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
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
Frog build. Skinny arms and legs but with a tummy. It's the visceral fat in your torso that messes you up, not the subcutaneous fat.
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?
Implosion, not explosion.
If something happened 2/3rds of the way down to the Titanic, then a phenomenon described as “dieseling” probably occurred. Think being inside the cylinder of a diesel engine on the compression part of the cycle.
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.
Calgon, with the Robert Webb lookalike. A favourite!
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.
Younger people have more elections ahead of them than older people. So, they get to change policies if they don't like 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?
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.
Sounds like you want to live in Russia.
I mean, modern Russia is a capitalist country and the boss dictator is just the same as the literal dictator. If you mean the USSR - as I said below - I also am not a Stalinist. How many times do I have to use the words that describe my beliefs to the best of the ability of labels and have people just come back and go "lol, sounds like you want only the negatives of what I understand the USSR was and believe is the entirety of the USSR". I'm not a defender of the USSR, by any means, but if people are all here like "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's better than past systems" than I think it would be pretty reasonable to say that the USSR wasn't perfect, was probably a net bad, but also was much better than the Tsar and feudalism.
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?
Compression not decompression, implosion not explosion. It will crumple inwards, like an empty plastic bottle you suck the air out of.
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.
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
I went on a tutored Japanese Whisky tasting at Map Maison in Haggerston a few weeks ago. Absolutely fascinating. Recommended.
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.
What juvenile bullshit.
Good employers respect and value their employees and recognise they are not interchangeable commodities.
Bad employers tend to lose good employees and have a team of bad employees which is bad for business.
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
Comes to a point it is just silly. One I have is very nice but no way would I part with anything like 2K for a bottle. My wife paid low hundreds for it for my 50th birthday. Personally once you get near 3 figures unless you are not going to get much better and even then no guarantee you will like it better than some cheaper stuff.
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
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.
If you want 8 billion people to live in luxury then purely in material terms, you would need to ramp up the level of industrialisation beyond what exists today, so you can't use "capitalism is destroying the planet" as an argument.
I went into one of the Whisky Shops a few years ago and, as I was going to the 40th birthday party of a friend of mine I thought it would be nice to get him a 40-yr old scotch. Well, said the guy, the 40yr olds start at around £800 and go up from there.
I ended up getting him one 20-yr old bottle, one 12-yr old and one 8-yr old.
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.
What juvenile bullshit.
Good employers respect and value their employees and recognise they are not interchangeable commodities.
Bad employers tend to lose good employees and have a team of bad employees which is bad for business.
As an employment lawyer I’ve been exposed to all varieties of employer. I tend to 148’s view - with reservations.
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.
Sounds like you want to live in Russia.
I mean, modern Russia is a capitalist country and the boss dictator is just the same as the literal dictator. If you mean the USSR - as I said below - I also am not a Stalinist. How many times do I have to use the words that describe my beliefs to the best of the ability of labels and have people just come back and go "lol, sounds like you want only the negatives of what I understand the USSR was and believe is the entirety of the USSR". I'm not a defender of the USSR, by any means, but if people are all here like "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's better than past systems" than I think it would be pretty reasonable to say that the USSR wasn't perfect, was probably a net bad, but also was much better than the Tsar and feudalism.
Hard to know what would be best, for sure humans will not be fair, there are too many grasping greedy barstewards who will roll over nice people. Your ideal is nice but would never happen in reality due to the amount of scumbags about.
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?
Compression not decompression, implosion not explosion. It will crumple inwards, like an empty plastic bottle you suck the air out of.
I imagine that whatever happened, happened pretty quickly and they wouldn't have known much about 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
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
Frog build. Skinny arms and legs but with a tummy. It's the visceral fat in your torso that messes you up, not the subcutaneous fat.
1. My diet is not shit. It is notably healthy. Red meat about once a week. Tons of fish and greens
2. Not frog type. Rugby playing type. Stocky, quite thick legs, barrel chested. Was a hooker at school
3. I do drink RIDIC amounts of booze, which isn't good at all
4. But I also exercise a lot, rarely get ill, and my Dad died at 88 and my Mum is still going at 86 (just about)
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.
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.
If you're quick, the Wine Society's Château Mouton Rothschild 2022 en primeur offer will close at midday tomorrow, Friday 23rd June 2023.
Mind you at £1,554 per case of 3 in-bond, it might not be quite what you had in mind.
All EP wines are sold at exactly the same price by every merchant so there's no "offer". That said if you do want the Mouton you'd better get your skates on as it will likely sell out from everywhere. That's why I use Farr's; they always get good allocations.
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?
Compression not decompression, implosion not explosion. It will crumple inwards, like an empty plastic bottle you suck the air out of.
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.
If you want 8 billion people to live in luxury then purely in material terms, you would need to ramp up the level of industrialisation beyond what exists today, so you can't use "capitalism is destroying the planet" as an argument.
No, because your definition of luxury and most people's definition of luxury is vastly different. We have the labour power and resources now for everyone to live in luxury, we instead just allow that to be diverted to a very small population of people who have incomprehensible amounts of wealth.
Luxury is working maybe 4 hours a day, a furnished house with fridge freezers and washer dryers, time to enjoy with friends and family, good quality food and water, good infrastructure for healthcare and transport. Which is completely possible. Am I saying everyone should have a mansion and a lambo - of course not, because that's not luxury, that's commodity fetishism.
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
Frog build. Skinny arms and legs but with a tummy. It's the visceral fat in your torso that messes you up, not the subcutaneous fat.
1. My diet is not shit. It is notably healthy. Red meat about once a week. Tons of fish and greens
2. Not frog type. Rugby playing type. Stocky, quite thick legs, barrel chested. Was a hooker at school
3. I do drink RIDIC amounts of booze, which isn't good at all
4. But I also exercise a lot, rarely get ill, and my Dad died at 8 and my Mum is still going at 86 (just about)
MEH
He must have been some lad to have had a son and died at 8…😀
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
Comes to a point it is just silly. One I have is very nice but no way would I part with anything like 2K for a bottle. My wife paid low hundreds for it for my 50th birthday. Personally once you get near 3 figures unless you are not going to get much better and even then no guarantee you will like it better than some cheaper stuff.
Absolutely right
I feel the same about wine. Above ~£50 and you are essentially paying for rarity and snob value. I doubt anyone can taste any difference. So if you're paying £500 or £5000 a bottle you're either a billionaire or an idiot or probably both
I actually tried this in the Balearics the other day with my billionaire friend and his wine connoisseur chum. We were drinking very nice red worth £30-£40 and then the billionaire said "I'll get something special" and he fetched a bottle of Bordeaux worth £300. I was dubious it would be THAT much better but the connoisseur (who actually makes wine in Italy) insisted I would notice a vast difference. I did not
The £300 wine was a little bit nicer, but we were already drinking very nice wine. It was not eight times nicer or whatever
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.
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.
If you're quick, the Wine Society's Château Mouton Rothschild 2022 en primeur offer will close at midday tomorrow, Friday 23rd June 2023.
Mind you at £1,554 per case of 3 in-bond, it might not be quite what you had in mind.
All EP wines are sold at exactly the same price by every merchant so there's no "offer". That said if you do want the Mouton you'd better get your skates on as it will likely sell out from everywhere. That's why I use Farr's; they always get good allocations.
I meant 'offer' in the sense of have an allocation that they make available. They're offering it, you apply, if too many people apply you may not be lucky.
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.
What juvenile bullshit.
Good employers respect and value their employees and recognise they are not interchangeable commodities.
Bad employers tend to lose good employees and have a team of bad employees which is bad for business.
As an employment lawyer I’ve been exposed to all varieties of employer. I tend to 148’s view - with reservations.
Do you not think there might be a reason, as an employment lawyer, you're exposed more [and notice more] employers that act like that though?
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
Frog build. Skinny arms and legs but with a tummy. It's the visceral fat in your torso that messes you up, not the subcutaneous fat.
1. My diet is not shit. It is notably healthy. Red meat about once a week. Tons of fish and greens
2. Not frog type. Rugby playing type. Stocky, quite thick legs, barrel chested. Was a hooker at school
3. I do drink RIDIC amounts of booze, which isn't good at all
4. But I also exercise a lot, rarely get ill, and my Dad died at 8 and my Mum is still going at 86 (just about)
MEH
He must have been some lad to have had a son and died at 8…😀
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
Frog build. Skinny arms and legs but with a tummy. It's the visceral fat in your torso that messes you up, not the subcutaneous fat.
1. My diet is not shit. It is notably healthy. Red meat about once a week. Tons of fish and greens
2. Not frog type. Rugby playing type. Stocky, quite thick legs, barrel chested. Was a hooker at school
3. I do drink RIDIC amounts of booze, which isn't good at all
4. But I also exercise a lot, rarely get ill, and my Dad died at 8 and my Mum is still going at 86 (just about)
MEH
He must have been some lad to have had a son and died at 8…😀
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.
What juvenile bullshit.
Good employers respect and value their employees and recognise they are not interchangeable commodities.
Bad employers tend to lose good employees and have a team of bad employees which is bad for business.
As an employment lawyer I’ve been exposed to all varieties of employer. I tend to 148’s view - with reservations.
To @BartholomewRoberts - we're talking about how capitalism functions. You have the freedom to get a job or starve. If you get a job, you don't get to choose your own salary, your own remit, your own boss - that is dictated to you. You have the option to get another job, sure, but that will have the same parameters. When you are an employee sure, you accrue rights, but at the end of the day the boss is in charge of the company and if the boss wants to make cuts to improve growth, or change focus onto a different thing that you as a worker do not agree with, there is little you can do.
Maybe the use of boss throughout all of this is the issue people are having - I don't mean your direct manager. I mean the capitalist at the top, the owner of the means of production. The share holders, the CEO, the boss.
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?
Compression not decompression, implosion not explosion. It will crumple inwards, like an empty plastic bottle you suck the air out of.
Any theories on why it would happen
Best guess: it's made of carbon fibre - most similar deep dive things are steel or titanium - and repeated descents weakened flaws in the CF lay-up.
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.
Squaring this circle etc…
That's an excellent question, but I think a rather peripheral one for my lifetime.
No one is concerned about wheelchair paths up Jacobs Ladder at Edale (start of Penine Way) or across Striding Edge, when our towns, cities and existing accessible paths are full of wheelchair, mobility scooter and cycle (which many disabled people use as mobility aids) blocking barriers to no benefit whatsoever - numbering in the tens of thousands.
This happens quite routinely even on lovely smooth, lit tarmac pathways advertised and publicised as "accessible".
The 1990s Estate where I live has a beautiful network of lit, landscaped walking / cycling paths, and every one of the 22 entrances has an illegal wheelchair excluding barrier on it, which has been in place since the mid-1990s. The same is the case with former railway paths which provide flat offroad routes to the town centre from suburbs. And locals still recite the "but motobikes" stuff that they were sold 35 years ago; motobikes are smaller than cycles so they are not blocked, and the answer is proper policing. They are even on "safe walking routes to schools".
There is still a default mentality of installing them, which has to be taken out of the system.
But the more rugged bits of the Cornish Coastal Path can wait until we have spent the next 20 years dealing with the low hanging fruit !
That said I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to drink a 2005 left bank classed growth even with the higher than usual merlot. I tried a cru bourgeois a year or so ago and it was quite far from ready.
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.
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.
If you're quick, the Wine Society's Château Mouton Rothschild 2022 en primeur offer will close at midday tomorrow, Friday 23rd June 2023.
Mind you at £1,554 per case of 3 in-bond, it might not be quite what you had in mind.
All EP wines are sold at exactly the same price by every merchant so there's no "offer". That said if you do want the Mouton you'd better get your skates on as it will likely sell out from everywhere. That's why I use Farr's; they always get good allocations.
But I don't want to buy wine which costs £100+ a bottle from the outset. I want a wine which will pleasingly quintuple in value in a decade or two. I accept I am asking for an extremely good deal
IIRC I bought the Chateau d'Issan from Tesco! Back when they used to have a weirdly good, on point Fine Wine department. Sadly gone
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.
What juvenile bullshit.
Good employers respect and value their employees and recognise they are not interchangeable commodities.
Bad employers tend to lose good employees and have a team of bad employees which is bad for business.
As an employment lawyer I’ve been exposed to all varieties of employer. I tend to 148’s view - with reservations.
To @BartholomewRoberts - we're talking about how capitalism functions. You have the freedom to get a job or starve. If you get a job, you don't get to choose your own salary, your own remit, your own boss - that is dictated to you. You have the option to get another job, sure, but that will have the same parameters. When you are an employee sure, you accrue rights, but at the end of the day the boss is in charge of the company and if the boss wants to make cuts to improve growth, or change focus onto a different thing that you as a worker do not agree with, there is little you can do.
Maybe the use of boss throughout all of this is the issue people are having - I don't mean your direct manager. I mean the capitalist at the top, the owner of the means of production. The share holders, the CEO, the boss.
You can become your own boss very easily in a market economy. Perhaps you're too afraid of giving up your regular salary to contemplate it, but it's an option you have to escape your predicament right now and it wouldn't require a global revolution.
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.
What juvenile bullshit.
Good employers respect and value their employees and recognise they are not interchangeable commodities.
Bad employers tend to lose good employees and have a team of bad employees which is bad for business.
As an employment lawyer I’ve been exposed to all varieties of employer. I tend to 148’s view - with reservations.
To @BartholomewRoberts - we're talking about how capitalism functions. You have the freedom to get a job or starve. If you get a job, you don't get to choose your own salary, your own remit, your own boss - that is dictated to you. You have the option to get another job, sure, but that will have the same parameters. When you are an employee sure, you accrue rights, but at the end of the day the boss is in charge of the company and if the boss wants to make cuts to improve growth, or change focus onto a different thing that you as a worker do not agree with, there is little you can do.
Maybe the use of boss throughout all of this is the issue people are having - I don't mean your direct manager. I mean the capitalist at the top, the owner of the means of production. The share holders, the CEO, the boss.
And that's a load of crap. We exist in a country with full employment. You don't have only one employer available to you, if you don't like your employer there are other employers out there who can value you more. The idea you're a slave to the first employer you sign up for does not reflect reality whatsoever.
Ironically the one area where that's least correct is if you work for the state, where the state can be a monopsony employer. Which of course is the least capitalist system.
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?
Compression not decompression, implosion not explosion. It will crumple inwards, like an empty plastic bottle you suck the air out of.
Any theories on why it would happen
Structural failure?
The pressure at the depth of the Titanic is about 40MPa or 3 tons per square inch.
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.
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.
If you're quick, the Wine Society's Château Mouton Rothschild 2022 en primeur offer will close at midday tomorrow, Friday 23rd June 2023.
Mind you at £1,554 per case of 3 in-bond, it might not be quite what you had in mind.
All EP wines are sold at exactly the same price by every merchant so there's no "offer". That said if you do want the Mouton you'd better get your skates on as it will likely sell out from everywhere. That's why I use Farr's; they always get good allocations.
But I don't want to buy wine which costs £100+ a bottle from the outset. I want a wine which will pleasingly quintuple in value in a decade or two. I accept I am asking for an extremely good deal
IIRC I bought the Chateau d'Issan from Tesco! Back when they used to have a weirdly good, on point Fine Wine department. Sadly gone
Absolutely and absolutely. We have discussed previously how good the Tescos wine dept was before they closed it.
And I'm not suggesting Mouton - if you are serious, then call Harry at Farr's and he will sort you out with something at your price point. The Batailley is supposed to be amazing this year for example at £372/cs (doz) IB.
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
Frog build. Skinny arms and legs but with a tummy. It's the visceral fat in your torso that messes you up, not the subcutaneous fat.
1. My diet is not shit. It is notably healthy. Red meat about once a week. Tons of fish and greens
2. Not frog type. Rugby playing type. Stocky, quite thick legs, barrel chested. Was a hooker at school
3. I do drink RIDIC amounts of booze, which isn't good at all
4. But I also exercise a lot, rarely get ill, and my Dad died at 8 and my Mum is still going at 86 (just about)
MEH
He must have been some lad to have had a son and died at 8…😀
It's always worth a check, because the consequences of missing it - even Type II - for a few years are really serious.
I'm Type I remember.
The normal time in the UK before Type II is diagnosed is something like 5-7 years, which is plenty of time for mucho damage to happen incognito.
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
With all other checks and balances it's just so weird to me appointments were made lifetime for the Court, (even if it's role was not as uber-powerful as now), when judicial whim of a handful of people can have absolutely massive effects. I guess most would not have served as long as they do now, but still.
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".
Utter rubbish, and you must realise that.
Ordinarily I'd say yes, but Andy I think is always utterly sincere.
That it's a claim so extreme I've not even seen loony antivaxers make it, only adds to the sense it must be a real view, not following a trendy claim.
That said I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to drink a 2005 left bank classed growth even with the higher than usual merlot. I tried a cru bourgeois a year or so ago and it was quite far from ready.
Interesting, thanks. So the Issan 2022 EP is £50 a bottle (+VAT, duty and delivery).
I'm at an age where anything that's not going to be at it's best for 20 years might be too long to wait.
Courthouse News Service - Contract workers used duplicated, deceased names on election paperwork, Colorado AG alleges
The Colorado Secretary of State's office identified thousands of incongruous signatures on ballot petitions submitted to place a candidate on the Republican Party's 2022 primary ballot.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Tuesday filed charges against six contract workers after investigators say they discovered the names of 21 dead people on petitions submitted to place a Republican congressional candidate on the 2022 primary ballot.
While running to represent the 7th Congressional District, which encompasses Jefferson County southwest of Denver, Republican Carl Andersen hired Oregon-based firm Grassfire LLC to help gather the 1,500 signatures needed for his name to be printed on the party’s primary ballot.
Andersen did not appear on the ballot. . . .
. . . Andersen's petitions raised eyebrows among state election regulators, prompting Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold to reject almost 80% of the signatures on them. Anderson sued the Colorado secretary of state's office in April 2022 over these rejections, only to abruptly withdraw his complaint ten days later.
Recent allegations offer new context to this controversy. Of the 4,462 "lines" of voter names submitted to Griswold's office, 1,967 signatures did not match state records of voters, authorities allege.
Nine hundred more of the names weren't associated with Colorado voters at all, authorities say. Meanwhile, 21 people who purportedly signed the petitions are dead.
Because those 4,462 lines of voter data allegedly included duplicated names, it's unclear at press time how many total people may have had their names used without their consent as part of the alleged fraud. . . .
In addition to the names of 21 deceased individuals, investigators discovered several duplicated names — leading the state attorney general to file charges against six Grassfire employees. The charges were brought in the District Court for the City and County of Denver on Tuesday.
Each individual faces one count of attempting to influence a public servant, a Class 4 felony, and one count of perjury, a Class 2 misdemeanor. The felony is punishable by up to 6 years in prison with up to a $500,000 fine.
Court documents allege that Diana Watt, who worked as a deputy state director for Grassfire at the time of the petitions, agreed to sign her name on petitions collected by a coworker who had to catch a last-minute flight to Florida. The submitted petitions allegedly contained fraudulent names.
A statement from the attorney general’s office clarified there is no suspected criminal misconduct from either Grassfire or Andersen. In his own statement to Courthouse News, Andersen said he was cooperating with authorities and praying for justice. . . .
Comments
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/
Mind you at £1,554 per case of 3 in-bond, it might not be quite what you had in mind.
Good employers respect and value their employees and recognise they are not interchangeable commodities.
Bad employers tend to lose good employees and have a team of bad employees which is bad for business.
I ended up getting him one 20-yr old bottle, one 12-yr old and one 8-yr old.
2. Not frog type. Rugby playing type. Stocky, quite thick legs, barrel chested. Was a hooker at school
3. I do drink RIDIC amounts of booze, which isn't good at all
4. But I also exercise a lot, rarely get ill, and my Dad died at 88 and my Mum is still going at 86 (just about)
MEH
Luxury is working maybe 4 hours a day, a furnished house with fridge freezers and washer dryers, time to enjoy with friends and family, good quality food and water, good infrastructure for healthcare and transport. Which is completely possible. Am I saying everyone should have a mansion and a lambo - of course not, because that's not luxury, that's commodity fetishism.
I feel the same about wine. Above ~£50 and you are essentially paying for rarity and snob value. I doubt anyone can taste any difference. So if you're paying £500 or £5000 a bottle you're either a billionaire or an idiot or probably both
I actually tried this in the Balearics the other day with my billionaire friend and his wine connoisseur chum. We were drinking very nice red worth £30-£40 and then the billionaire said "I'll get something special" and he fetched a bottle of Bordeaux worth £300. I was dubious it would be THAT much better but the connoisseur (who actually makes wine in Italy) insisted I would notice a vast difference. I did not
The £300 wine was a little bit nicer, but we were already drinking very nice wine. It was not eight times nicer or whatever
Brits are even more critical of the government on Sunak's 5 key pledges
% saying government doing badly at...
Reducing inflation: 82% (+6 from 26 May)
Economic growth: 69% (+5)
National debt: 71% (+5)
NHS waiting lists: 84% (+1)
Small boats: 76% (+1)
Kind of a reverse of this:
Maybe the use of boss throughout all of this is the issue people are having - I don't mean your direct manager. I mean the capitalist at the top, the owner of the means of production. The share holders, the CEO, the boss.
No one is concerned about wheelchair paths up Jacobs Ladder at Edale (start of Penine Way) or across Striding Edge, when our towns, cities and existing accessible paths are full of wheelchair, mobility scooter and cycle (which many disabled people use as mobility aids) blocking barriers to no benefit whatsoever - numbering in the tens of thousands.
This happens quite routinely even on lovely smooth, lit tarmac pathways advertised and publicised as "accessible".
The 1990s Estate where I live has a beautiful network of lit, landscaped walking / cycling paths, and every one of the 22 entrances has an illegal wheelchair excluding barrier on it, which has been in place since the mid-1990s. The same is the case with former railway paths which provide flat offroad routes to the town centre from suburbs. And locals still recite the "but motobikes" stuff that they were sold 35 years ago; motobikes are smaller than cycles so they are not blocked, and the answer is proper policing. They are even on "safe walking routes to schools".
There is still a default mentality of installing them, which has to be taken out of the system.
But the more rugged bits of the Cornish Coastal Path can wait until we have spent the next 20 years dealing with the low hanging fruit !
https://www.farrvintners.com/en_primeur/wine.php?wine=91163
That said I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to drink a 2005 left bank classed growth even with the higher than usual merlot. I tried a cru bourgeois a year or so ago and it was quite far from ready.
IIRC I bought the Chateau d'Issan from Tesco! Back when they used to have a weirdly good, on point Fine Wine department. Sadly gone
Ironically the one area where that's least correct is if you work for the state, where the state can be a monopsony employer. Which of course is the least capitalist system.
The pressure at the depth of the Titanic is about 40MPa or 3 tons per square inch.
And I'm not suggesting Mouton - if you are serious, then call Harry at Farr's and he will sort you out with something at your price point. The Batailley is supposed to be amazing this year for example at £372/cs (doz) IB.
https://mailchi.mp/380b76b7aed3/2022-bordeaux-round-up?e=136554292f
Debris found. USCG statement at 8pm our time.
I'm Type I remember.
The normal time in the UK before Type II is diagnosed is something like 5-7 years, which is plenty of time for mucho damage to happen incognito.
But - obvs your call.
That it's a claim so extreme I've not even seen loony antivaxers make it, only adds to the sense it must be a real view, not following a trendy claim.
I'm at an age where anything that's not going to be at it's best for 20 years might be too long to wait.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/22/desantis-wont-say-if-hell-support-trump-in-2024-00103163
The Colorado Secretary of State's office identified thousands of incongruous signatures on ballot petitions submitted to place a candidate on the Republican Party's 2022 primary ballot.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Tuesday filed charges against six contract workers after investigators say they discovered the names of 21 dead people on petitions submitted to place a Republican congressional candidate on the 2022 primary ballot.
While running to represent the 7th Congressional District, which encompasses Jefferson County southwest of Denver, Republican Carl Andersen hired Oregon-based firm Grassfire LLC to help gather the 1,500 signatures needed for his name to be printed on the party’s primary ballot.
Andersen did not appear on the ballot. . . .
. . . Andersen's petitions raised eyebrows among state election regulators, prompting Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold to reject almost 80% of the signatures on them. Anderson sued the Colorado secretary of state's office in April 2022 over these rejections, only to abruptly withdraw his complaint ten days later.
Recent allegations offer new context to this controversy. Of the 4,462 "lines" of voter names submitted to Griswold's office, 1,967 signatures did not match state records of voters, authorities allege.
Nine hundred more of the names weren't associated with Colorado voters at all, authorities say. Meanwhile, 21 people who purportedly signed the petitions are dead.
Because those 4,462 lines of voter data allegedly included duplicated names, it's unclear at press time how many total people may have had their names used without their consent as part of the alleged fraud. . . .
In addition to the names of 21 deceased individuals, investigators discovered several duplicated names — leading the state attorney general to file charges against six Grassfire employees. The charges were brought in the District Court for the City and County of Denver on Tuesday.
Each individual faces one count of attempting to influence a public servant, a Class 4 felony, and one count of perjury, a Class 2 misdemeanor. The felony is punishable by up to 6 years in prison with up to a $500,000 fine.
Court documents allege that Diana Watt, who worked as a deputy state director for Grassfire at the time of the petitions, agreed to sign her name on petitions collected by a coworker who had to catch a last-minute flight to Florida. The submitted petitions allegedly contained fraudulent names.
A statement from the attorney general’s office clarified there is no suspected criminal misconduct from either Grassfire or Andersen. In his own statement to Courthouse News, Andersen said he was cooperating with authorities and praying for justice. . . .
https://www.courthousenews.com/contract-workers-used-duplicated-deceased-names-on-election-paperwork-colorado-ag-alleges/