compassion when I have been quite open about it.
Who have I bullied off the site?
What have I made up?
I am not seeking anyone's attention, no more than you are. I made a clumsy joke "I am Horse" in an attempt to satirise Leon's constant off-topic posting, I thought it was quite obviously a joke but then you didn't.
You don't like my opinions because I lean left wing, you allow and praise plenty of people that do what you accuse me of, for example your liking posts by Malcolm and Leon. And that's fine - but you're not as noble as you think you are.
I've not got any problems with you, you are the one who made problems with me...
Anyway let's just leave it there, I will go back to ignoring you because it's clearly not doing either of us any good engaging.
Although the "cyclists need insurance" brigade do have a point. Liability insurance for cyclists is quite sensible.
Adult cyclists who cycle on pavements, which is unlawful, with a "get out of my way, pedestrian scum" attitude, being too wimpy and scared to ride on the roads, need bans slapped on them by magistrates. (It would only take a few Cambridge fellows to feel the long arm of the law for the others to feel "encouraged".)
Guidance from the Police Chief's Association accepts that adults cycling on pavements is OK, when the road is too dangerous, and it is done considerately - as in the vast majority of cases. Guidance was issued in 1999 by the Home Secretary when it became an "offence", and reaffirmed in 2014. The recent case of the manslaughter of the elderly cyclist demonstrates the need, until such time as we have safe facilities everywhere:
The "cyclists need insurance" brigade have no point whatsoever, except in their own sawdust-filled heads.
Lability insurance for people riding bikes usually comes for free with a home contents policy. Some of us have extra insurance via memberships or specialist policies. I have that because I know many motorist vehicle drivers will lie to the police and then lie to the court, and I will need ferocious lawyers should the worst happen, potentially for a civil claim.
These insurance companies include liability insurance in their Home Contents policies:
Apologies for introducing evidence to the debate.
Normally placid people go absolutely bonkers when it comes to cyclists. It's utterly barmy and baffling.
It's jealously. Motorists see my calf muscles go momentarily insane.
I had a shout-off with some driver in a huge fuck off (but white) Jeep Cherokee this morning. I just think many drivers resent the freedom of movement of cyclists. They don't like cyclists filtering either which I think is part of this.
Unless its a London thing, I think cyclists overestimate how much drivers dislike them. Some drivers are just douchebags, some cyclists are just douchebags, and I'm more likely to get into an argument with another driver than a cyclist.
This morning I had a shout-off (or exchange of banged horns) after I indicated to show I was pulling into the right hand lane, the driver behind in the right hand-lane saw my indicator and took that as a dare to close the gap instead of letting me in, and I pulled in safely anyway. Day before I shouted at another road user to use their indicator after they went around a roundabout in a dangerous manner without using their indicator.
Before that I hadn't been annoyed with any other road use in months and its an extremely long time since a cyclist has pissed me off (red light as almost always).
Sometimes people just don't like other road users for how they're acting. Whether that be people who ride through red lights, or people who don't use their indicator or those who take the indicator as a challenge, its not about cyclist or driver per se.
It's a numbers game, really. As a cyclist you spend a lot of time being overtaken by cars for obvious reasons. So 99 go past perfectly normally and 1 idiot comes too close or shouts at you just for being there, and that's the one you remember. It's easy to feel like everyone hates you because that's just how memory works.
This applies to lots of other situations too, of course. The memorability of extreme examples the main engine of all polarisation.
I'm just back from a cycling holiday and we only had one bad pass the whole time out of hundreds. We were on a Sustrans route and we even had drivers stopping and asking us how we were getting on, telling us about good pubs etc.
That one pass nearly killed us though, so it does stick in the mind.
There's quite an amusing and slightly blunt Irish camera cyclist called RighttoBikeIt who has his rear facing camera showing his "equipment" and his quadriceps, which probably does make people jealous.
At present there is little alternative much of the time other than to cycle on the roads, as there are few safe mobility (used to be called cycle-) tracks, and the entire public footpath, bridleway and cycleway network is littered with tens of thousands (literally) of illegal (under Equality Act 2010) anti-access barriers pandering to the myth that they keep 'motobikes' out, which ban disabled and many elderly people from much of the countryside.
This is one just built project (just finished by Plymouth Council) which excludes people in wheelchairs and elderly people in mobility scooters from a "strategic walking and cycling route", which is illegal. They considered a ramp, but wanted to save money.
Question (genuine) - large chunks of the Cornish costal path have steps and/or very steep gradients.
When getting funding etc for such things, what is the assessment process by which the requirement to be accessible can be removed/not apply?
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
I don’t mean to offend, but you’re sounding quite a bit like Pol Pot there! Particularly the bit about forcing hedge fund managers to work in the fields.
SKS could kill all talk of him being a centrist poodle stone dead by including this in the manifesto.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Re: your mortgage affordability I have great sympathy but without meaning to pry I shall pry and ask whether you are interest only or repayment?
I've only ever had a interest-only mortgage and consequently have very low monthly costs with large tolerance for rates increasing - and I reduce capital in chunks on an ad hoc basis. I'm wondering whether people with repayment mortgages realise this is an option with lenders (there may need to be some equity in the property). The other thing to consider is extending the term.
The clown likely inherited a house and has nothing to pay , just a whining git. I would love to know these people he gave up his life for, nothing short of an absolute bellend.
Touched a nerve did I? Diddums
Look you are a dullard and a clown , an idiot like you could never touch a nerve with an intelligent person like me. Put your dummy tit back in and give us peace from your whining.
You are utterly hopeless.
You and foreskin should have a Sad Git Bores convention. I bet pubs empty when your mushes come through the door.
I get weirdly tired about 3 hours after I wake up. Does anyone else? Doesn’t matter when. If I wake at 7 I have a bout of yawning at 10am. If I wake at 9 I am yawning at noon. For about ten minutes
Same if I wake unexpectedly in the night. Say at 2am. I will reliably fall asleep again at 5am. I don’t try to push it, I accept it
Does anyone else have a similar biorhythm?
(This is my attempt to interrupt and divert the tedious bickering)
Ever checked your blood sugar at those times? Might be a low blood sugar effect.
No because it doesn’t really bother me. The tiredness only lasts about 10 minutes. I yawn a fair bit, have a coffee, then I’m fine
In fact it’s quite handy. If I properly wake in the night I know it’s pointless to try and fight my way back to sleep. I just read for 3 hours (or whatever). Then zzz
Just some rhythm in my metabolism, I guess
I'd suggest a diabetes check.
Nah, I’ve been like this for 30 years it doesn’t concern me. And I can be quite hypochondriac
I would contend that I have earned more since 18 than most people have in their lives, I've probably paid more tax too.
And you’re complaining about your lot in life?
Fuck you
I am complaining about how people my age are treated.
You are a touchy prick aren't you?
You started the fuck yous
How are people of my age (45) treated better?
Aren't you a Tory? Why not ask your mates
Only once you’ve told me the last joke you and Jeremy shared, when you were mates
I’m a postie. I have to try to work at least 45 hours a week to pay my rent, bills and food (and beer), and have enough left over to get my overdraft down a bit. I have no savings at all
I do usually support the Tories. I don’t really support anyone at the moment. I don’t like SKS more than I don’t like Sunak. I pity Rishi a bit, he is a mate after all
I don't have any issue with your supporting the Tories, you were the one who took issue with me years back for some reason, I can only think it's because I'm left-leaning.
You make things up (jokes?!?) and complain about being bullied
Then you bully people and hope you’ll bully them off the website (jokes?!?)
I get weirdly tired about 3 hours after I wake up. Does anyone else? Doesn’t matter when. If I wake at 7 I have a bout of yawning at 10am. If I wake at 9 I am yawning at noon. For about ten minutes
Same if I wake unexpectedly in the night. Say at 2am. I will reliably fall asleep again at 5am. I don’t try to push it, I accept it
Does anyone else have a similar biorhythm?
(This is my attempt to interrupt and divert the tedious bickering)
I have an afternoon dip around 4pm. Get very tired but it only lasts about 20 minutes and then I am fine. Strangely it doesn't happen at the equivalent time in the morning when I am working nightshift. I also only sleep about 4 hours a night and have done for the last 30 years. I put this down to many years of shift work.
I get an afternoon dip at about three and have a Japanese Power Nap-even if just five minutes - and then my brain feels like I’ve had a good eight hours. Very weird as the drift off feels incredibly heavy and deep sleep but it is very quick.
I’ve learned to love naps. Very restorative. If the body wants to sleep let it sleep. I can go the whole siesta sometimes
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
How crazy that transphobic people lie, and that the story that looked like someone compared trans identities to identifying as an animal (like they used to compare consenting same sex relationships to beastiality) ends up being that and not that someone actually identifies as a cat (despite what the national press think):
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
Can any experts opine on the submarine disaster, the odds of survival must be close to zero now?
Isn't this a situation where we don't have enough information to say? I heard someone on the radio say that something catastrophic could have happened and they've been dead for two days now.
3500m deep - that's about 350 times atmospheric pressure.
There are drop weights on the thing so it should have been possible to pull the handle and float up to the surface under pure buoyancy alone. Unless the mechanism was power operated and there was a power cut.
There's multiple ways of releasing them, in what seems the best thought-out aspect of the whole thing. Hull breach and implosion, or they are stuck on or under something
That does seem likely. The reporters seem to have gone quiet on the banging noises story.
Slightly surprising story re a chap who claims partial flooding is likely.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
I don't see much of a conflict between the two. Most people who labour accumulate capital. The kind of society which you're advocating, in which people have enough, but no more than enough, and in which people cannot spend money on things they don't need, sounds perfectly ghastly to me. And, because it cuts right across human nature, a society which can be achieved only through a great deal of coercion.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
I don’t mean to offend, but you’re sounding quite a bit like Pol Pot there! Particularly the bit about forcing hedge fund managers to work in the fields.
SKS could kill all talk of him being a centrist poodle stone dead by including this in the manifesto.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Although the "cyclists need insurance" brigade do have a point. Liability insurance for cyclists is quite sensible.
Adult cyclists who cycle on pavements, which is unlawful, with a "get out of my way, pedestrian scum" attitude, being too wimpy and scared to ride on the roads, need bans slapped on them by magistrates. (It would only take a few Cambridge fellows to feel the long arm of the law for the others to feel "encouraged".)
Guidance from the Police Chief's Association accepts that adults cycling on pavements is OK, when the road is too dangerous, and it is done considerately - as in the vast majority of cases. Guidance was issued in 1999 by the Home Secretary when it became an "offence", and reaffirmed in 2014. The recent case of the manslaughter of the elderly cyclist demonstrates the need, until such time as we have safe facilities everywhere:
The "cyclists need insurance" brigade have no point whatsoever, except in their own sawdust-filled heads.
Lability insurance for people riding bikes usually comes for free with a home contents policy. Some of us have extra insurance via memberships or specialist policies. I have that because I know many motorist vehicle drivers will lie to the police and then lie to the court, and I will need ferocious lawyers should the worst happen, potentially for a civil claim.
These insurance companies include liability insurance in their Home Contents policies:
Apologies for introducing evidence to the debate.
Normally placid people go absolutely bonkers when it comes to cyclists. It's utterly barmy and baffling.
It's jealously. Motorists see my calf muscles go momentarily insane.
I had a shout-off with some driver in a huge fuck off (but white) Jeep Cherokee this morning. I just think many drivers resent the freedom of movement of cyclists. They don't like cyclists filtering either which I think is part of this.
Unless its a London thing, I think cyclists overestimate how much drivers dislike them. Some drivers are just douchebags, some cyclists are just douchebags, and I'm more likely to get into an argument with another driver than a cyclist.
This morning I had a shout-off (or exchange of banged horns) after I indicated to show I was pulling into the right hand lane, the driver behind in the right hand-lane saw my indicator and took that as a dare to close the gap instead of letting me in, and I pulled in safely anyway. Day before I shouted at another road user to use their indicator after they went around a roundabout in a dangerous manner without using their indicator.
Before that I hadn't been annoyed with any other road use in months and its an extremely long time since a cyclist has pissed me off (red light as almost always).
Sometimes people just don't like other road users for how they're acting. Whether that be people who ride through red lights, or people who don't use their indicator or those who take the indicator as a challenge, its not about cyclist or driver per se.
It's a numbers game, really. As a cyclist you spend a lot of time being overtaken by cars for obvious reasons. So 99 go past perfectly normally and 1 idiot comes too close or shouts at you just for being there, and that's the one you remember. It's easy to feel like everyone hates you because that's just how memory works.
This applies to lots of other situations too, of course. The memorability of extreme examples the main engine of all polarisation.
I'm just back from a cycling holiday and we only had one bad pass the whole time out of hundreds. We were on a Sustrans route and we even had drivers stopping and asking us how we were getting on, telling us about good pubs etc.
That one pass nearly killed us though, so it does stick in the mind.
There's quite an amusing and slightly blunt Irish camera cyclist called RighttoBikeIt who has his rear facing camera showing his "equipment" and his quadriceps, which probably does make people jealous.
At present there is little alternative much of the time other than to cycle on the roads, as there are few safe mobility (used to be called cycle-) tracks, and the entire public footpath, bridleway and cycleway network is littered with tens of thousands (literally) of illegal (under Equality Act 2010) anti-access barriers pandering to the myth that they keep 'motobikes' out, which ban disabled and many elderly people from much of the countryside.
This is one just built project (just finished by Plymouth Council) which excludes people in wheelchairs and elderly people in mobility scooters from a "strategic walking and cycling route", which is illegal. They considered a ramp, but wanted to save money.
Question (genuine) - large chunks of the Cornish costal path have steps and/or very steep gradients.
When getting funding etc for such things, what is the assessment process by which the requirement to be accessible can be removed/not apply?
From distant memory, that depends on the classification of the route: if it is path, it has to be accessible by foot alone. If a bridleway, it needs to be wider with accessible gates. A BOAT (Byway Open To All Traffic) has even more stringent requirements.
So if it is an official footpath, accessibility isn't much of an issue - as long as you can walk along it.
I get weirdly tired about 3 hours after I wake up. Does anyone else? Doesn’t matter when. If I wake at 7 I have a bout of yawning at 10am. If I wake at 9 I am yawning at noon. For about ten minutes
Same if I wake unexpectedly in the night. Say at 2am. I will reliably fall asleep again at 5am. I don’t try to push it, I accept it
Does anyone else have a similar biorhythm?
(This is my attempt to interrupt and divert the tedious bickering)
Ever checked your blood sugar at those times? Might be a low blood sugar effect.
No because it doesn’t really bother me. The tiredness only lasts about 10 minutes. I yawn a fair bit, have a coffee, then I’m fine
In fact it’s quite handy. If I properly wake in the night I know it’s pointless to try and fight my way back to sleep. I just read for 3 hours (or whatever). Then zzz
Just some rhythm in my metabolism, I guess
I'd suggest a diabetes check.
Nah, I’ve been like this for 30 years it doesn’t concern me. And I can be quite hypochondriac
Probably genetic predisposition if the study I linked is correct. With a bit if googling and spending a bit on having your DNA sequenced, you could even check that if you're bothered.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
Most communist systems directed labour towards the needs of the system, not the needs of people.
And "people" here also presumably excludes the sort of people who want to invest to make a bob or two. Or indeed just be left to their own devices and do unproductive but enjoyable things like bumming around the world, whether as billionaires or on a shoe string. Materialistic approaches to labour on both left and right simply suck the joy out of existence.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
I assumed the paradox was going to be how any number of bottles of wine survived this long with you in the first place.
UGH final op is Jones . Thomas writes (6-3) that even if an intervening federal case shows *you were convicted of something that isn't a crime* OR *were sentenced to more time than the law allows* you CANNOT file a federal habeas petition. https://twitter.com/LeahLitman/status/1671885660540788739
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
Anyone who runs their own business would be surprised by this theory of capitalism being top down.
Although the "cyclists need insurance" brigade do have a point. Liability insurance for cyclists is quite sensible.
Adult cyclists who cycle on pavements, which is unlawful, with a "get out of my way, pedestrian scum" attitude, being too wimpy and scared to ride on the roads, need bans slapped on them by magistrates. (It would only take a few Cambridge fellows to feel the long arm of the law for the others to feel "encouraged".)
Guidance from the Police Chief's Association accepts that adults cycling on pavements is OK, when the road is too dangerous, and it is done considerately - as in the vast majority of cases. Guidance was issued in 1999 by the Home Secretary when it became an "offence", and reaffirmed in 2014. The recent case of the manslaughter of the elderly cyclist demonstrates the need, until such time as we have safe facilities everywhere:
The "cyclists need insurance" brigade have no point whatsoever, except in their own sawdust-filled heads.
Lability insurance for people riding bikes usually comes for free with a home contents policy. Some of us have extra insurance via memberships or specialist policies. I have that because I know many motorist vehicle drivers will lie to the police and then lie to the court, and I will need ferocious lawyers should the worst happen, potentially for a civil claim.
These insurance companies include liability insurance in their Home Contents policies:
Apologies for introducing evidence to the debate.
Normally placid people go absolutely bonkers when it comes to cyclists. It's utterly barmy and baffling.
It's jealously. Motorists see my calf muscles go momentarily insane.
I had a shout-off with some driver in a huge fuck off (but white) Jeep Cherokee this morning. I just think many drivers resent the freedom of movement of cyclists. They don't like cyclists filtering either which I think is part of this.
Unless its a London thing, I think cyclists overestimate how much drivers dislike them. Some drivers are just douchebags, some cyclists are just douchebags, and I'm more likely to get into an argument with another driver than a cyclist.
This morning I had a shout-off (or exchange of banged horns) after I indicated to show I was pulling into the right hand lane, the driver behind in the right hand-lane saw my indicator and took that as a dare to close the gap instead of letting me in, and I pulled in safely anyway. Day before I shouted at another road user to use their indicator after they went around a roundabout in a dangerous manner without using their indicator.
Before that I hadn't been annoyed with any other road use in months and its an extremely long time since a cyclist has pissed me off (red light as almost always).
Sometimes people just don't like other road users for how they're acting. Whether that be people who ride through red lights, or people who don't use their indicator or those who take the indicator as a challenge, its not about cyclist or driver per se.
It's a numbers game, really. As a cyclist you spend a lot of time being overtaken by cars for obvious reasons. So 99 go past perfectly normally and 1 idiot comes too close or shouts at you just for being there, and that's the one you remember. It's easy to feel like everyone hates you because that's just how memory works.
This applies to lots of other situations too, of course. The memorability of extreme examples the main engine of all polarisation.
I'm just back from a cycling holiday and we only had one bad pass the whole time out of hundreds. We were on a Sustrans route and we even had drivers stopping and asking us how we were getting on, telling us about good pubs etc.
That one pass nearly killed us though, so it does stick in the mind.
There's quite an amusing and slightly blunt Irish camera cyclist called RighttoBikeIt who has his rear facing camera showing his "equipment" and his quadriceps, which probably does make people jealous.
At present there is little alternative much of the time other than to cycle on the roads, as there are few safe mobility (used to be called cycle-) tracks, and the entire public footpath, bridleway and cycleway network is littered with tens of thousands (literally) of illegal (under Equality Act 2010) anti-access barriers pandering to the myth that they keep 'motobikes' out, which ban disabled and many elderly people from much of the countryside.
This is one just built project (just finished by Plymouth Council) which excludes people in wheelchairs and elderly people in mobility scooters from a "strategic walking and cycling route", which is illegal. They considered a ramp, but wanted to save money.
I've seen that on Twitter, and I'd like to see a little more detail on where it is, and what sort of path it is. It *may* be a reasonable compromise; it may not.
Leaving the steps aside, what sort of speed should cyclists be going down that path, if it is shared? 5 MPH max?
The Council considered a ramp, and rejected in favour of a staircase for cost reasons. It's partly an artefact of short term Govt funding packages.
But it is still in violation of the Equality Act 2010, which speaks of their priorities being wrong. With that staircase, it should not have been approved by the Govt funding body.
It is identified as an important cycling route, so discriminating against all sorts of users (parents with kids in a trailer or a tagalong, disabled cyclists on trikes, people on mobility scooters) is completely unacceptable. The first person who is discriminated against under EA 2010 can sue them as provided for in the act, receive compensation, and obtain an injunction making them change it.
It is in Plymstock.
Appropriate speed depends on conditions, how busy it is, and sightlines - amongst other things.
If it has peds, then 10mph and 4-5 mph when close. If empty or long gaps between peds with clear visibility, a higher speed would be fine.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Where are they from - what region, appellation, year etc.?
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I have a short nap (15 mins) after lunch whenever I have the chance. I always wake up much more refreshed and ready to go again.
Winston Churchill swore by naps, of course
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
Shoes off, trousers off and proper go to bed, with alarm set: "OK Google, wake me up in 15 minutes". It works wonders for me, but can obviously only do when at home.
I've noticed more and more online ads are using computer-generated voices to do the voice-over. Anyone know why?
I'm guessing two things:
1) cheaper than hiring voice actors. 2) The ability to tailor ads more narrowly. This may not be a thing atm, but it will be going forward.
Incidentally, I love the really poorly-dubbed ads we occasionally see on TV. Ones where the lip sync means it's obvious the actor is actually speaking a different language.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
All systems create distortions if left unchecked. Capitalism isn't left unchecked. It's why we have regulation. It's why the most successful Western economies with the happiest people and highest HDI scores have a shit load of regulation. It's why the Brexiteer dream of a deregulated libertarian paradise was never a runner.
I get weirdly tired about 3 hours after I wake up. Does anyone else? Doesn’t matter when. If I wake at 7 I have a bout of yawning at 10am. If I wake at 9 I am yawning at noon. For about ten minutes
Same if I wake unexpectedly in the night. Say at 2am. I will reliably fall asleep again at 5am. I don’t try to push it, I accept it
Does anyone else have a similar biorhythm?
(This is my attempt to interrupt and divert the tedious bickering)
Ever checked your blood sugar at those times? Might be a low blood sugar effect.
No because it doesn’t really bother me. The tiredness only lasts about 10 minutes. I yawn a fair bit, have a coffee, then I’m fine
In fact it’s quite handy. If I properly wake in the night I know it’s pointless to try and fight my way back to sleep. I just read for 3 hours (or whatever). Then zzz
Just some rhythm in my metabolism, I guess
I'd suggest a diabetes check.
Nah, I’ve been like this for 30 years it doesn’t concern me. And I can be quite hypochondriac
Get checked anyway. You're the right age and weight for type 2 and your diet is shit.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Get someone round whose company you really enjoy, order some great food and drink them. The memory of a great chilled evening with good wine, food and company will be worth infinitely more than the wine and it won’t be left to go shit and leave a real and metaphorical bad taste in your mouth that you left them lying there.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
Any number of huge companies have collapsed because they stopped providing the goods or services that people wanted.
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I have a short nap (15 mins) after lunch whenever I have the chance. I always wake up much more refreshed and ready to go again.
Winston Churchill swore by naps, of course
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
Shoes off, trousers off and proper go to bed, with alarm set: "OK Google, wake me up in 15 minutes". It works wonders for me, but can obviously only do when at home.
The most remarkable naps are the 3-4 minute reboot jobs I sometimes need to carry out while driving in late afternoon (4-5pm is the witching hour for me). Driving along, starting to feel the eyelids droop, worrying about veering into the hard shoulder and killing all the passengers. Pull into a motorway services car park, close eyes and boom, 3 minutes later the fatigue is gone and I'm alert as ever.
Although the "cyclists need insurance" brigade do have a point. Liability insurance for cyclists is quite sensible.
Adult cyclists who cycle on pavements, which is unlawful, with a "get out of my way, pedestrian scum" attitude, being too wimpy and scared to ride on the roads, need bans slapped on them by magistrates. (It would only take a few Cambridge fellows to feel the long arm of the law for the others to feel "encouraged".)
Guidance from the Police Chief's Association accepts that adults cycling on pavements is OK, when the road is too dangerous, and it is done considerately - as in the vast majority of cases. Guidance was issued in 1999 by the Home Secretary when it became an "offence", and reaffirmed in 2014. The recent case of the manslaughter of the elderly cyclist demonstrates the need, until such time as we have safe facilities everywhere:
The "cyclists need insurance" brigade have no point whatsoever, except in their own sawdust-filled heads.
Lability insurance for people riding bikes usually comes for free with a home contents policy. Some of us have extra insurance via memberships or specialist policies. I have that because I know many motorist vehicle drivers will lie to the police and then lie to the court, and I will need ferocious lawyers should the worst happen, potentially for a civil claim.
These insurance companies include liability insurance in their Home Contents policies:
Apologies for introducing evidence to the debate.
Normally placid people go absolutely bonkers when it comes to cyclists. It's utterly barmy and baffling.
It's jealously. Motorists see my calf muscles go momentarily insane.
I had a shout-off with some driver in a huge fuck off (but white) Jeep Cherokee this morning. I just think many drivers resent the freedom of movement of cyclists. They don't like cyclists filtering either which I think is part of this.
Unless its a London thing, I think cyclists overestimate how much drivers dislike them. Some drivers are just douchebags, some cyclists are just douchebags, and I'm more likely to get into an argument with another driver than a cyclist.
This morning I had a shout-off (or exchange of banged horns) after I indicated to show I was pulling into the right hand lane, the driver behind in the right hand-lane saw my indicator and took that as a dare to close the gap instead of letting me in, and I pulled in safely anyway. Day before I shouted at another road user to use their indicator after they went around a roundabout in a dangerous manner without using their indicator.
Before that I hadn't been annoyed with any other road use in months and its an extremely long time since a cyclist has pissed me off (red light as almost always).
Sometimes people just don't like other road users for how they're acting. Whether that be people who ride through red lights, or people who don't use their indicator or those who take the indicator as a challenge, its not about cyclist or driver per se.
It's a numbers game, really. As a cyclist you spend a lot of time being overtaken by cars for obvious reasons. So 99 go past perfectly normally and 1 idiot comes too close or shouts at you just for being there, and that's the one you remember. It's easy to feel like everyone hates you because that's just how memory works.
This applies to lots of other situations too, of course. The memorability of extreme examples the main engine of all polarisation.
I'm just back from a cycling holiday and we only had one bad pass the whole time out of hundreds. We were on a Sustrans route and we even had drivers stopping and asking us how we were getting on, telling us about good pubs etc.
That one pass nearly killed us though, so it does stick in the mind.
There's quite an amusing and slightly blunt Irish camera cyclist called RighttoBikeIt who has his rear facing camera showing his "equipment" and his quadriceps, which probably does make people jealous.
At present there is little alternative much of the time other than to cycle on the roads, as there are few safe mobility (used to be called cycle-) tracks, and the entire public footpath, bridleway and cycleway network is littered with tens of thousands (literally) of illegal (under Equality Act 2010) anti-access barriers pandering to the myth that they keep 'motobikes' out, which ban disabled and many elderly people from much of the countryside.
This is one just built project (just finished by Plymouth Council) which excludes people in wheelchairs and elderly people in mobility scooters from a "strategic walking and cycling route", which is illegal. They considered a ramp, but wanted to save money.
Question (genuine) - large chunks of the Cornish costal path have steps and/or very steep gradients.
When getting funding etc for such things, what is the assessment process by which the requirement to be accessible can be removed/not apply?
I don't know in detail, even though I am a little active campaigning on such things. In England they are supposed to be required to meet LTN 1/20 standards for quality of cycling / walking infra to get funding, which is a good system which *usually* works, but Plymouth are a bit of an outlier.
Not sure on conditions wrt disability discrimination. It's coming up the agenda, though, and there are *some* legal teeth available - though quite a bit of effort.
Although the "cyclists need insurance" brigade do have a point. Liability insurance for cyclists is quite sensible.
Adult cyclists who cycle on pavements, which is unlawful, with a "get out of my way, pedestrian scum" attitude, being too wimpy and scared to ride on the roads, need bans slapped on them by magistrates. (It would only take a few Cambridge fellows to feel the long arm of the law for the others to feel "encouraged".)
Guidance from the Police Chief's Association accepts that adults cycling on pavements is OK, when the road is too dangerous, and it is done considerately - as in the vast majority of cases. Guidance was issued in 1999 by the Home Secretary when it became an "offence", and reaffirmed in 2014. The recent case of the manslaughter of the elderly cyclist demonstrates the need, until such time as we have safe facilities everywhere:
The "cyclists need insurance" brigade have no point whatsoever, except in their own sawdust-filled heads.
Lability insurance for people riding bikes usually comes for free with a home contents policy. Some of us have extra insurance via memberships or specialist policies. I have that because I know many motorist vehicle drivers will lie to the police and then lie to the court, and I will need ferocious lawyers should the worst happen, potentially for a civil claim.
These insurance companies include liability insurance in their Home Contents policies:
Apologies for introducing evidence to the debate.
Normally placid people go absolutely bonkers when it comes to cyclists. It's utterly barmy and baffling.
It's jealously. Motorists see my calf muscles go momentarily insane.
I had a shout-off with some driver in a huge fuck off (but white) Jeep Cherokee this morning. I just think many drivers resent the freedom of movement of cyclists. They don't like cyclists filtering either which I think is part of this.
Unless its a London thing, I think cyclists overestimate how much drivers dislike them. Some drivers are just douchebags, some cyclists are just douchebags, and I'm more likely to get into an argument with another driver than a cyclist.
This morning I had a shout-off (or exchange of banged horns) after I indicated to show I was pulling into the right hand lane, the driver behind in the right hand-lane saw my indicator and took that as a dare to close the gap instead of letting me in, and I pulled in safely anyway. Day before I shouted at another road user to use their indicator after they went around a roundabout in a dangerous manner without using their indicator.
Before that I hadn't been annoyed with any other road use in months and its an extremely long time since a cyclist has pissed me off (red light as almost always).
Sometimes people just don't like other road users for how they're acting. Whether that be people who ride through red lights, or people who don't use their indicator or those who take the indicator as a challenge, its not about cyclist or driver per se.
It's a numbers game, really. As a cyclist you spend a lot of time being overtaken by cars for obvious reasons. So 99 go past perfectly normally and 1 idiot comes too close or shouts at you just for being there, and that's the one you remember. It's easy to feel like everyone hates you because that's just how memory works.
This applies to lots of other situations too, of course. The memorability of extreme examples the main engine of all polarisation.
I'm just back from a cycling holiday and we only had one bad pass the whole time out of hundreds. We were on a Sustrans route and we even had drivers stopping and asking us how we were getting on, telling us about good pubs etc.
That one pass nearly killed us though, so it does stick in the mind.
There's quite an amusing and slightly blunt Irish camera cyclist called RighttoBikeIt who has his rear facing camera showing his "equipment" and his quadriceps, which probably does make people jealous.
At present there is little alternative much of the time other than to cycle on the roads, as there are few safe mobility (used to be called cycle-) tracks, and the entire public footpath, bridleway and cycleway network is littered with tens of thousands (literally) of illegal (under Equality Act 2010) anti-access barriers pandering to the myth that they keep 'motobikes' out, which ban disabled and many elderly people from much of the countryside.
This is one just built project (just finished by Plymouth Council) which excludes people in wheelchairs and elderly people in mobility scooters from a "strategic walking and cycling route", which is illegal. They considered a ramp, but wanted to save money.
I've seen that on Twitter, and I'd like to see a little more detail on where it is, and what sort of path it is. It *may* be a reasonable compromise; it may not.
Leaving the steps aside, what sort of speed should cyclists be going down that path, if it is shared? 5 MPH max?
The Council considered a ramp, and rejected in favour of a staircase for cost reasons. It's partly an artefact of short term Govt funding packages.
But it is still in violation of the Equality Act 2010, which speaks of their priorities being wrong. With that staircase, it should not have been approved by the Govt funding body.
It is identified as an important cycling route, so discriminating against all sorts of users (parents with kids in a trailer or a tagalong, disabled cyclists on trikes, people on mobility scooters) is completely unacceptable. The first person who is discriminated against under EA 2010 can sue them as provided for in the act, receive compensation, and obtain an injunction making them change it.
It is in Plymstock.
Appropriate speed depends on conditions, how busy it is, and sightlines - amongst other things.
If it has peds, then 10mph and 4-5 mph when close. If empty or long gaps between peds with clear visibility, a higher speed would be fine.
Thanks for that. I'd point out a couple of immediate issues (from #3 plan):
*) There is a road right at the bottom of those steps. Having people bombing down straight into a road is not necessarily a good idea. *) The site *appears* to be quite limited for space, with gardens and houses on either side. Is there space for a reasonable ramp, given the required fall?
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Where are they from - what region, appellation, year etc.?
A variety. Some grand crus. Some pricey Australians. Some supertuscans etc
Here’s one. Worth about £100 apparently. Five times what I paid (ages ago)
Advice seems to be:drink now if you haven’t already
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
The fact they are at or passing their peak means that no matter what you do you will not have £300 wine in your flat for much longer. Drink the buggers as was meant for them and enjoy that fleeting delight.
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I have a short nap (15 mins) after lunch whenever I have the chance. I always wake up much more refreshed and ready to go again.
Winston Churchill swore by naps, of course
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
Shoes off, trousers off and proper go to bed, with alarm set: "OK Google, wake me up in 15 minutes". It works wonders for me, but can obviously only do when at home.
The most remarkable naps are the 3-4 minute reboot jobs I sometimes need to carry out while driving in late afternoon (4-5pm is the witching hour for me). Driving along, starting to feel the eyelids droop, worrying about veering into the hard shoulder and killing all the passengers. Pull into a motorway services car park, close eyes and boom, 3 minutes later the fatigue is gone and I'm alert as ever.
Happened to me once on a hot day after lunch driving back with family aboard. Bloody frightening
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
The present suggests that capitalism is going to destroy the world, because profit comes before people and externalities don't matter.
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I have a short nap (15 mins) after lunch whenever I have the chance. I always wake up much more refreshed and ready to go again.
Winston Churchill swore by naps, of course
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
Shoes off, trousers off and proper go to bed, with alarm set: "OK Google, wake me up in 15 minutes". It works wonders for me, but can obviously only do when at home.
The most remarkable naps are the 3-4 minute reboot jobs I sometimes need to carry out while driving in late afternoon (4-5pm is the witching hour for me). Driving along, starting to feel the eyelids droop, worrying about veering into the hard shoulder and killing all the passengers. Pull into a motorway services car park, close eyes and boom, 3 minutes later the fatigue is gone and I'm alert as ever.
I find the naps sometimes feel much longer than they are. I'll drift off and have what seems like a really long dream, then wake thinking my alarm didn't go off and find I've only been asleep for 10 minutes. Perhaps whoever wrote Inception had a similar experience.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
Any number of huge companies have collapsed because they stopped providing the goods or services that people wanted.
And anti-capitalism never considers the consumer. There are 3 people in the economic relationship: labour, capital, and consumer. Marxism ignores the third almost completely and focuses on the other two. So too often do investors, oligarchs and crony capitalists. It's left to the likes of the European Commission, the FDA and EMA, the food standards agency and the plethora of Of-this and Of-that watchdogs out there to attempt (some more effectively than others) to pick up the pieces for consumers.
Although the "cyclists need insurance" brigade do have a point. Liability insurance for cyclists is quite sensible.
Adult cyclists who cycle on pavements, which is unlawful, with a "get out of my way, pedestrian scum" attitude, being too wimpy and scared to ride on the roads, need bans slapped on them by magistrates. (It would only take a few Cambridge fellows to feel the long arm of the law for the others to feel "encouraged".)
Guidance from the Police Chief's Association accepts that adults cycling on pavements is OK, when the road is too dangerous, and it is done considerately - as in the vast majority of cases. Guidance was issued in 1999 by the Home Secretary when it became an "offence", and reaffirmed in 2014. The recent case of the manslaughter of the elderly cyclist demonstrates the need, until such time as we have safe facilities everywhere:
The "cyclists need insurance" brigade have no point whatsoever, except in their own sawdust-filled heads.
Lability insurance for people riding bikes usually comes for free with a home contents policy. Some of us have extra insurance via memberships or specialist policies. I have that because I know many motorist vehicle drivers will lie to the police and then lie to the court, and I will need ferocious lawyers should the worst happen, potentially for a civil claim.
These insurance companies include liability insurance in their Home Contents policies:
Apologies for introducing evidence to the debate.
Normally placid people go absolutely bonkers when it comes to cyclists. It's utterly barmy and baffling.
It's jealously. Motorists see my calf muscles go momentarily insane.
I had a shout-off with some driver in a huge fuck off (but white) Jeep Cherokee this morning. I just think many drivers resent the freedom of movement of cyclists. They don't like cyclists filtering either which I think is part of this.
Unless its a London thing, I think cyclists overestimate how much drivers dislike them. Some drivers are just douchebags, some cyclists are just douchebags, and I'm more likely to get into an argument with another driver than a cyclist.
This morning I had a shout-off (or exchange of banged horns) after I indicated to show I was pulling into the right hand lane, the driver behind in the right hand-lane saw my indicator and took that as a dare to close the gap instead of letting me in, and I pulled in safely anyway. Day before I shouted at another road user to use their indicator after they went around a roundabout in a dangerous manner without using their indicator.
Before that I hadn't been annoyed with any other road use in months and its an extremely long time since a cyclist has pissed me off (red light as almost always).
Sometimes people just don't like other road users for how they're acting. Whether that be people who ride through red lights, or people who don't use their indicator or those who take the indicator as a challenge, its not about cyclist or driver per se.
It's a numbers game, really. As a cyclist you spend a lot of time being overtaken by cars for obvious reasons. So 99 go past perfectly normally and 1 idiot comes too close or shouts at you just for being there, and that's the one you remember. It's easy to feel like everyone hates you because that's just how memory works.
This applies to lots of other situations too, of course. The memorability of extreme examples the main engine of all polarisation.
I'm just back from a cycling holiday and we only had one bad pass the whole time out of hundreds. We were on a Sustrans route and we even had drivers stopping and asking us how we were getting on, telling us about good pubs etc.
That one pass nearly killed us though, so it does stick in the mind.
There's quite an amusing and slightly blunt Irish camera cyclist called RighttoBikeIt who has his rear facing camera showing his "equipment" and his quadriceps, which probably does make people jealous.
At present there is little alternative much of the time other than to cycle on the roads, as there are few safe mobility (used to be called cycle-) tracks, and the entire public footpath, bridleway and cycleway network is littered with tens of thousands (literally) of illegal (under Equality Act 2010) anti-access barriers pandering to the myth that they keep 'motobikes' out, which ban disabled and many elderly people from much of the countryside.
This is one just built project (just finished by Plymouth Council) which excludes people in wheelchairs and elderly people in mobility scooters from a "strategic walking and cycling route", which is illegal. They considered a ramp, but wanted to save money.
Question (genuine) - large chunks of the Cornish costal path have steps and/or very steep gradients.
When getting funding etc for such things, what is the assessment process by which the requirement to be accessible can be removed/not apply?
I don't know in detail, even though I am a little active campaigning on such things. In England they are supposed to be required to meet LTN 1/20 standards for quality of cycling / walking infra to get funding, which is a good system which *usually* works, but Plymouth are a bit of an outlier.
Not sure on conditions wrt disability discrimination. It's coming up the agenda, though, and there are *some* legal teeth available - though quite a bit of effort.
I’m curious, because
1) accessibility is a good thing 2) but short of dynamiting large sections of the Cornish coast, the path could never be made fully accessible. 3) public funding of the path seems to be a Good Thing, to me.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
If you work in a factory in the UK of Germany or Finland or France etc., then you have a variety of rights, enforced by law, and a safety net welfare state should you wish to leave the factory’s employ.
The money you make in your job, you get to decide how to spend that.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Where are they from - what region, appellation, year etc.?
A variety. Some grand crus. Some pricey Australians. Some supertuscans etc
Here’s one. Worth about £100 apparently. Five times what I paid (ages ago)
Advice seems to be:drink now if you haven’t already
2005 = fantastic year for Bordeaux. That'll be ideal now. Very nice.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
And, if you don't like the boss, or the terms that he's offering, you can look for better employment elsewhere. Or seek to negotiate better terms. Or and your colleagues can band together in seeking better terms and conditions. Workers are not bound to their employers like chattel slaves. I've been an employee. It's not as you describe.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
Most communist systems directed labour towards the needs of the system, not the needs of people.
And "people" here also presumably excludes the sort of people who want to invest to make a bob or two. Or indeed just be left to their own devices and do unproductive but enjoyable things like bumming around the world, whether as billionaires or on a shoe string. Materialistic approaches to labour on both left and right simply suck the joy out of existence.
And capitalist systems direct labour towards of the needs of capital, not the people.
I have no issue with people doing unproductive things, whereas capitalism sure hates the ideas of workers having more free time, or working from home or having more freedom at all not increasing production for the hopes of infinite growth.
There is a minimum voting age. Should there be a maximum voting age?
Yes. Minimum should be 16, maximum should be 15.
I don't think there should be a minimum or maximum voting age, as long as you can cast your own vote. I don't think people with dementia lose the right to vote, and many of them have less capability or understanding of the world than some 7 year olds. Considering that often the majority of the voting eligible population chose not to vote anyway, I don't see the issue with allowing the kind of annoying teenager that I would have been (who read newspapers, and followed politics, etc etc) a vote as well. It would actually make politicians have to care about the needs of children without that going through the prism of the desires of parents.
In all seriousness, I don't agree with maximum voting ages. I hope my glib and absurd answer wasn't taken seriously.
Testing suitability for maturity is fraught with difficulties. Who sets the test?
I'd make it a flat 16 years old for all legal residents. That includes foreign born and prisoners too.
I would agree with that if we also lowered the age of consent, smoking, drinking, driving, serving on the front line, signing contracts and jury service. If we consider a 16 year old mature enough to decide on the future of the country then they are also old enough to do all those other things as well.
Disagree about foreign born unless they commit to the country by taking citizenship. And prisoners are still, in some element of our judicial system, being punished. Preventing them from voting seems a reasonable part of that.
I would withdraw the vote from anyone who has lived outside the country for more than 5 years and also from commonwealth citizens and Irish. They are foreign nationals.
For a referendum that affects the long-term future (Brexit, Sindy, PR etc.) everybody should get n votes each where n = average life expectancy minus their age, those over the current life expectancy (81 years) get no votes. Thus as a 62 year old I would get 19 votes whereas an 18 year old would 63 votes.
This to reflect the longer time they will have to live with the consequences.
Such a system would have saved us from Brexit of course, and Scotland would now be independent.
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I have a short nap (15 mins) after lunch whenever I have the chance. I always wake up much more refreshed and ready to go again.
Winston Churchill swore by naps, of course
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
Shoes off, trousers off and proper go to bed, with alarm set: "OK Google, wake me up in 15 minutes". It works wonders for me, but can obviously only do when at home.
The most remarkable naps are the 3-4 minute reboot jobs I sometimes need to carry out while driving in late afternoon (4-5pm is the witching hour for me). Driving along, starting to feel the eyelids droop, worrying about veering into the hard shoulder and killing all the passengers. Pull into a motorway services car park, close eyes and boom, 3 minutes later the fatigue is gone and I'm alert as ever.
Yes I did this in America recently on a long drive. I was terrifyingly tired, losing control of the car, realised this was utterly insane. So I pulled over, laid down the seat, slept for about 6 minutes, and I was perfectly fine thereafter. Quite odd
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
The present suggests that capitalism is going to destroy the world, because profit comes before people and externalities don't matter.
The Aral sea has joined the chat. Oh and Chernobyl, and the Nickel towns of Siberia etc etc.
(Apologies PBers, "has joined the chat" should probably be on the banned list).
I've been trying to get my head around the strength of the physical forces that would have acted on the sub, water coming in fast enough to cut you in half, or just simply 'explode', which it obviously can't do because of the pressure involved on the sub makes an explosion impossible.
I'm guessing the force of the decompression just ripped the whole thing to pieces?
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
And, if you don't like the boss, or the terms that he's offering, you can look for better employment elsewhere. Or seek to negotiate better terms. Or and your colleagues can band together in seeking better terms and conditions. Workers are not bound to their employers like chattel slaves. I've been an employee. It's not as you describe.
You can swap one boss out for another boss - one dictator for another. Woop de doo.
I am an employee right now. I can talk to my line manager, and she to hers, and up all the way to the top. But really, what I want or am interested in doesn't matter - the boss decides. And yes, unions are good things - they are one means by which workers can democratically enforce their collective will against the tyranny of the boss. Another good way to do that would be to get rid of the tyranny of the boss altogether and let workers decide everything democratically.
Although the "cyclists need insurance" brigade do have a point. Liability insurance for cyclists is quite sensible.
Adult cyclists who cycle on pavements, which is unlawful, with a "get out of my way, pedestrian scum" attitude, being too wimpy and scared to ride on the roads, need bans slapped on them by magistrates. (It would only take a few Cambridge fellows to feel the long arm of the law for the others to feel "encouraged".)
Guidance from the Police Chief's Association accepts that adults cycling on pavements is OK, when the road is too dangerous, and it is done considerately - as in the vast majority of cases. Guidance was issued in 1999 by the Home Secretary when it became an "offence", and reaffirmed in 2014. The recent case of the manslaughter of the elderly cyclist demonstrates the need, until such time as we have safe facilities everywhere:
The "cyclists need insurance" brigade have no point whatsoever, except in their own sawdust-filled heads.
Lability insurance for people riding bikes usually comes for free with a home contents policy. Some of us have extra insurance via memberships or specialist policies. I have that because I know many motorist vehicle drivers will lie to the police and then lie to the court, and I will need ferocious lawyers should the worst happen, potentially for a civil claim.
These insurance companies include liability insurance in their Home Contents policies:
Apologies for introducing evidence to the debate.
Normally placid people go absolutely bonkers when it comes to cyclists. It's utterly barmy and baffling.
It's jealously. Motorists see my calf muscles go momentarily insane.
I had a shout-off with some driver in a huge fuck off (but white) Jeep Cherokee this morning. I just think many drivers resent the freedom of movement of cyclists. They don't like cyclists filtering either which I think is part of this.
Unless its a London thing, I think cyclists overestimate how much drivers dislike them. Some drivers are just douchebags, some cyclists are just douchebags, and I'm more likely to get into an argument with another driver than a cyclist.
This morning I had a shout-off (or exchange of banged horns) after I indicated to show I was pulling into the right hand lane, the driver behind in the right hand-lane saw my indicator and took that as a dare to close the gap instead of letting me in, and I pulled in safely anyway. Day before I shouted at another road user to use their indicator after they went around a roundabout in a dangerous manner without using their indicator.
Before that I hadn't been annoyed with any other road use in months and its an extremely long time since a cyclist has pissed me off (red light as almost always).
Sometimes people just don't like other road users for how they're acting. Whether that be people who ride through red lights, or people who don't use their indicator or those who take the indicator as a challenge, its not about cyclist or driver per se.
It's a numbers game, really. As a cyclist you spend a lot of time being overtaken by cars for obvious reasons. So 99 go past perfectly normally and 1 idiot comes too close or shouts at you just for being there, and that's the one you remember. It's easy to feel like everyone hates you because that's just how memory works.
This applies to lots of other situations too, of course. The memorability of extreme examples the main engine of all polarisation.
I'm just back from a cycling holiday and we only had one bad pass the whole time out of hundreds. We were on a Sustrans route and we even had drivers stopping and asking us how we were getting on, telling us about good pubs etc.
That one pass nearly killed us though, so it does stick in the mind.
There's quite an amusing and slightly blunt Irish camera cyclist called RighttoBikeIt who has his rear facing camera showing his "equipment" and his quadriceps, which probably does make people jealous.
At present there is little alternative much of the time other than to cycle on the roads, as there are few safe mobility (used to be called cycle-) tracks, and the entire public footpath, bridleway and cycleway network is littered with tens of thousands (literally) of illegal (under Equality Act 2010) anti-access barriers pandering to the myth that they keep 'motobikes' out, which ban disabled and many elderly people from much of the countryside.
This is one just built project (just finished by Plymouth Council) which excludes people in wheelchairs and elderly people in mobility scooters from a "strategic walking and cycling route", which is illegal. They considered a ramp, but wanted to save money.
I've seen that on Twitter, and I'd like to see a little more detail on where it is, and what sort of path it is. It *may* be a reasonable compromise; it may not.
Leaving the steps aside, what sort of speed should cyclists be going down that path, if it is shared? 5 MPH max?
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
Most communist systems directed labour towards the needs of the system, not the needs of people.
And "people" here also presumably excludes the sort of people who want to invest to make a bob or two. Or indeed just be left to their own devices and do unproductive but enjoyable things like bumming around the world, whether as billionaires or on a shoe string. Materialistic approaches to labour on both left and right simply suck the joy out of existence.
And capitalist systems direct labour towards of the needs of capital, not the people.
I have no issue with people doing unproductive things, whereas capitalism sure hates the ideas of workers having more free time, or working from home or having more freedom at all not increasing production for the hopes of infinite growth.
This is a variation of the kind of absolutism that says Britain still hasn't properly left the EU.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Where are they from - what region, appellation, year etc.?
A variety. Some grand crus. Some pricey Australians. Some supertuscans etc
Here’s one. Worth about £100 apparently. Five times what I paid (ages ago)
Advice seems to be:drink now if you haven’t already
2005 = fantastic year for Bordeaux. That'll be ideal now. Very nice.
There is a minimum voting age. Should there be a maximum voting age?
Yes. Minimum should be 16, maximum should be 15.
I don't think there should be a minimum or maximum voting age, as long as you can cast your own vote. I don't think people with dementia lose the right to vote, and many of them have less capability or understanding of the world than some 7 year olds. Considering that often the majority of the voting eligible population chose not to vote anyway, I don't see the issue with allowing the kind of annoying teenager that I would have been (who read newspapers, and followed politics, etc etc) a vote as well. It would actually make politicians have to care about the needs of children without that going through the prism of the desires of parents.
In all seriousness, I don't agree with maximum voting ages. I hope my glib and absurd answer wasn't taken seriously.
Testing suitability for maturity is fraught with difficulties. Who sets the test?
I'd make it a flat 16 years old for all legal residents. That includes foreign born and prisoners too.
I would agree with that if we also lowered the age of consent, smoking, drinking, driving, serving on the front line, signing contracts and jury service. If we consider a 16 year old mature enough to decide on the future of the country then they are also old enough to do all those other things as well.
Disagree about foreign born unless they commit to the country by taking citizenship. And prisoners are still, in some element of our judicial system, being punished. Preventing them from voting seems a reasonable part of that.
I would withdraw the vote from anyone who has lived outside the country for more than 5 years and also from commonwealth citizens and Irish. They are foreign nationals.
For a referendum that affects the long-term future (Brexit, Sindy, PR etc.) everybody should get n votes each where n = average life expectancy minus their age, those over the current life expectancy (81 years) get no votes. Thus as a 62 year old I would get 19 votes whereas an 18 year old would 63 votes.
This to reflect the longer time they will have to live with the consequences.
Such a system would have saved us from Brexit of course, and Scotland would now be independent.
Do smokers get fewer votes? If I show I’ve got a low blood pressure for my age, can I get some extra votes?
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
The present suggests that capitalism is going to destroy the world, because profit comes before people and externalities don't matter.
The Aral sea has joined the chat. Oh and Chernobyl, and the Nickel towns of Siberia etc etc.
(Apologies PBers, "has joined the chat" should probably be on the banned list).
I'm not a Stalinist - that's bad too, it replaces the tyranny of the boss with the tyranny of the party. Hence why, when asked, I have said I am probably an anarcho communist, and like the idea of anarchic democratic confederalism over capitalism.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
I have a similarly nice problem with 4 remaining bottles of 1963 port.
My advice is drink them soonish. Just think how pissed off you will be if you pop your clogs before enjoying them!
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
Most communist systems directed labour towards the needs of the system, not the needs of people.
And "people" here also presumably excludes the sort of people who want to invest to make a bob or two. Or indeed just be left to their own devices and do unproductive but enjoyable things like bumming around the world, whether as billionaires or on a shoe string. Materialistic approaches to labour on both left and right simply suck the joy out of existence.
And capitalist systems direct labour towards of the needs of capital, not the people.
I have no issue with people doing unproductive things, whereas capitalism sure hates the ideas of workers having more free time, or working from home or having more freedom at all not increasing production for the hopes of infinite growth.
What is the fate of businesses under capitalism that make products people don't want to buy?
Yes I did this in America recently on a long drive. I was terrifyingly tired, losing control of the car, realised this was utterly insane. So I pulled over, laid down the seat, slept for about 6 minutes, and I was perfectly fine thereafter. Quite odd
An erstwhile colleague of mine once told me that your brain switches sides every few hours. If you are concentrating hard on something, the switch can't happen which is bad. Stopping for a few minutes allows the switch.
I have no idea where he got this theory or if it is true, but empirically it seems to fit the observations.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Where are they from - what region, appellation, year etc.?
A variety. Some grand crus. Some pricey Australians. Some supertuscans etc
Here’s one. Worth about £100 apparently. Five times what I paid (ages ago)
Advice seems to be:drink now if you haven’t already
2005 = fantastic year for Bordeaux. That'll be ideal now. Very nice.
PS if I want to buy some wines now around £20-£30 that could be worth 3-5 times that in 10-15 years what should I buy?
There is a minimum voting age. Should there be a maximum voting age?
Yes. Minimum should be 16, maximum should be 15.
I don't think there should be a minimum or maximum voting age, as long as you can cast your own vote. I don't think people with dementia lose the right to vote, and many of them have less capability or understanding of the world than some 7 year olds. Considering that often the majority of the voting eligible population chose not to vote anyway, I don't see the issue with allowing the kind of annoying teenager that I would have been (who read newspapers, and followed politics, etc etc) a vote as well. It would actually make politicians have to care about the needs of children without that going through the prism of the desires of parents.
In all seriousness, I don't agree with maximum voting ages. I hope my glib and absurd answer wasn't taken seriously.
Testing suitability for maturity is fraught with difficulties. Who sets the test?
I'd make it a flat 16 years old for all legal residents. That includes foreign born and prisoners too.
I would agree with that if we also lowered the age of consent, smoking, drinking, driving, serving on the front line, signing contracts and jury service. If we consider a 16 year old mature enough to decide on the future of the country then they are also old enough to do all those other things as well.
Disagree about foreign born unless they commit to the country by taking citizenship. And prisoners are still, in some element of our judicial system, being punished. Preventing them from voting seems a reasonable part of that.
I would withdraw the vote from anyone who has lived outside the country for more than 5 years and also from commonwealth citizens and Irish. They are foreign nationals.
For a referendum that affects the long-term future (Brexit, Sindy, PR etc.) everybody should get n votes each where n = average life expectancy minus their age, those over the current life expectancy (81 years) get no votes. Thus as a 62 year old I would get 19 votes whereas an 18 year old would 63 votes.
This to reflect the longer time they will have to live with the consequences.
Such a system would have saved us from Brexit of course, and Scotland would now be independent.
Do smokers get fewer votes? If I show I’ve got a low blood pressure for my age, can I get some extra votes?
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Where are they from - what region, appellation, year etc.?
A variety. Some grand crus. Some pricey Australians. Some supertuscans etc
Here’s one. Worth about £100 apparently. Five times what I paid (ages ago)
Advice seems to be:drink now if you haven’t already
2005 = fantastic year for Bordeaux. That'll be ideal now. Very nice.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
And, if you don't like the boss, or the terms that he's offering, you can look for better employment elsewhere. Or seek to negotiate better terms. Or and your colleagues can band together in seeking better terms and conditions. Workers are not bound to their employers like chattel slaves. I've been an employee. It's not as you describe.
You can swap one boss out for another boss - one dictator for another. Woop de doo.
I am an employee right now. I can talk to my line manager, and she to hers, and up all the way to the top. But really, what I want or am interested in doesn't matter - the boss decides. And yes, unions are good things - they are one means by which workers can democratically enforce their collective will against the tyranny of the boss. Another good way to do that would be to get rid of the tyranny of the boss altogether and let workers decide everything democratically.
You can go work for John Lewis or the Co-op. My employer, a university, has an academic council, so a form of worker democracy. We could encourage more of these without going full anarcho-syndicalist. Germany mandates worker representation in decision-making: let’s do that.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
The present suggests that capitalism is going to destroy the world, because profit comes before people and externalities don't matter.
The Aral sea has joined the chat. Oh and Chernobyl, and the Nickel towns of Siberia etc etc.
(Apologies PBers, "has joined the chat" should probably be on the banned list).
I'm not a Stalinist - that's bad too, it replaces the tyranny of the boss with the tyranny of the party. Hence why, when asked, I have said I am probably an anarcho communist, and like the idea of anarchic democratic confederalism over capitalism.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
The fact they are at or passing their peak means that no matter what you do you will not have £300 wine in your flat for much longer. Drink the buggers as was meant for them and enjoy that fleeting delight.
On a related topic, the mystery of why people (I suspect a some PBers are like this) have loads of books on their shelves they haven't read is solved by reflecting on the thought that this is for the same reason that you don't mind having hundreds of bottles of wine in the cellar that you haven't drunk.
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I have a short nap (15 mins) after lunch whenever I have the chance. I always wake up much more refreshed and ready to go again.
Winston Churchill swore by naps, of course
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
Shoes off, trousers off and proper go to bed, with alarm set: "OK Google, wake me up in 15 minutes". It works wonders for me, but can obviously only do when at home.
The most remarkable naps are the 3-4 minute reboot jobs I sometimes need to carry out while driving in late afternoon (4-5pm is the witching hour for me). Driving along, starting to feel the eyelids droop, worrying about veering into the hard shoulder and killing all the passengers. Pull into a motorway services car park, close eyes and boom, 3 minutes later the fatigue is gone and I'm alert as ever.
Happened to me once on a hot day after lunch driving back with family aboard. Bloody frightening
I get this on driving holidays about 30 mins after a hotel breakfast. After a close call, I have sworn off substantial breakfasts on these trips.
. . . meanwhile back at the ranch . . . in race for Dumbest SCOTUS Justice, Samuel Alito edging out Clarence Thomas . . .
Politico.com - Samuel Alito and the Donald Trump School of Self-Immolation The justice’s defense against charges of unethical behavior only proved how clueless he is about public relations.
I've been trying to get my head around the strength of the physical forces that would have acted on the sub, water coming in fast enough to cut you in half, or just simply 'explode', which it obviously can't do because of the pressure involved on the sub makes an explosion impossible.
I'm guessing the force of the decompression just ripped the whole thing to pieces?
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I have a short nap (15 mins) after lunch whenever I have the chance. I always wake up much more refreshed and ready to go again.
Winston Churchill swore by naps, of course
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
Shoes off, trousers off and proper go to bed, with alarm set: "OK Google, wake me up in 15 minutes". It works wonders for me, but can obviously only do when at home.
The most remarkable naps are the 3-4 minute reboot jobs I sometimes need to carry out while driving in late afternoon (4-5pm is the witching hour for me). Driving along, starting to feel the eyelids droop, worrying about veering into the hard shoulder and killing all the passengers. Pull into a motorway services car park, close eyes and boom, 3 minutes later the fatigue is gone and I'm alert as ever.
Yes I did this in America recently on a long drive. I was terrifyingly tired, losing control of the car, realised this was utterly insane. So I pulled over, laid down the seat, slept for about 6 minutes, and I was perfectly fine thereafter. Quite odd
I usually just chuck a load of sugar in. Works better than coffee.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
I have a similarly nice problem with 4 remaining bottles of 1963 port.
My advice is drink them soonish. Just think how pissed off you will be if you pop your clogs before enjoying them!
I have a small amount left in a bottle of 50 year old Glen Grant whisky which is now over £2K a bottle, but I have enjoyed a tipple of it every now and again.
There is a minimum voting age. Should there be a maximum voting age?
Yes. Minimum should be 16, maximum should be 15.
I don't think there should be a minimum or maximum voting age, as long as you can cast your own vote. I don't think people with dementia lose the right to vote, and many of them have less capability or understanding of the world than some 7 year olds. Considering that often the majority of the voting eligible population chose not to vote anyway, I don't see the issue with allowing the kind of annoying teenager that I would have been (who read newspapers, and followed politics, etc etc) a vote as well. It would actually make politicians have to care about the needs of children without that going through the prism of the desires of parents.
In all seriousness, I don't agree with maximum voting ages. I hope my glib and absurd answer wasn't taken seriously.
Testing suitability for maturity is fraught with difficulties. Who sets the test?
I'd make it a flat 16 years old for all legal residents. That includes foreign born and prisoners too.
I would agree with that if we also lowered the age of consent, smoking, drinking, driving, serving on the front line, signing contracts and jury service. If we consider a 16 year old mature enough to decide on the future of the country then they are also old enough to do all those other things as well.
Disagree about foreign born unless they commit to the country by taking citizenship. And prisoners are still, in some element of our judicial system, being punished. Preventing them from voting seems a reasonable part of that.
I would withdraw the vote from anyone who has lived outside the country for more than 5 years and also from commonwealth citizens and Irish. They are foreign nationals.
For a referendum that affects the long-term future (Brexit, Sindy, PR etc.) everybody should get n votes each where n = average life expectancy minus their age, those over the current life expectancy (81 years) get no votes. Thus as a 62 year old I would get 19 votes whereas an 18 year old would 63 votes.
This to reflect the longer time they will have to live with the consequences.
Such a system would have saved us from Brexit of course, and Scotland would now be independent.
Do smokers get fewer votes? If I show I’ve got a low blood pressure for my age, can I get some extra votes?
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
Around 1,000 people in the UK died from Covid on its own, the rest died "with Covid".
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
The problem is: who determines the needs of people? History suggests that top-down systems for determining the needs of people often lead to tyranny. The “needs of the people” becomes the excuse for many atrocities.
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
I have literally answered this question already when someone else asked it. A form of anarcho-democratic confederalism works for me.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
History suggests that forms of anarcho-democratic confederalism, and the like, rarely last long and soon collapse into dictatorship. Rojava is certainly no utopia, with lots of concerns over human rights.
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
If you work in a factory under capitalism, you work under the dictatorship of the boss. What are paid is determined by the boss, what you make is determined by the boss, and the boss reaps the rewards of profits. The self interest is that of the boss - not the worker.
And, if you don't like the boss, or the terms that he's offering, you can look for better employment elsewhere. Or seek to negotiate better terms. Or and your colleagues can band together in seeking better terms and conditions. Workers are not bound to their employers like chattel slaves. I've been an employee. It's not as you describe.
You can swap one boss out for another boss - one dictator for another. Woop de doo.
I am an employee right now. I can talk to my line manager, and she to hers, and up all the way to the top. But really, what I want or am interested in doesn't matter - the boss decides. And yes, unions are good things - they are one means by which workers can democratically enforce their collective will against the tyranny of the boss. Another good way to do that would be to get rid of the tyranny of the boss altogether and let workers decide everything democratically.
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
Where are they from - what region, appellation, year etc.?
A variety. Some grand crus. Some pricey Australians. Some supertuscans etc
Here’s one. Worth about £100 apparently. Five times what I paid (ages ago)
Advice seems to be:drink now if you haven’t already
2005 = fantastic year for Bordeaux. That'll be ideal now. Very nice.
PS if I want to buy some wines now around £20-£30 that could be worth 3-5 times that in 10-15 years what should I buy?
The 2022 clarets. Supposed to be as good as 1947. Which was good. Extremely good.
THIS is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal AND the New York Times, all info released by officials of the Biden admin
"That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious.
"Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis."
I have a short nap (15 mins) after lunch whenever I have the chance. I always wake up much more refreshed and ready to go again.
Winston Churchill swore by naps, of course
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
Shoes off, trousers off and proper go to bed, with alarm set: "OK Google, wake me up in 15 minutes". It works wonders for me, but can obviously only do when at home.
The most remarkable naps are the 3-4 minute reboot jobs I sometimes need to carry out while driving in late afternoon (4-5pm is the witching hour for me). Driving along, starting to feel the eyelids droop, worrying about veering into the hard shoulder and killing all the passengers. Pull into a motorway services car park, close eyes and boom, 3 minutes later the fatigue is gone and I'm alert as ever.
Snap. Used to do this regularly when I was driving long distances for work. Always better to take a 10 minute nap than to try to press on through the tiredness imo.
I am ready for a fight. I genuinely hate the people who have been so protected whilst we get fucked.
Put our lives on hold. Fucked.
We should have all refused to lock down, it was a complete waste of time for us. The people protected will be dead soon, we've got years of this shit to come.
I am so, so angry. I have no confidence Labour will sort it out - but the priority is getting Little Rishi and his bunch of fucktards out.
Labour rarely sorts anything out.
But joking aside, the younger generation do have legitimate complaint, though in my experience it is a little simplistic to make demographic divisions. There are plenty of entitled oldies and entitled youngers. There are plenty of whinging oldies and whinging youngsters. There are also those that work bloody hard, don't blame others and become a success in life however that looks, because they seize the day and look for the bright spots rather than the dark.
There are plenty of reasons why we (particularly those in UK) should all be very grateful for the times we live in, despite Brexit, incoming Labour governments, Putin etc. Let us be grateful we were not born in Mariupol.
You make a good point but I was addressing the overwhelming feeling we get from the media and so on who amplify it. I recall the week we spent discussing avocado on toast.
I am not saying all elderly people are bad - but a large minority give the rest a bad name. And for them I am afraid I regret putting my life on hold.
It wasn't just older people that were killed by Covid. Yes they were disproportionately effected. The lockdowns were not designed to save the elderly, they were designed to save our healthcare system. Funnily enough, the one system in Europe that is closest to our mad NHS system had no lockdown at all (Sweden). It will be interesting to reflect on which government got it right.
Lockdown was pretty shit. But if you want to focus on the bright side by contrasting with the darkest, imagine what it must be like for those people in Ukraine at the moment, or even the parents of Russian soldiers. They really have had a lot to complain about.
It's not just lockdown, it is the aftermath. Young people had their lives put on hold because it was the right thing to do yet we are basically now fending for ourselves.
Rishi says he wants to help, has literally anything he's done been aimed at anyone under the age of 90?
I would say that the negatives for young people would have happened covid or not - capitalism wants to extract more value from it's workers to create growth, the easiest way to do that is to pay workers less relative to the value they create, or lay them off completely. Covid exacerbated and highlighted some of these worst things, but if it wasn't covid it would be climate change, or inflation, or whatever other shock to the system would come about and mean government would shit on the young and workers.
What would you replace capitalism with?
Personally - I like the model of grass roots democracy model that is currently happening in Rojava. Like I said further down, I would probably call myself an anarcho communist - I don't really like the existence of states and I think equitable distribution of resources based on need is good.
Capitalism is just "those with capital dictate how markets work" - you can try and make other claims, but it boils down to that. If we want to get into a deeper materialist analysis, about the relationship between value, wealth and labour, we can - but at the end of the day capital accrues to capital, and the more capital you have the more power you have.
"based on need" is the problem here. How do you measure need? Especially without a state, but even with a state... how?
Strongmen emerge and decide.
That's how capitalism works, no? Rich people choose what to produce, because it will provide them profit, rich people choose how to sell it, because it will provide them with profit, and rich people will reap the benefits - because they get the profits. Elon Musk is a strongman - is his company a democracy, do his workers get a say on what they build, or who their boss is, or what they're paid? Is Jeff Bezos not a strongman - directing union busters and strike breakers? How is need "measured" in capitalism? It's distorted by advertising and fomo and the fetishization of products. The idea of the "free market" being purely the acts of "rational consumers" reacting to "rational producers" is obviously false - if it were true advertising and marketing would just be fact based pamphlets telling you the pros and cons of each product.
I don't think capitalism is perfect.
I do think anarchic-democracy and communistic models seem to end up much much worse, and place theory above human nature, cloaked in pseudo-utopian verbiage.
Well, capitalism is literally destroying the globe in the name of profit - I don't know how much worse we can get, but sure.
So in your alternative, there would be less production, i.e. more scarcity?
Less production, sure; but more scarcity? No. A more equitable distribution of resources. Considering that there is enough food to feed everyone globally (and we don’t) and have enough resources to house everyone (and we don’t) and that like 50% of the global wealth is held by 1% of the global population, and 50% of the global population have 1% of the global wealth - capitalism creates a lot of poverty and scarcity.
You're confusing yourself with abstractions. The 1% are not eating 50% of the food or living in 50% of the housing.
But the value - the labour - exists. If people can build a luxury yacht, a thing that need not exist, they can do other labour that is beneficial. If people can work at hedge funds, they can (and should be forced to) work in the fields and pick food.
Wealth is the product of labour. We have lots of labour being used for antisocial ends. Humanity could choose to direct that labour towards social ends, and decide to distribute the outputs of that labour more equitably.
That sounds rather like Pol Pot's Cambodia or Mao's China.
I mean, the snide making hedge fund managers do farming aside, what’s the issue? A materialist approach to labour? You’re saying that it’s Maoism or Pol Potism to recognise that wealth is labour and that under capitalism it is directed to the desires of capital and not actually the needs of people?
Most communist systems directed labour towards the needs of the system, not the needs of people.
And "people" here also presumably excludes the sort of people who want to invest to make a bob or two. Or indeed just be left to their own devices and do unproductive but enjoyable things like bumming around the world, whether as billionaires or on a shoe string. Materialistic approaches to labour on both left and right simply suck the joy out of existence.
And capitalist systems direct labour towards of the needs of capital, not the people.
I have no issue with people doing unproductive things, whereas capitalism sure hates the ideas of workers having more free time, or working from home or having more freedom at all not increasing production for the hopes of infinite growth.
This is a variation of the kind of absolutism that says Britain still hasn't properly left the EU.
It's so interesting seeing people identify other people having ideology, which I admit I have, and yet treat their ideology like it isn't one.
I want joy in existence, I want freedom, I want people to live lives where their basic needs are met and luxury needs are met - I'm in favour of bread and roses, bread and roses. Capitalism isn't giving us that, and increasingly is taking the gains the average person has made away to give to the rich, whilst also destroying the world in the process. If me preferring a radically different system with the aim of not doing that makes me an absolutist - I guess that's what I am.
I get weirdly tired about 3 hours after I wake up. Does anyone else? Doesn’t matter when. If I wake at 7 I have a bout of yawning at 10am. If I wake at 9 I am yawning at noon. For about ten minutes
Same if I wake unexpectedly in the night. Say at 2am. I will reliably fall asleep again at 5am. I don’t try to push it, I accept it
Does anyone else have a similar biorhythm?
(This is my attempt to interrupt and divert the tedious bickering)
Ever checked your blood sugar at those times? Might be a low blood sugar effect.
No because it doesn’t really bother me. The tiredness only lasts about 10 minutes. I yawn a fair bit, have a coffee, then I’m fine
In fact it’s quite handy. If I properly wake in the night I know it’s pointless to try and fight my way back to sleep. I just read for 3 hours (or whatever). Then zzz
Just some rhythm in my metabolism, I guess
I'd suggest a diabetes check.
Nah, I’ve been like this for 30 years it doesn’t concern me. And I can be quite hypochondriac
Get checked anyway. You're the right age and weight for type 2 and your diet is shit.
I thought he was skinny, when did he pack the weight on
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
I have a similarly nice problem with 4 remaining bottles of 1963 port.
My advice is drink them soonish. Just think how pissed off you will be if you pop your clogs before enjoying them!
I have a small amount left in a bottle of 50 year old Glen Grant whisky which is now over £2K a bottle, but I have enjoyed a tipple of it every now and again.
In Cincinnati the other day we visited a guy who specialises in super-rare liquors, mainly American bourbon but some scotch, gin, cognac etc
He showed us a bottle worth $30,000. About 40 years old I think. Maybe more. Some Americans will pay insane prices for hard-to-get whiskey
He allowed us a sniff (nothing special) and no more. He DID give us a small glass each of some bourbon worth about $3k a bottle. Again, nothing special. I didn't tell him I simply don't like bourbon. Too sweet
PS I just checked. It was this bourbon. He wasn't lying. $30k
4. Old Rip Van Winkle ‘Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve’ 17 Year Old Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Kentucky, USA
Comments
If the questions are, were the restrictions in place too long, were they (mostly) too strict, were we too slow to react to new information from abroad, and was there insufficient risk segmentation?
Then the answers are probably, yes,yes,yes,yes.
But that doesn't mean that Covid wasn't a major killer.
Leaving the steps aside, what sort of speed should cyclists be going down that path, if it is shared? 5 MPH max?
I refuse to stop
You can do what you like
When getting funding etc for such things, what is the assessment process by which the requirement to be accessible can be removed/not apply?
I've noticed more and more online ads are using computer-generated voices to do the voice-over. Anyone know why?
Capitalism puts decision making more in the hands of individuals. That tends to work better. Untempered capitalism soon sees the power accumulate in bad ways, but capitalism with a degree of redistribution and the rule of law within a liberal democracy seems to work pretty well in the long run compared to most alternatives.
In addition, the CTBTO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparatory_Commission_for_the_Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty_Organization) runs seismic monitoring stations around the world. Some of their sensors picked up the implosion of the San Juan (Argentine submarine lost at sea).
I just discovered that a few bottles of wine - say two dozen - that I bought many years ago for £20 or so, are now worth £100-£300 each
That’s deeply pleasing. However Vivino says these wines are now peaking or indeed past their peak. So I need to drink them all quite quickly or they will slowly turn to vinegar
So I will have the pleasure of drinking these fine wines but then, after that, I won’t have the pleasure of knowing I have got some wines worth £100-£300 sitting in the dark in my flat. And the latter pleasure is no small thing
So if it is an official footpath, accessibility isn't much of an issue - as long as you can walk along it.
AIUI, IANAE etc.
Also - capitalism is top down - it creates monopolies. Who decides need now? “The market”? The market is just the desires of capital owners who act only in self interest chasing profit.
Do you have a day bed or do you do the full go-to-bed thing?
I do the full Monty
And "people" here also presumably excludes the sort of people who want to invest to make a bob or two. Or indeed just be left to their own devices and do unproductive but enjoyable things like bumming around the world, whether as billionaires or on a shoe string. Materialistic approaches to labour on both left and right simply suck the joy out of existence.
UGH final op is Jones . Thomas writes (6-3) that even if an intervening federal case shows *you were convicted of something that isn't a crime* OR *were sentenced to more time than the law allows* you CANNOT file a federal habeas petition.
https://twitter.com/LeahLitman/status/1671885660540788739
https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/saltram-meadow-colesdown-hill
The Council considered a ramp, and rejected in favour of a staircase for cost reasons. It's partly an artefact of short term Govt funding packages.
But it is still in violation of the Equality Act 2010, which speaks of their priorities being wrong. With that staircase, it should not have been approved by the Govt funding body.
It is identified as an important cycling route, so discriminating against all sorts of users (parents with kids in a trailer or a tagalong, disabled cyclists on trikes, people on mobility scooters) is completely unacceptable. The first person who is discriminated against under EA 2010 can sue them as provided for in the act, receive compensation, and obtain an injunction making them change it.
It is in Plymstock.
Appropriate speed depends on conditions, how busy it is, and sightlines - amongst other things.
If it has peds, then 10mph and 4-5 mph when close. If empty or long gaps between peds with clear visibility, a higher speed would be fine.
1) cheaper than hiring voice actors.
2) The ability to tailor ads more narrowly. This may not be a thing atm, but it will be going forward.
Incidentally, I love the really poorly-dubbed ads we occasionally see on TV. Ones where the lip sync means it's obvious the actor is actually speaking a different language.
Would you. Care. For some teeea?
I do not support unexpurgated capitalism. It needs regulation and democratic infrastructure. However, people acting in their self-interest has its up sides. People know what their self-interests actually are, so who better to act in them? Better people act in their own self-interests than the system deciding what their interests are for them.
Not sure on conditions wrt disability discrimination. It's coming up the agenda, though, and there are *some* legal teeth available - though quite a bit of effort.
*) There is a road right at the bottom of those steps. Having people bombing down straight into a road is not necessarily a good idea.
*) The site *appears* to be quite limited for space, with gardens and houses on either side. Is there space for a reasonable ramp, given the required fall?
It also allows for a lot of variations, which are especially useful in advertising.
Here’s one. Worth about £100 apparently. Five times what I paid (ages ago)
Advice seems to be:drink now if you haven’t
already
A debris field has been discovered within the search area by an ROV near the Titanic, the US Coast Guard has just announced.
Experts within the unified command are evaluating the information
The present suggests that capitalism is going to destroy the world, because profit comes before people and externalities don't matter.
1) accessibility is a good thing
2) but short of dynamiting large sections of the Cornish coast, the path could never be made fully accessible.
3) public funding of the path seems to be a Good Thing, to me.
Squaring this circle etc…
The money you make in your job, you get to decide how to spend that.
I have no issue with people doing unproductive things, whereas capitalism sure hates the ideas of workers having more free time, or working from home or having more freedom at all not increasing production for the hopes of infinite growth.
This to reflect the longer time they will have to live with the consequences.
Such a system would have saved us from Brexit of course, and Scotland would now be independent.
(Apologies PBers, "has joined the chat" should probably be on the banned list).
I'm guessing the force of the decompression just ripped the whole thing to pieces?
I am an employee right now. I can talk to my line manager, and she to hers, and up all the way to the top. But really, what I want or am interested in doesn't matter - the boss decides. And yes, unions are good things - they are one means by which workers can democratically enforce their collective will against the tyranny of the boss. Another good way to do that would be to get rid of the tyranny of the boss altogether and let workers decide everything democratically.
I shall find a suitable moment to celebrate. Ta
My advice is drink them soonish. Just think how pissed off you will be if you pop your clogs before enjoying them!
I have no idea where he got this theory or if it is true, but empirically it seems to fit the observations.
Politico.com - Samuel Alito and the Donald Trump School of Self-Immolation
The justice’s defense against charges of unethical behavior only proved how clueless he is about public relations.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/21/alito-donald-trump-scotus-00103021
No surprises who's top of the pile.
https://www.farrvintners.com/en_primeur/winelist.php
Or call Harry Palmer there for the best deals (it was such a good year everyone has jacked up their prices) and he will sort you out.
I want joy in existence, I want freedom, I want people to live lives where their basic needs are met and luxury needs are met - I'm in favour of bread and roses, bread and roses. Capitalism isn't giving us that, and increasingly is taking the gains the average person has made away to give to the rich, whilst also destroying the world in the process. If me preferring a radically different system with the aim of not doing that makes me an absolutist - I guess that's what I am.
He showed us a bottle worth $30,000. About 40 years old I think. Maybe more. Some Americans will pay insane prices for hard-to-get whiskey
He allowed us a sniff (nothing special) and no more. He DID give us a small glass each of some bourbon worth about $3k a bottle. Again, nothing special. I didn't tell him I simply don't like bourbon. Too sweet
PS I just checked. It was this bourbon. He wasn't lying. $30k
4. Old Rip Van Winkle ‘Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve’ 17 Year Old Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Kentucky, USA
https://vinepair.com/booze-news/25-most-expensive-bourbons/