What's the PB view on this poll in Telegraph showing Lab winning mid beds?
It's obviously going to be used again and again in Labour literature there if there's a by-election (or even at the GE). Up to now the assumption has been that it's more of a LibDem target, and some of that thinking may persist, so the risk of a split non-Tory vote enabling the Tories to hold on is probably greater.
It’s not a blow to Sunak, but rather another example of our offshoring the benefits of U.K. research and development.
Free market, open investment, and zero effective industrial policy, together regularly mean we lose businesses overseas after they start up here. In a similar manner to that in which we’ve allowed much of the benefits of running privatised monopolies to go offshore.
Clearly the opposite if all this - statist policies - isn’t really the answer either. But the consensus Thatcher established has proven economically malign for much of the country. Those at the center of power have done fine out of it, so I’m not sure many of them are really even fully aware of the process - or they don’t give a damn.
That's not quite fair. The Thatcher model mandated low taxes and light regulation to attract investment. We don't do that bit - we're highly regulated and have high taxes. Combining that with an orthodox laissez faire approach to mergers and takeovers is the worst of all worlds.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Its a luxury because people aren't going hungry, so there's no "need" to learn as much as people had to in the past.
That's not such a bad thing.
A bag of apples costs less than a bag of crisps but people like crisps so choose to buy them.
Right, now we're getting somewhere. So people are driven to choices by things other than cost and effort. We also have preference on the table now, as well as the subtler point of convenience undermining the motivation to learn to do things the "hard" way. This is good work.
I'd say "Big Food" is the problem. A handful of transnational companies industrially manufacture all the edible products that supermarkets sell as food and advertise them as the perfect food for our lifestyle. It's chock full of cheap substitutes for natural ingredients that provide less nutrition than fresh cooked food and doesn't sate you as much. It's almost addictive as it hits the bliss point of salt, fat, and sweeteners to make you want more. And it's cheap, colourful and might even say the words "healthy" "low fat" "light" and "sugar free " on the labels. It's quick to prepare and eat, with little fibre in it and made to be soft so you eat quicker and want more. That's why poor people eat bad diets.
No analysis of the problem of poor diet is complete without including what you've just said. Thank you.
I think too that we cannot ignore that a lot of people lead pretty bleak lives, of relentless grind to make ends nearly meet, and simple pleasures are desired at the end of the day. Much the same reason poor people also smoke more, are more often addicts, have worse mental health, more STDs and unplanned pregnancies etc.
Working class motivation for self improvement, and upward mobility still exists as it always has, but has never been universal.
Quite often, we'd attend an incident in a councill house or flat on the Saff, or Brauny or Beaumont Leys, and the occupants would have nothing of any real worth in the place, but maybe a big TV and a PlayStation. It used to really get to me, the unending bleakness of the places we make people live in. When Goscote House was emptied, we had access to it for a few months as a training site (genuinely really useful, some if the most helpful training I ever did, even though it was later in my career! ) and the grimness of the place was overwhelming. 20 floors up, in a concrete block, windows that only open up an inch, scary, dangerous stairs, crime, drugs. We broke a door in during entry training to find the usual, basic, scruffy flat. One one small bedroom was a nursery, with nice baby wallpaper on, actual carpet and a mobile hanging above where the cot would have been. It really bought home to you how we treat those less well off, and how they still strive to create happiness. Are they lazy, or just not as fortunate as others?
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
I'll spend the afternoon putting cats up trees in order to increase their productivity.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Well they do have people like Peter Mandelson advising them.
Why not forgive student date, a portion for each year worked in the state sector. Same with younger junior doctors.
That would be a sensible idea for itself, but I'm not sure how much use it would be. People don't tend to work for abstract accounting principles. Teachers already quit even though the pension remains decent, for example.
There are economies you could make in education that would help. For example, abolishing SATS, OFQUAL and the DfE. None of them fulfil any useful purpose whatsoever, cost an absolute fortune, and indeed take up a lot of time and money that could spent on far more useful things. You could even add GCSEs to that, particularly given how badly designed the current set are.
But I very much doubt if Labour, who have always had centralising tendencies, would make them.
The risk is that this pledge unless they can show where the money would come from would be like the Tory pay rises - as there is no funding, they would come out of school budgets and make them even more impossible to balance.
There is a lot to be said for abolishing GCSEs which serve no useful function now the school-leaving age has been raised. They are no longer needed for jobs or further study.
As for Labour saying where the money will come from, they do. It's in your linked article. You clearly do not believe them but that is a different matter.
You sure? Some time back, an O level in French or German was a genuinely useful thing to have to complement one's A-levels when applying to uni or for a job. Same with the basic English and Maths qualifications.
Speaking German might or might not be useful in different circumstances. Having a GCSE German certificate, less so. Abolition would save money and free up more time for learning German.
I have been wondering about this. In theory my daughter passed her GCSE Spanish with the same grade as I got in German 40 years ago. Yet despite having had those 40 years to forget it all, I find this summer that more than 30 years since my last trip to Germany, I can still remember quite a lot. Whereas last summer in Spain my daughter knew nothing more than a few words.
I wonder if that's because modern teaching covers what's on the exam, and nothing more, whereas when I was at school we were taught to speak/understand the language? The syllabus doesn't appear to have changed much. Has how exams are set become much more tightly defined than back then?
I suppose it depends on when you got your grade C. I got Cs in French and German O Level in 77. My French is not bad still to be honest, but I credit the fact that we were started on French in my primary at age 7, purely spoken, very little written or grammar etc, whereas my German I started at age 14 and have virtually forgotten it all.
Grade B for me, but in fact I only took it for 2 years. It was just well taught, in retrospect. I was the same as you for French but didn't really find it that much easier at O Level, but carried on with it to A Level (and what I learned certainly has stuck).
Incidentally I reckon French is probably the only GCSE I could just sit down and pass today without having to relearn anything.
I passed my German O level with a B four decades ago, but managed quite well in Germany last summer, though a fair proportion spoke English back to me. My accent must be terrible.
[swaggering] Man, I got GCSE grade As in both French AND German!
I was taught French by a Welshman and it's possible I still speak it with a pronounced Welsh accent but my interlocutors are too polite to mention the fact.
I learned to speak German when working in Cologne and acquired the local accent (Koelsch.) I'm told that for a German this is a bit like me listening to a German speaking English with a Yorkshire accent. The only practical disadvantage is that Germans who hear me and don't know me assume I'm from Cologne and am totally fluent in their language, which of course I am not.
It nearly got me into trouble once when I was pulled over in Cologne for a minor accidental traffic offence. The copper thought I was lying when I told him I was English. It was a compliment but an annoying one at the time.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Well they do have people like Peter Mandelson advising them.
Why not forgive student date, a portion for each year worked in the state sector. Same with younger junior doctors.
That would be a sensible idea for itself, but I'm not sure how much use it would be. People don't tend to work for abstract accounting principles. Teachers already quit even though the pension remains decent, for example.
There are economies you could make in education that would help. For example, abolishing SATS, OFQUAL and the DfE. None of them fulfil any useful purpose whatsoever, cost an absolute fortune, and indeed take up a lot of time and money that could spent on far more useful things. You could even add GCSEs to that, particularly given how badly designed the current set are.
But I very much doubt if Labour, who have always had centralising tendencies, would make them.
The risk is that this pledge unless they can show where the money would come from would be like the Tory pay rises - as there is no funding, they would come out of school budgets and make them even more impossible to balance.
There is a lot to be said for abolishing GCSEs which serve no useful function now the school-leaving age has been raised. They are no longer needed for jobs or further study.
As for Labour saying where the money will come from, they do. It's in your linked article. You clearly do not believe them but that is a different matter.
You sure? Some time back, an O level in French or German was a genuinely useful thing to have to complement one's A-levels when applying to uni or for a job. Same with the basic English and Maths qualifications.
Speaking German might or might not be useful in different circumstances. Having a GCSE German certificate, less so. Abolition would save money and free up more time for learning German.
I have been wondering about this. In theory my daughter passed her GCSE Spanish with the same grade as I got in German 40 years ago. Yet despite having had those 40 years to forget it all, I find this summer that more than 30 years since my last trip to Germany, I can still remember quite a lot. Whereas last summer in Spain my daughter knew nothing more than a few words.
I wonder if that's because modern teaching covers what's on the exam, and nothing more, whereas when I was at school we were taught to speak/understand the language? The syllabus doesn't appear to have changed much. Has how exams are set become much more tightly defined than back then?
tbh I thought it was supposed to be the other way round, with language teaching now concentrating on actually speaking conversational French (or whatever) whereas in the bad old days it was more about learning lists of conjugations and declensions and translating written texts. The PBer to ask is @Dura_Ace who does it for a living, or possibly @NickPalmer. If I had to guess based on what you describe, perhaps school-level oral Spanish depends on getting the right cues from the native speakers, and your daughter didn't.
I've never taught GCSE or prepared students for he exam so I don't really know much about it. French GSCE does seem very light on grammar compared to when I did O-Level a million years ago. Eg the subjonctif is on the GCSE syllabus but never seems to be taught or examined. When I did O-level the candidate had to know every wrinkle of it - verbs which can't take the subjunctive when negated (eg douter), etc.
When our GCSE German teacher tried to teach us German grammar, he soon found that we didn't know any English grammar. And we were the top class. I think that the school curriculum should really focus on conversation - it's a real shame to leave school after learning a subject and not be able to speak it.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
I'll spend the afternoon putting cats up trees in order to increase their productivity.
Just make sure they are actually cats, and not fictional self-identifying teenagers.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
I'll spend the afternoon putting cats up trees in order to increase their productivity.
And then call ambulances to tend to your torn flesh. Tbf they don’t seem to do a lot of sitting around except in queues outside A&E trying to stop their passengers pegging out.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
In rural areas they often are as they are just on call. And not only them. I had a partner in the Anstruther office of my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
I'll spend the afternoon putting cats up trees in order to increase their productivity.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
I'll spend the afternoon putting cats up trees in order to increase their productivity.
Just make sure they are actually cats, and not fictional self-identifying teenagers.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
It wasn't a golden age, it was however an age where if you whinged about it you got no where and had to learn to do stuff to make the money last.
You are from the give a man a fish school of thought I am from the teach a man to fish school of thought
When I grew up you had to learn to fish, since the mid 90's though society has seemed to pivot to the give a man a fish school. Nothing is anyones fault.....don't eat decently its because the government/your employer doesn't give you enough etc. No sorry totally and utterly their fault
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for the day. Teach a man to fish, and he will… spend all day on a boat with his friends, drinking beer!
Joke aside, you make a good point about cooking skills. Enjoy your Sunday lunch.
I think personally all councils should run free courses in basic cooking, budgeting , literacy and every day maths. That would be a better use of funds than many things the state spends money on
SureStart.
I have never said SureStart was necessarily a bad thing, I have asked for figures to show it works. If it works then all good. I don't mind governments spending where it actually does something. Sadly my suspicion (and many others) is a lot of state spending is on things that sound like a good idea but achieve the square root of fuck all. It is the latter I object to.
I think the value of Sure Start was that it pulled a lot of different things into a single framework, and that it therefore removed a lot of cracks that people fell down. Which means that a lot of sticky plaster ha to be used to paste over cracks that appear in the absence of a framework, and it will never be as effective.
I'm not sure if I can find studies due to time.
Breaking his promise to protect Sure Start was one of the worst things David Cameron did imo, amongst a very long list of salami-sliced cuts.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
Or volunteers, maybe? I've always wanted to slam through rush hour traffic at 90mph with absolute impunity.
On call firefighters are subject to the same Highway code that you are. There ain't no slamming anywhere at 90mph when they attend a call.
Sad. I guess I'd just have to polish 'Dennis' then.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
I'll spend the afternoon putting cats up trees in order to increase their productivity.
And then call ambulances to tend to your torn flesh.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
Or volunteers, maybe? I've always wanted to slam through rush hour traffic at 90mph with absolute impunity.
On call firefighters are subject to the same Highway code that you are. There ain't no slamming anywhere at 90mph when they attend a call.
Sad. I guess I'd just have to polish 'Dennis' then.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
No free money isn't morally corrosive. What I was trying to get across is continually making excuses for why people act the way they do is morally corrosive.
person A :I am obese because I live on take aways and ready meals
Farooq : Thats because you can't afford to buy ingredients, you dont have time to cook, you cant cook and can't be expected to learn.....take your pick of excuses as its definitely not your fault and you can't change it
person A: thanks Farooq now I feel better its not my fault I am fat its the governments and societies....heads off to mcDonalds
Easy come easy go , if it is free it is not respected
Where is the evidence that Sunak is “very intelligent”?
It all hinges on what you consider intelligence, but I don't doubt that he is far more academically intelligent than most MPs, and has a far stronger work ethic too.
I would class Starmer as undeniably intelligent and with a strong work ethic too.
Not that intelligence is the be all and end all of being a leader. Vision, rhetorical and people skills are lacked by both.
Sunak is of course intelligent and hard-working, but I wonder if he's something of a victim of a version of gifted/privileged child syndrome. Namely that he's experienced very little adversity in life or his political career. Winchester, Oxford, Goldman Sachs, Hedgie. Married a billionaire's daughter. As a politician has only ever known the Tory Party in the ascendancy, and the only real setback he ever had was losing to Truss - which was swiftly erased. As a result he's completely out of his depth when things are going wrong and things aren't working like the textbook says it should.
Now, I know some like to cast Starmer as an out of touch Islingtonian - but compared to Sunak is a son of toil having had adversity in his personal life (a very ill parent), and a fairly varied legal career. Plus politically, while also elected in 2015, so in theory just as inexperienced as Sunak, has had to navigate Labour's forever wars and its unpopularity so has been much more unflappable when under pressure and prepared to take on his party's fruitcakes, rather than appease them and hope they go away.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
In rural areas they often are as they are just on call. And not only them. I had a partner in the Anstruther office of my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
A lot of small and medium towns still have the retained firefighters. One was a friend of the family growing up, he worked as a decorator during the day, but had a pager and needed to stay 5 mins away from the station. More than once his alarm went off in church, and he hurriedly tried to silence it as he exited via the side door.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
It wasn't a golden age, it was however an age where if you whinged about it you got no where and had to learn to do stuff to make the money last.
You are from the give a man a fish school of thought I am from the teach a man to fish school of thought
When I grew up you had to learn to fish, since the mid 90's though society has seemed to pivot to the give a man a fish school. Nothing is anyones fault.....don't eat decently its because the government/your employer doesn't give you enough etc. No sorry totally and utterly their fault
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for the day. Teach a man to fish, and he will… spend all day on a boat with his friends, drinking beer!
Joke aside, you make a good point about cooking skills. Enjoy your Sunday lunch.
I think personally all councils should run free courses in basic cooking, budgeting , literacy and every day maths. That would be a better use of funds than many things the state spends money on
SureStart.
I have never said SureStart was necessarily a bad thing, I have asked for figures to show it works. If it works then all good. I don't mind governments spending where it actually does something. Sadly my suspicion (and many others) is a lot of state spending is on things that sound like a good idea but achieve the square root of fuck all. It is the latter I object to.
I think the value of Sure Start was that it pulled a lot of different things into a single framework, and that it therefore removed a lot of cracks that people fell down. Which means that a lot of sticky plaster ha to be used to paste over cracks that appear in the absence of a framework, and it will never be as effective.
I'm not sure if I can find studies due to time.
Breaking his promise to protect Sure Start was one of the worst things David Cameron did imo, amongst a very long list of salami-sliced cuts.
I would like a government that tries things, sees if they measurably work and if they aren't providing value for the money spent then admits it and drops them. Measurements based on actual figures rather than soundbites and programmes which have a stated aim to measure against.
For example if they spent 10 billion on an adult literacy programme....if they increased adult literacy levels by 50% we might think it money well spent....if the programme only increased adult literacy by 1% however its obviously not providing value for the money spent and we should drop it and spend the 10 billion on something that does provide value, perhaps even a different adult literacy idea.
Too often we see things continue because its some politicians pet idea even if it is not working as intended.
Any initiative in my view should have a stated aim and measurable target and a timeframe to achieve that target
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Its a luxury because people aren't going hungry, so there's no "need" to learn as much as people had to in the past.
That's not such a bad thing.
A bag of apples costs less than a bag of crisps but people like crisps so choose to buy them.
Right, now we're getting somewhere. So people are driven to choices by things other than cost and effort. We also have preference on the table now, as well as the subtler point of convenience undermining the motivation to learn to do things the "hard" way. This is good work.
I'd say "Big Food" is the problem. A handful of transnational companies industrially manufacture all the edible products that supermarkets sell as food and advertise them as the perfect food for our lifestyle. It's chock full of cheap substitutes for natural ingredients that provide less nutrition than fresh cooked food and doesn't sate you as much. It's almost addictive as it hits the bliss point of salt, fat, and sweeteners to make you want more. And it's cheap, colourful and might even say the words "healthy" "low fat" "light" and "sugar free " on the labels. It's quick to prepare and eat, with little fibre in it and made to be soft so you eat quicker and want more. That's why poor people eat bad diets.
No analysis of the problem of poor diet is complete without including what you've just said. Thank you.
I think too that we cannot ignore that a lot of people lead pretty bleak lives, of relentless grind to make ends nearly meet, and simple pleasures are desired at the end of the day. Much the same reason poor people also smoke more, are more often addicts, have worse mental health, more STDs and unplanned pregnancies etc.
Working class motivation for self improvement, and upward mobility still exists as it always has, but has never been universal.
Quite often, we'd attend an incident in a councill house or flat on the Saff, or Brauny or Beaumont Leys, and the occupants would have nothing of any real worth in the place, but maybe a big TV and a PlayStation. It used to really get to me, the unending bleakness of the places we make people live in. When Goscote House was emptied, we had access to it for a few months as a training site (genuinely really useful, some if the most helpful training I ever did, even though it was later in my career! ) and the grimness of the place was overwhelming. 20 floors up, in a concrete block, windows that only open up an inch, scary, dangerous stairs, crime, drugs. We broke a door in during entry training to find the usual, basic, scruffy flat. One one small bedroom was a nursery, with nice baby wallpaper on, actual carpet and a mobile hanging above where the cot would have been. It really bought home to you how we treat those less well off, and how they still strive to create happiness. Are they lazy, or just not as fortunate as others?
Since it's Sunday Morning, it's the thing the Anglo Catholics (many of whom were politically on the left).
Material charity to lift people out of poverty. Education to keep them there. Beauty (for want of a better word) to soothe people's spirits to be able to process the other stuff profitably.
Even if you don't believe the underlying story, the beauty still works. Perhaps the lack of beauty is why post war socialism or Thatcherism struggled to lift people off the very bottom.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Its a luxury because people aren't going hungry, so there's no "need" to learn as much as people had to in the past.
That's not such a bad thing.
A bag of apples costs less than a bag of crisps but people like crisps so choose to buy them.
Right, now we're getting somewhere. So people are driven to choices by things other than cost and effort. We also have preference on the table now, as well as the subtler point of convenience undermining the motivation to learn to do things the "hard" way. This is good work.
I'd say "Big Food" is the problem. A handful of transnational companies industrially manufacture all the edible products that supermarkets sell as food and advertise them as the perfect food for our lifestyle. It's chock full of cheap substitutes for natural ingredients that provide less nutrition than fresh cooked food and doesn't sate you as much. It's almost addictive as it hits the bliss point of salt, fat, and sweeteners to make you want more. And it's cheap, colourful and might even say the words "healthy" "low fat" "light" and "sugar free " on the labels. It's quick to prepare and eat, with little fibre in it and made to be soft so you eat quicker and want more. That's why poor people eat bad diets.
No analysis of the problem of poor diet is complete without including what you've just said. Thank you.
I think too that we cannot ignore that a lot of people lead pretty bleak lives, of relentless grind to make ends nearly meet, and simple pleasures are desired at the end of the day. Much the same reason poor people also smoke more, are more often addicts, have worse mental health, more STDs and unplanned pregnancies etc.
Working class motivation for self improvement, and upward mobility still exists as it always has, but has never been universal.
A double bed and a stalwart lover, for sure, These are the riches of the poor.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
It’s not a blow to Sunak, but rather another example of our offshoring the benefits of U.K. research and development.
Free market, open investment, and zero effective industrial policy, together regularly mean we lose businesses overseas after they start up here. In a similar manner to that in which we’ve allowed much of the benefits of running privatised monopolies to go offshore.
Clearly the opposite if all this - statist policies - isn’t really the answer either. But the consensus Thatcher established has proven economically malign for much of the country. Those at the center of power have done fine out of it, so I’m not sure many of them are really even fully aware of the process - or they don’t give a damn.
That's not quite fair. The Thatcher model mandated low taxes and light regulation to attract investment. We don't do that bit - we're highly regulated and have high taxes. Combining that with an orthodox laissez faire approach to mergers and takeovers is the worst of all worlds.
The utilities clearly aren’t highly regulated. Tory MP on R4 this morning suggesting that several of the water companies have issued debt paying well over market rates - to connected companies. So they have been reducing reported profits artificially - and thus paid less U.K. tax - while remitting them overseas via debt interest payments.
If this is the case with Thames, there is an excellent opportunity (and overwhelming case) to take it down, rather than allowing it to refinance at the expense of its customers - which is what the industry is proposing.
And of course tech companies aren’t leaving because of regulation, but the massively greater availability of capital - from both the market and government - in the US.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
In rural areas they often are as they are just on call. And not only them. I had a partner in the Anstruther office of my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
A lot of small and medium towns still have the retained firefighters. One was a friend of the family growing up, he worked as a decorator during the day, but had a pager and needed to stay 5 mins away from the station. More than once his alarm went off in church, and he hurriedly tried to silence it as he exited via the side door.
The Fire Service couldn't function without retained (now called On Call) firefighters. The problem is retention. The Fire authority is legally bound to provide fire cover, but it's not affordable to have a whole time fire station in a village that gets minimal calls in its patch a month. So an on call station works but locals join, do some damn hard and time consuming training around their main job and family, qualify....then get no calls for days or even weeks at a time. In that time they have to keep their skills up via weekly training. They thought it was going to be like Chicago Fire, but it's more like Dad's Army so they lose motivation. But if there is a proper house fire in their patch, they are the only ones who can make it, with the nearest back up sometimes 10 or15 minutes away, longer if its a busy night elsewhere. They get paid a monthly retainer, and a firefighter hourly rate for actual jobs. For some, it ends up not being worth it.
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
It wasn't a golden age, it was however an age where if you whinged about it you got no where and had to learn to do stuff to make the money last.
You are from the give a man a fish school of thought I am from the teach a man to fish school of thought
When I grew up you had to learn to fish, since the mid 90's though society has seemed to pivot to the give a man a fish school. Nothing is anyones fault.....don't eat decently its because the government/your employer doesn't give you enough etc. No sorry totally and utterly their fault
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for the day. Teach a man to fish, and he will… spend all day on a boat with his friends, drinking beer!
Joke aside, you make a good point about cooking skills. Enjoy your Sunday lunch.
I think personally all councils should run free courses in basic cooking, budgeting , literacy and every day maths. That would be a better use of funds than many things the state spends money on
SureStart.
I have never said SureStart was necessarily a bad thing, I have asked for figures to show it works. If it works then all good. I don't mind governments spending where it actually does something. Sadly my suspicion (and many others) is a lot of state spending is on things that sound like a good idea but achieve the square root of fuck all. It is the latter I object to.
I think the value of Sure Start was that it pulled a lot of different things into a single framework, and that it therefore removed a lot of cracks that people fell down. Which means that a lot of sticky plaster ha to be used to paste over cracks that appear in the absence of a framework, and it will never be as effective.
I'm not sure if I can find studies due to time.
Breaking his promise to protect Sure Start was one of the worst things David Cameron did imo, amongst a very long list of salami-sliced cuts.
I would like a government that tries things, sees if they measurably work and if they aren't providing value for the money spent then admits it and drops them. Measurements based on actual figures rather than soundbites and programmes which have a stated aim to measure against.
For example if they spent 10 billion on an adult literacy programme....if they increased adult literacy levels by 50% we might think it money well spent....if the programme only increased adult literacy by 1% however its obviously not providing value for the money spent and we should drop it and spend the 10 billion on something that does provide value, perhaps even a different adult literacy idea.
Too often we see things continue because its some politicians pet idea even if it is not working as intended.
Any initiative in my view should have a stated aim and measurable target and a timeframe to achieve that target
Ideally yes and if the difference is 1% or 50% a programme is likely to be unarguably positive or negative.
But with something like surestart the differences are both marginal and it wont be clear which costs and benefits are down to surestart and which are down to other changes like the economy, covid or technology. So the ideological will be able to produce plausible reports and analysis that show surestart is a great success and others a waste of money.
It will be very difficult for the voting public to know with confidence which is correct.
So it looks like most people can in fact cook "a main dish from basic ingredients", and many do cook five nights a week (when you account for people living together, 2/3rds is a lot of people), and confidence in cooking is not biased to any particular social demographic.
I mainly cook for 1, its only 4 the first sunday of every month. Sorry I don't believe that survey if 2/3 of the country are cooking 5 main meals a week why are we getting all the furore about the poor cant afford to cook decent meals and the proliferation of obese people due to ultra processed foods and take aways.
I'm going to go with "because stirring up a furore about how the poor can't cook sells newspapers and lets people feel smugly superior that they wouldn't make that kind of bad decision". Just World fallacy ("they are poor and overweight because they did the wrong things" is always popular.
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
No free money isn't morally corrosive. What I was trying to get across is continually making excuses for why people act the way they do is morally corrosive.
person A :I am obese because I live on take aways and ready meals
Farooq : Thats because you can't afford to buy ingredients, you dont have time to cook, you cant cook and can't be expected to learn.....take your pick of excuses as its definitely not your fault and you can't change it
person A: thanks Farooq now I feel better its not my fault I am fat its the governments and societies....heads off to mcDonalds
Hey, I'm looking for the truth, that's all.
Your idea that poor diet is due to laziness seems to chime badly with the fact that poor diet and overwork are correlated. People who are overworked are by definition not lazy, so perhaps it's a little more complicated than you suppose.
Define overworked? I have had periods in my life where I have had to work basically two more or less full time jobs to make ends meet. I still had enough time to cook. Poor diet is a choice. Once more you are handing them excuses and enabling them, telling them their diet is not there fault when it absolutely is.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Its a luxury because people aren't going hungry, so there's no "need" to learn as much as people had to in the past.
That's not such a bad thing.
A bag of apples costs less than a bag of crisps but people like crisps so choose to buy them.
Right, now we're getting somewhere. So people are driven to choices by things other than cost and effort. We also have preference on the table now, as well as the subtler point of convenience undermining the motivation to learn to do things the "hard" way. This is good work.
I'd say "Big Food" is the problem. A handful of transnational companies industrially manufacture all the edible products that supermarkets sell as food and advertise them as the perfect food for our lifestyle. It's chock full of cheap substitutes for natural ingredients that provide less nutrition than fresh cooked food and doesn't sate you as much. It's almost addictive as it hits the bliss point of salt, fat, and sweeteners to make you want more. And it's cheap, colourful and might even say the words "healthy" "low fat" "light" and "sugar free " on the labels. It's quick to prepare and eat, with little fibre in it and made to be soft so you eat quicker and want more. That's why poor people eat bad diets.
No analysis of the problem of poor diet is complete without including what you've just said. Thank you.
I think too that we cannot ignore that a lot of people lead pretty bleak lives, of relentless grind to make ends nearly meet, and simple pleasures are desired at the end of the day. Much the same reason poor people also smoke more, are more often addicts, have worse mental health, more STDs and unplanned pregnancies etc.
Working class motivation for self improvement, and upward mobility still exists as it always has, but has never been universal.
Quite often, we'd attend an incident in a councill house or flat on the Saff, or Brauny or Beaumont Leys, and the occupants would have nothing of any real worth in the place, but maybe a big TV and a PlayStation. It used to really get to me, the unending bleakness of the places we make people live in. When Goscote House was emptied, we had access to it for a few months as a training site (genuinely really useful, some if the most helpful training I ever did, even though it was later in my career! ) and the grimness of the place was overwhelming. 20 floors up, in a concrete block, windows that only open up an inch, scary, dangerous stairs, crime, drugs. We broke a door in during entry training to find the usual, basic, scruffy flat. One one small bedroom was a nursery, with nice baby wallpaper on, actual carpet and a mobile hanging above where the cot would have been. It really bought home to you how we treat those less well off, and how they still strive to create happiness. Are they lazy, or just not as fortunate as others?
Since it's Sunday Morning, it's the thing the Anglo Catholics (many of whom were politically on the left).
Material charity to lift people out of poverty. Education to keep them there. Beauty (for want of a better word) to soothe people's spirits to be able to process the other stuff profitably.
Even if you don't believe the underlying story, the beauty still works. Perhaps the lack of beauty is why post war socialism or Thatcherism struggled to lift people off the very bottom.
I was pondering 'lack of beauty' the other day. When I was a callow youth popular music was all about love. Nowadays the little I hear emanating from young people's cars seems to be all about hate.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
In rural areas they often are as they are just on call. And not only them. I had a partner in the Anstruther office of my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
A lot of small and medium towns still have the retained firefighters. One was a friend of the family growing up, he worked as a decorator during the day, but had a pager and needed to stay 5 mins away from the station. More than once his alarm went off in church, and he hurriedly tried to silence it as he exited via the side door.
The Fire Service couldn't function without retained (now called On Call) firefighters. The problem is retention. The Fire authority is legally bound to provide fire cover, but it's not affordable to have a whole time fire station in a village that gets minimal calls in its patch a month. So an on call station works but locals join, do some damn hard and time consuming training around their main job and family, qualify....then get no calls for days or even weeks at a time. In that time they have to keep their skills up via weekly training. They thought it was going to be like Chicago Fire, but it's more like Dad's Army so they lose motivation. But if there is a proper house fire in their patch, they are the only ones who can make it, with the nearest back up sometimes 10 or15 minutes away, longer if its a busy night elsewhere. They get paid a monthly retainer, and a firefighter hourly rate for actual jobs. For some, it ends up not being worth it.
I expect many do it for the adrenalin and the camaraderie rather than the money but you can only subsidise your hobbies so much.
Around here most firemen seem to spend most of their days cutting people out of smashed up cars. I suppose it depends on what sort of road network you have locally. The Dundee to Perth A90 keeps them pretty busy.
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Sadly, I think this is a series too far for Anderson and Broad.
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Sadly, I think this is a series too far for Anderson and Broad.
Not so much Broad but Jimmy is certainly well below his best. I would be amazed if he is in the next test.
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Sadly, I think this is a series too far for Anderson and Broad.
Broads been very good imo? Anderson been written off loads of times, I'd imagine still worthy of selection in the right conditions, not at all suited to first test, disappointing this one.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Its a luxury because people aren't going hungry, so there's no "need" to learn as much as people had to in the past.
That's not such a bad thing.
A bag of apples costs less than a bag of crisps but people like crisps so choose to buy them.
Right, now we're getting somewhere. So people are driven to choices by things other than cost and effort. We also have preference on the table now, as well as the subtler point of convenience undermining the motivation to learn to do things the "hard" way. This is good work.
I'd say "Big Food" is the problem. A handful of transnational companies industrially manufacture all the edible products that supermarkets sell as food and advertise them as the perfect food for our lifestyle. It's chock full of cheap substitutes for natural ingredients that provide less nutrition than fresh cooked food and doesn't sate you as much. It's almost addictive as it hits the bliss point of salt, fat, and sweeteners to make you want more. And it's cheap, colourful and might even say the words "healthy" "low fat" "light" and "sugar free " on the labels. It's quick to prepare and eat, with little fibre in it and made to be soft so you eat quicker and want more. That's why poor people eat bad diets.
No analysis of the problem of poor diet is complete without including what you've just said. Thank you.
I think too that we cannot ignore that a lot of people lead pretty bleak lives, of relentless grind to make ends nearly meet, and simple pleasures are desired at the end of the day. Much the same reason poor people also smoke more, are more often addicts, have worse mental health, more STDs and unplanned pregnancies etc.
Working class motivation for self improvement, and upward mobility still exists as it always has, but has never been universal.
Quite often, we'd attend an incident in a councill house or flat on the Saff, or Brauny or Beaumont Leys, and the occupants would have nothing of any real worth in the place, but maybe a big TV and a PlayStation. It used to really get to me, the unending bleakness of the places we make people live in. When Goscote House was emptied, we had access to it for a few months as a training site (genuinely really useful, some if the most helpful training I ever did, even though it was later in my career! ) and the grimness of the place was overwhelming. 20 floors up, in a concrete block, windows that only open up an inch, scary, dangerous stairs, crime, drugs. We broke a door in during entry training to find the usual, basic, scruffy flat. One one small bedroom was a nursery, with nice baby wallpaper on, actual carpet and a mobile hanging above where the cot would have been. It really bought home to you how we treat those less well off, and how they still strive to create happiness. Are they lazy, or just not as fortunate as others?
I am going to make a comparison here which might not be entirely accurate and I have not thought it through completely so please forgive me.
I see the poverty/lazy argument and how we handle it as coparable to the guilt/innocence of persons accused of a crime.
There are people who choose to commit crime and there are people (the vast majority) who do not. There are people in poverty who are lazy and feckless and there are people (the vast majority) who are not.
In the criminal justice system we have long ago decided that it is not always possible to identify who is guilty and who is not but the most important thing is that the innocent should go free rather than the guilty be caught. This does not mean we do not try to catch the guilty but it means that in the end we accept some will get away with it and that is better than someone innocent being punished. There are some who argue the opposite should be the norm. Better to punish all in the certainty that you will at least get the guilty ones.
In the world of poverty it seems we (or at least many in society as a whole) have adopted the exact opposite idea. It is better that the genuinely unfortunate should suffer rather than some of the feckless get away with it. Rather than putting more effort into identifying the feckless we would rather just punish all the poor and justify this on the basis that at least we are also punishing the feckless. At the same time the opposition to this is also unwilling to put effort into identifying the feckless and would do exactly the opposite - work on the basis that the feckless do not exist and every case is one of genuine misfortune.
It is perhaps inevitable that, given the scale of problems and the ever increasing size of the population, only broad sweep solutions are considered. But I can't help thinking that the answer - though I don't know exactly what it is - lies far more in treating each person as an individual case and handliung them accordingly, much as we still try to do in the criminal justice system.
That seems quite an unsatisfactory comment by me but I will post it anyway as I took long enough to write it and I think in the confused ramblings there is at least some truth.
It's all over for this lot. The prospect of 18 months of blocking while they hope something turns up is deeply depressing. If we are talking Tory Bazball, here's an idea. How about a surprise declaration to have a few overs at them while the conditions are dire?
It's all over for this lot. The prospect of 18 months of blocking while they hope something turns up is deeply depressing. If we are talking Tory Bazball, here's an idea. How about a surprise declaration to have a few overs at them while the conditions are dire?
So what’s starmer going to do that’s materially different ?
Swapping Tweedle Dee for Tweedle Dum achieves nothing
He’ll take the advice of Liz Truss and lead the growth coalition.
Biggest guaranteed growth policy: Rejoin the Single Market.
Starmer is the heir to Thatcher.
Yes yes young Eagles a bit of ramping.
But here we are with the “grown ups” in charge and the lie of the land is the same as Truss but with no prospect of much growth.
THe EU can’t provide it as they’re not particularly charging ahead of the UK and are as deep in the mire as we are
Starmer in office will be five years of deciding how many penises a woman can have and bribing doctors to do their jobs. Add in yet another slew of pointless laws and the country will be seizing up.
So again what’s he going to do that’s different?
The difference is we KNOW the Tories are clueless, we are living the reality. On the other hand we have PB Tories pontificating that Labour are going to hopeless.
We have CR telling us they are going to be really radical once the election is won and we have you telling us they will be no different to Sunak. In other words you don't really have a clue but are wishcasting according to your own prejudices.
The one group that will take a hit from Labour will be wealthy pensioners. Their unswerving support for the Tories means that they are the one group that Labour will we able to penalise without any electoral consequences for themselves. If Labour do nothing else it will be well overdue and I say that as one of them. Wealthy oldies are about to pay a heavy price.
Agree with the first bit. But your final paragraph is your own wishcasting.
Possibly but given the need for revenue it's hard to imagine wealthy OAPs being feather bedded in the way they have been under the Tories. I am certainly planning as though that will be the case.
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Sadly, I think this is a series too far for Anderson and Broad.
Broads been very good imo? Anderson been written off loads of times, I'd imagine still worthy of selection in the right conditions, not at all suited to first test, disappointing this one.
I suspect that Anderson will tell the selectors himself when his time is up. And it will be before the selectors think it is.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
Apologies for diving in again, and I'm nowhere near an expert, and probably the least educated fella on here (a few early 80s O Levels, a few factory jobs then 22 years putting out bin fires) but it is something that fascinates me. I've had lots of dealings with poverty, and been poor myself ( born in a Leicester council house in the 60s) and when I was a kid, money was tight, but we ate OKish. Lots of cottage pie and sausages and chips, cheap roasts, basic, but home cooked. The issue now is cultural, societal and as I bang on about, Big Food. We rely on technology to warm stuff up rather than cook it. Chemicals rather than actual food. Cooking from scratch costs time and money in ingredients and equipment. Poor people and busy people aren't lazy, they're just conditioned by society and Big Business to eat differently.
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Sadly, I think this is a series too far for Anderson and Broad.
Broads been very good imo? Anderson been written off loads of times, I'd imagine still worthy of selection in the right conditions, not at all suited to first test, disappointing this one.
Yes, hope I’m wrong. I think with Broad when the conditions are right I just expect him to produce a spell like that morning at Trent Bridge in 2015. Maybe he still has it in him.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
I though did not say it was laziness. I put it down to several things
1) Ultra processed food is an endorphin hit 2) Advertising driving it even the subtle form of seeing for example people in a film showing eating at a burger joint as a happy event 3) People making excuses and telling them its not their fault that they choose to eat like that 4) The fear factor of I have never cooked 5) Taking the easiest perceived path
1) We can and do regulate for what manufacturers can put into food....do we do enough probably not. 2) We banned advertising for cigarettes, frankly I am not sure we shouldn't have an end to fast food ads 3) Stop telling people its not their fault, we don't do that to our kids when raising them we teach them they are making choices and choices are down to them but have consequences or at least good parents do otherwise we enable them 4) I have suggest local authorities should run free courses to teach the basics of cooking 5) Not sure what to do about that one, and I used the word perceived advisedly. It often takes as long to wait for your burger to be cooked and ready as for example whipping up a cheese omelette....difference is you cant do the latter while glued to your phone.
5) Is where laziness comes in I would guess....I don't want to spend time cooking when I could be on instafacebookgram
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Sadly, I think this is a series too far for Anderson and Broad.
Broads been very good imo? Anderson been written off loads of times, I'd imagine still worthy of selection in the right conditions, not at all suited to first test, disappointing this one.
Yes, hope I’m wrong. I think with Broad when the conditions are right I just expect him to produce a spell like that morning at Trent Bridge in 2015. Maybe he still has it in him.
He is second globally in Test wickets for 2023 and was fourth in 2022. Perhaps not quite the time to write him off......
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Sadly, I think this is a series too far for Anderson and Broad.
Broads been very good imo? Anderson been written off loads of times, I'd imagine still worthy of selection in the right conditions, not at all suited to first test, disappointing this one.
Yes, hope I’m wrong. I think with Broad when the conditions are right I just expect him to produce a spell like that morning at Trent Bridge in 2015. Maybe he still has it in him.
He is second globally in Test wickets for 2023 and was fourth in 2022. Perhaps not quite the time to write him off......
Yes, that’s fair. But I’m conscious that he just passed his 37th birthday. And that is old for a pace bowler.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
Apologies for diving in again, and I'm nowhere near an expert, and probably the least educated fella on here (a few early 80s O Levels, a few factory jobs then 22 years putting out bin fires) but it is something that fascinates me. I've had lots of dealings with poverty, and been poor myself ( born in a Leicester council house in the 60s) and when I was a kid, money was tight, but we ate OKish. Lots of cottage pie and sausages and chips, cheap roasts, basic, but home cooked. The issue now is cultural, societal and as I bang on about, Big Food. We rely on technology to warm stuff up rather than cook it. Chemicals rather than actual food. Cooking from scratch costs time and money in ingredients and equipment. Poor people and busy people aren't lazy, they're just conditioned by society and Big Business to eat differently.
I think that, when there are children in a household there’s a great deal to be said for one parent being at home. One of today’s problems is that both rents and house purchase costs assume that both parents work. TWS lived in a house where the rent was such that that wasn’t necessary. My teacher grandchildren, parents of our great-grandson, don’t; they’re looking to a time when both of them will be working because otherwise they can’t afford the mortgage.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
No free money isn't morally corrosive. What I was trying to get across is continually making excuses for why people act the way they do is morally corrosive.
person A :I am obese because I live on take aways and ready meals
Farooq : Thats because you can't afford to buy ingredients, you dont have time to cook, you cant cook and can't be expected to learn.....take your pick of excuses as its definitely not your fault and you can't change it
person A: thanks Farooq now I feel better its not my fault I am fat its the governments and societies....heads off to mcDonalds
Speaking for myself, when I indulge in ready meals and freezer food it’s more about mental capacity than actual time. Sure I could whip up something in 30 minutes but then I’d have to think about what I’m cooking, make sure I have the ingredients and wash up afterwards. Sometimes it’s lovely to come home and just know I have one thing to shove in the oven.
In my case it’s 100% an excuse but I can imagine if I had a really horrible shift job, had several kids to look after alone etc then it would be a temptation I’d give into more often. We don’t have to endorse it as a choice but we shouldn’t judge it either.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
In rural areas they often are as they are just on call. And not only them. I had a partner in the Anstruther office of my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
A lot of small and medium towns still have the retained firefighters. One was a friend of the family growing up, he worked as a decorator during the day, but had a pager and needed to stay 5 mins away from the station. More than once his alarm went off in church, and he hurriedly tried to silence it as he exited via the side door.
The Fire Service couldn't function without retained (now called On Call) firefighters. The problem is retention. The Fire authority is legally bound to provide fire cover, but it's not affordable to have a whole time fire station in a village that gets minimal calls in its patch a month. So an on call station works but locals join, do some damn hard and time consuming training around their main job and family, qualify....then get no calls for days or even weeks at a time. In that time they have to keep their skills up via weekly training. They thought it was going to be like Chicago Fire, but it's more like Dad's Army so they lose motivation. But if there is a proper house fire in their patch, they are the only ones who can make it, with the nearest back up sometimes 10 or15 minutes away, longer if its a busy night elsewhere. They get paid a monthly retainer, and a firefighter hourly rate for actual jobs. For some, it ends up not being worth it.
Slightly related - had a mishap in the Cairngorms recently (friend, broken leg) and within 2 hours of me calling 999 we had 10 members of the local mountain rescue team fell running and ATVing up the mountain. Including two paramedics, an off duty coastguard pilot and loads of outdoor instructors.
They don't have any issues with membership or people signing up for training, and it's entirely voluntary. I wonder what the difference is with the fire service?
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
Apologies for diving in again, and I'm nowhere near an expert, and probably the least educated fella on here (a few early 80s O Levels, a few factory jobs then 22 years putting out bin fires) but it is something that fascinates me. I've had lots of dealings with poverty, and been poor myself ( born in a Leicester council house in the 60s) and when I was a kid, money was tight, but we ate OKish. Lots of cottage pie and sausages and chips, cheap roasts, basic, but home cooked. The issue now is cultural, societal and as I bang on about, Big Food. We rely on technology to warm stuff up rather than cook it. Chemicals rather than actual food. Cooking from scratch costs time and money in ingredients and equipment. Poor people and busy people aren't lazy, they're just conditioned by society and Big Business to eat differently.
I've sometimes wondered if the rise of the TV Chef has a part to play. Our little inner monkey brains getting so see delicious nutritious (sometimes) food being cooked then spooning cheap processed food down our necks but still with that little pristine TV image in our heads.
Also, I've known some rather wealthy people who live off ready meals and couldn't cook even some boiled spuds without some hand-holding. So I'm not sure it's just confined to the poor.
Also when poor people do a 'bad thing' it's generally frowned on much more than if a relatively wealthy person does it. By and large anyway. Poor person who necks a bottle of wine every night - alky! Get social services involved! Middle-class person who necks a bottle of wine every night - bon viveur! And besides - they drink good wine. Not that Echo Falls stuff.
It’s not a blow to Sunak, but rather another example of our offshoring the benefits of U.K. research and development.
Free market, open investment, and zero effective industrial policy, together regularly mean we lose businesses overseas after they start up here. In a similar manner to that in which we’ve allowed much of the benefits of running privatised monopolies to go offshore.
Clearly the opposite if all this - statist policies - isn’t really the answer either. But the consensus Thatcher established has proven economically malign for much of the country. Those at the center of power have done fine out of it, so I’m not sure many of them are really even fully aware of the process - or they don’t give a damn.
During Thatcher's time the UK ran a trade surplus and wealth creation was valued.
Now all parties have the same strategy of increasing wealth consumption, in particular increasing wealth consumption among their voter bases.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
I though did not say it was laziness. I put it down to several things
1) Ultra processed food is an endorphin hit 2) Advertising driving it even the subtle form of seeing for example people in a film showing eating at a burger joint as a happy event 3) People making excuses and telling them its not their fault that they choose to eat like that 4) The fear factor of I have never cooked 5) Taking the easiest perceived path
1) We can and do regulate for what manufacturers can put into food....do we do enough probably not. 2) We banned advertising for cigarettes, frankly I am not sure we shouldn't have an end to fast food ads 3) Stop telling people its not their fault, we don't do that to our kids when raising them we teach them they are making choices and choices are down to them but have consequences or at least good parents do otherwise we enable them 4) I have suggest local authorities should run free courses to teach the basics of cooking 5) Not sure what to do about that one, and I used the word perceived advisedly. It often takes as long to wait for your burger to be cooked and ready as for example whipping up a cheese omelette....difference is you cant do the latter while glued to your phone.
5) Is where laziness comes in I would guess....I don't want to spend time cooking when I could be on instafacebookgram
Hard to argue with any of that. Social media has been good in one respect - cooking well is seen as a cool thing to do, and podcasts make cooking (indeed all "chores") much easier to get through.
Starc once again looking the most dangerous of the Aussie bowlers. Still don't understand the decision not to play him in the first test. Surely in for the rest of the series now.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
Can't last 5 tests. Management of fast bowlers is better nowadays and more important as they are even less used to the stresses of tests with all the focus on one day and t20 cricket.
Sadly, I think this is a series too far for Anderson and Broad.
Broads been very good imo? Anderson been written off loads of times, I'd imagine still worthy of selection in the right conditions, not at all suited to first test, disappointing this one.
Yes, hope I’m wrong. I think with Broad when the conditions are right I just expect him to produce a spell like that morning at Trent Bridge in 2015. Maybe he still has it in him.
He is second globally in Test wickets for 2023 and was fourth in 2022. Perhaps not quite the time to write him off......
Yes, that’s fair. But I’m conscious that he just passed his 37th birthday. And that is old for a pace bowler.
So was 34,35 and 36 and he was fine. I think its quite different at the moment. The experience of Broad and Anderson very important vs the younger generation who play very limited longform cricket and they can train their bodies for longform cricket whereas the younger ones are trying to do all formats.
Pick on form, conditions and injury prevention, but not age.
It's all over for this lot. The prospect of 18 months of blocking while they hope something turns up is deeply depressing. If we are talking Tory Bazball, here's an idea. How about a surprise declaration to have a few overs at them while the conditions are dire?
It's all over for this lot. The prospect of 18 months of blocking while they hope something turns up is deeply depressing. If we are talking Tory Bazball, here's an idea. How about a surprise declaration to have a few overs at them while the conditions are dire?
So what’s starmer going to do that’s materially different ?
Swapping Tweedle Dee for Tweedle Dum achieves nothing
He’ll take the advice of Liz Truss and lead the growth coalition.
Biggest guaranteed growth policy: Rejoin the Single Market.
Starmer is the heir to Thatcher.
Yes yes young Eagles a bit of ramping.
But here we are with the “grown ups” in charge and the lie of the land is the same as Truss but with no prospect of much growth.
THe EU can’t provide it as they’re not particularly charging ahead of the UK and are as deep in the mire as we are
Starmer in office will be five years of deciding how many penises a woman can have and bribing doctors to do their jobs. Add in yet another slew of pointless laws and the country will be seizing up.
So again what’s he going to do that’s different?
The difference is we KNOW the Tories are clueless, we are living the reality. On the other hand we have PB Tories pontificating that Labour are going to hopeless.
We have CR telling us they are going to be really radical once the election is won and we have you telling us they will be no different to Sunak. In other words you don't really have a clue but are wishcasting according to your own prejudices.
The one group that will take a hit from Labour will be wealthy pensioners. Their unswerving support for the Tories means that they are the one group that Labour will we able to penalise without any electoral consequences for themselves. If Labour do nothing else it will be well overdue and I say that as one of them. Wealthy oldies are about to pay a heavy price.
High earners will also almost certainly take a hit, with Labour restoring the 50% top income tax rate for those earning over £125k a year. As well as imposing a wealth tax on wealthy home owning pensioners and ending relief on tax on private pensions
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
I though did not say it was laziness. I put it down to several things
1) Ultra processed food is an endorphin hit 2) Advertising driving it even the subtle form of seeing for example people in a film showing eating at a burger joint as a happy event 3) People making excuses and telling them its not their fault that they choose to eat like that 4) The fear factor of I have never cooked 5) Taking the easiest perceived path
1) We can and do regulate for what manufacturers can put into food....do we do enough probably not. 2) We banned advertising for cigarettes, frankly I am not sure we shouldn't have an end to fast food ads 3) Stop telling people its not their fault, we don't do that to our kids when raising them we teach them they are making choices and choices are down to them but have consequences or at least good parents do otherwise we enable them 4) I have suggest local authorities should run free courses to teach the basics of cooking 5) Not sure what to do about that one, and I used the word perceived advisedly. It often takes as long to wait for your burger to be cooked and ready as for example whipping up a cheese omelette....difference is you cant do the latter while glued to your phone.
5) Is where laziness comes in I would guess....I don't want to spend time cooking when I could be on instafacebookgram
Love this. 90% of this thread is on PB and watching the cricket, and moaning about the outgroup being on facebook and watching jeremy kyle.
What's the PB view on this poll in Telegraph showing Lab winning mid beds?
It's obviously going to be used again and again in Labour literature there if there's a by-election (or even at the GE). Up to now the assumption has been that it's more of a LibDem target, and some of that thinking may persist, so the risk of a split non-Tory vote enabling the Tories to hold on is probably greater.
What stands out in the poll is Gareth Mackey, an independent, is in third place on 19%, and Reform UK are doing pretty well on 10% (fifth). That’s 29% of the vote that looks very squeezable by any party with sufficient boots on the ground. There’s a large not-Tory vote that could move around.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
In rural areas they often are as they are just on call. And not only them. I had a partner in the Anstruther office of my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
A lot of small and medium towns still have the retained firefighters. One was a friend of the family growing up, he worked as a decorator during the day, but had a pager and needed to stay 5 mins away from the station. More than once his alarm went off in church, and he hurriedly tried to silence it as he exited via the side door.
The Fire Service couldn't function without retained (now called On Call) firefighters. The problem is retention. The Fire authority is legally bound to provide fire cover, but it's not affordable to have a whole time fire station in a village that gets minimal calls in its patch a month. So an on call station works but locals join, do some damn hard and time consuming training around their main job and family, qualify....then get no calls for days or even weeks at a time. In that time they have to keep their skills up via weekly training. They thought it was going to be like Chicago Fire, but it's more like Dad's Army so they lose motivation. But if there is a proper house fire in their patch, they are the only ones who can make it, with the nearest back up sometimes 10 or15 minutes away, longer if its a busy night elsewhere. They get paid a monthly retainer, and a firefighter hourly rate for actual jobs. For some, it ends up not being worth it.
Slightly related - had a mishap in the Cairngorms recently (friend, broken leg) and within 2 hours of me calling 999 we had 10 members of the local mountain rescue team fell running and ATVing up the mountain. Including two paramedics, an off duty coastguard pilot and loads of outdoor instructors.
They don't have any issues with membership or people signing up for training, and it's entirely voluntary. I wonder what the difference is with the fire service?
I'm not sure why the FS is different, but the main criteria for joining an On Call Station is that you have to be able to get to the station within 4 minutes of your alerter going, at normal road speed and following the highway code. In a posh little village, none of the lawyers/doctors/accountants or farmers are going to want to get involved, so you're fishing in a very small pool, for not much glory or treasure.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Its a luxury because people aren't going hungry, so there's no "need" to learn as much as people had to in the past.
That's not such a bad thing.
A bag of apples costs less than a bag of crisps but people like crisps so choose to buy them.
Right, now we're getting somewhere. So people are driven to choices by things other than cost and effort. We also have preference on the table now, as well as the subtler point of convenience undermining the motivation to learn to do things the "hard" way. This is good work.
I'd say "Big Food" is the problem. A handful of transnational companies industrially manufacture all the edible products that supermarkets sell as food and advertise them as the perfect food for our lifestyle. It's chock full of cheap substitutes for natural ingredients that provide less nutrition than fresh cooked food and doesn't sate you as much. It's almost addictive as it hits the bliss point of salt, fat, and sweeteners to make you want more. And it's cheap, colourful and might even say the words "healthy" "low fat" "light" and "sugar free " on the labels. It's quick to prepare and eat, with little fibre in it and made to be soft so you eat quicker and want more. That's why poor people eat bad diets.
No analysis of the problem of poor diet is complete without including what you've just said. Thank you.
I think too that we cannot ignore that a lot of people lead pretty bleak lives, of relentless grind to make ends nearly meet, and simple pleasures are desired at the end of the day. Much the same reason poor people also smoke more, are more often addicts, have worse mental health, more STDs and unplanned pregnancies etc.
Working class motivation for self improvement, and upward mobility still exists as it always has, but has never been universal.
To quote Orwell :
“Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.”
Russian missiles are built with western machinery, contd.
Between 2016-2020 the Votkinsk Plant, sole producer of the solid-propellant missiles (ICBM Yars, SLBM Bulava, ballistic missiles for the SRBM Iskander) in Russia constructed a new forging plant. It ordered the forging press from the Danieli Breda https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1675459630032461825
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
No free money isn't morally corrosive. What I was trying to get across is continually making excuses for why people act the way they do is morally corrosive.
person A :I am obese because I live on take aways and ready meals
Farooq : Thats because you can't afford to buy ingredients, you dont have time to cook, you cant cook and can't be expected to learn.....take your pick of excuses as its definitely not your fault and you can't change it
person A: thanks Farooq now I feel better its not my fault I am fat its the governments and societies....heads off to mcDonalds
Easy come easy go , if it is free it is not respected
The BBC is free and respected. The NHS is free and respected.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
I though did not say it was laziness. I put it down to several things
1) Ultra processed food is an endorphin hit 2) Advertising driving it even the subtle form of seeing for example people in a film showing eating at a burger joint as a happy event 3) People making excuses and telling them its not their fault that they choose to eat like that 4) The fear factor of I have never cooked 5) Taking the easiest perceived path
1) We can and do regulate for what manufacturers can put into food....do we do enough probably not. 2) We banned advertising for cigarettes, frankly I am not sure we shouldn't have an end to fast food ads 3) Stop telling people its not their fault, we don't do that to our kids when raising them we teach them they are making choices and choices are down to them but have consequences or at least good parents do otherwise we enable them 4) I have suggest local authorities should run free courses to teach the basics of cooking 5) Not sure what to do about that one, and I used the word perceived advisedly. It often takes as long to wait for your burger to be cooked and ready as for example whipping up a cheese omelette....difference is you cant do the latter while glued to your phone.
5) Is where laziness comes in I would guess....I don't want to spend time cooking when I could be on instafacebookgram
Love this. 90% of this thread is on PB and watching the cricket, and moaning about the outgroup being on facebook and watching jeremy kyle.
That’s not entirely fair. Some of us are watching the motor racing.
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Well they do have people like Peter Mandelson advising them.
Why not forgive student date, a portion for each year worked in the state sector. Same with younger junior doctors.
That would be a sensible idea for itself, but I'm not sure how much use it would be. People don't tend to work for abstract accounting principles. Teachers already quit even though the pension remains decent, for example.
There are economies you could make in education that would help. For example, abolishing SATS, OFQUAL and the DfE. None of them fulfil any useful purpose whatsoever, cost an absolute fortune, and indeed take up a lot of time and money that could spent on far more useful things. You could even add GCSEs to that, particularly given how badly designed the current set are.
But I very much doubt if Labour, who have always had centralising tendencies, would make them.
The risk is that this pledge unless they can show where the money would come from would be like the Tory pay rises - as there is no funding, they would come out of school budgets and make them even more impossible to balance.
There is a lot to be said for abolishing GCSEs which serve no useful function now the school-leaving age has been raised. They are no longer needed for jobs or further study.
As for Labour saying where the money will come from, they do. It's in your linked article. You clearly do not believe them but that is a different matter.
Surely GCSEs cover wider areas of study, and A-levels narrower? If you do nine GCSEs and three A-levels, then the GCSEs indicate your breadth of knowledge outside the A-levels you chose?
I'm not saying children should start school at 16, so the broad education can still take place. However, GCSEs as a qualification are no longer interesting or useful like they used to be when most people left school at 16.
Must be in England only, people still leave at 16 in Scotland and if going into further education in colleges need GCSE's.
You can leave school on the last Friday in June if you’ll be 16 by the end of the summer holidays.
You must then do one of the following until you’re 18:
-stay in full-time education, for example at a college -start an apprenticeship or traineeship -spend 20 hours or more a week working or volunteering, while in part-time education or training
(Probably unintentionally) revealing from Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times;
At Winchester, Oxford, Stanford, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, Sunak was told that if he worked hard and solved problems, he would succeed in life. But political reward is more hard won. One cabinet minister put it this way: “In his mind the deal he struck with the universe is not working out. He’s very clever, but he knows that with cleverness comes responsibility to graft ... But if you work hard and do the right thing, the universe will reward you — and in his mind at the moment the universe is not keeping its side of the bargain.”
It's the risk with meritocracy, that those who succeed under it conclude that all their success is down to their talents and efforts, ignoring the inevitable contribution of luck. And whilst it can be a useful star to navigate your own life by, it's potentially a dangerous belief to have when leading a society.
Unfortunately to win a general election you need to win skilled working class and lower middle class voters in marginal seats. They are less easy for a very intelligent, very rich man to know how to appeal to than public school teachers, Oxford tutors and bankers and big corporate executives
What a shame they got given the vote, eh? Very unfair.
It was a comment from Rishi's perspective. I didn't say anything about rolling back the franchise to pre 1832 levels.
Blair and Boris and to an extent Cameron whatever you think of them could appeal to the average voter, Rishi is intelligent and competent but doesn't have the same natural charisma and appeal they had.
It is often said too Thatcher spent her early life trying to advance from the lower middle class to the upper middle class via Oxford and the law and her rich husband, before realising as a politician she needed to connect again with the lower middle classes she was raised with if she was to win elections!
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Its a luxury because people aren't going hungry, so there's no "need" to learn as much as people had to in the past.
That's not such a bad thing.
A bag of apples costs less than a bag of crisps but people like crisps so choose to buy them.
Right, now we're getting somewhere. So people are driven to choices by things other than cost and effort. We also have preference on the table now, as well as the subtler point of convenience undermining the motivation to learn to do things the "hard" way. This is good work.
I'd say "Big Food" is the problem. A handful of transnational companies industrially manufacture all the edible products that supermarkets sell as food and advertise them as the perfect food for our lifestyle. It's chock full of cheap substitutes for natural ingredients that provide less nutrition than fresh cooked food and doesn't sate you as much. It's almost addictive as it hits the bliss point of salt, fat, and sweeteners to make you want more. And it's cheap, colourful and might even say the words "healthy" "low fat" "light" and "sugar free " on the labels. It's quick to prepare and eat, with little fibre in it and made to be soft so you eat quicker and want more. That's why poor people eat bad diets.
No analysis of the problem of poor diet is complete without including what you've just said. Thank you.
I think too that we cannot ignore that a lot of people lead pretty bleak lives, of relentless grind to make ends nearly meet, and simple pleasures are desired at the end of the day. Much the same reason poor people also smoke more, are more often addicts, have worse mental health, more STDs and unplanned pregnancies etc.
Working class motivation for self improvement, and upward mobility still exists as it always has, but has never been universal.
To quote Orwell :
“Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.”
Misses the point, which is that nutrition is calories before it is anything else. You will die much quicker on a diet of organic raw carrot and ryvita and spring water, than on deep fried stuffed crust pizza and irn bru.
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
I though did not say it was laziness. I put it down to several things
1) Ultra processed food is an endorphin hit 2) Advertising driving it even the subtle form of seeing for example people in a film showing eating at a burger joint as a happy event 3) People making excuses and telling them its not their fault that they choose to eat like that 4) The fear factor of I have never cooked 5) Taking the easiest perceived path
1) We can and do regulate for what manufacturers can put into food....do we do enough probably not. 2) We banned advertising for cigarettes, frankly I am not sure we shouldn't have an end to fast food ads 3) Stop telling people its not their fault, we don't do that to our kids when raising them we teach them they are making choices and choices are down to them but have consequences or at least good parents do otherwise we enable them 4) I have suggest local authorities should run free courses to teach the basics of cooking 5) Not sure what to do about that one, and I used the word perceived advisedly. It often takes as long to wait for your burger to be cooked and ready as for example whipping up a cheese omelette....difference is you cant do the latter while glued to your phone.
5) Is where laziness comes in I would guess....I don't want to spend time cooking when I could be on instafacebookgram
Hard to argue with any of that. Social media has been good in one respect - cooking well is seen as a cool thing to do, and podcasts make cooking (indeed all "chores") much easier to get through.
Might even inspire one to grate a bit of Parmesan. The UK doesn’t really have a food culture (that is Pa and Ma normal going down the market to buy fresh ingredients rather than watch cooking programmes and buying Tesco Finest ready meal deals) like say Spain or Italy, and probably never will at this late stage.
I'm hoping the match is over before the start of the Grand Prix at 2pm.
At least Leon is getting a few hours of cricket to view in between slips of a ice cool glass of vino. He could easily have been packing up to come home before getting through his first bottle.
I notice that although I live a long way from Selby, the emails from Labour are now ignoring Uxbridge and urging me to pitch into the "marginal" of Selby. I've yet to receive a request to go to Somerton and think that the party is concentrating entirely on winning the other two.
LDs focusing on Somerton, so Labour focusing on Selby and on that Opinium poll putting them not the LDs ahead in Mid Beds will push there too if Dorries does stand down.
Uxbridge it seems Labour now taking for granted as a gain. Yet with a strong pro Rishi Hindu vote there, still a Tory held council and the Tory candidate a local councillor and the Labour candidate from Camden sounds a bit complacent
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
In rural areas they often are as they are just on call. And not only them. I had a partner in the Anstruther office of my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
A lot of small and medium towns still have the retained firefighters. One was a friend of the family growing up, he worked as a decorator during the day, but had a pager and needed to stay 5 mins away from the station. More than once his alarm went off in church, and he hurriedly tried to silence it as he exited via the side door.
The Fire Service couldn't function without retained (now called On Call) firefighters. The problem is retention. The Fire authority is legally bound to provide fire cover, but it's not affordable to have a whole time fire station in a village that gets minimal calls in its patch a month. So an on call station works but locals join, do some damn hard and time consuming training around their main job and family, qualify....then get no calls for days or even weeks at a time. In that time they have to keep their skills up via weekly training. They thought it was going to be like Chicago Fire, but it's more like Dad's Army so they lose motivation. But if there is a proper house fire in their patch, they are the only ones who can make it, with the nearest back up sometimes 10 or15 minutes away, longer if its a busy night elsewhere. They get paid a monthly retainer, and a firefighter hourly rate for actual jobs. For some, it ends up not being worth it.
Slightly related - had a mishap in the Cairngorms recently (friend, broken leg) and within 2 hours of me calling 999 we had 10 members of the local mountain rescue team fell running and ATVing up the mountain. Including two paramedics, an off duty coastguard pilot and loads of outdoor instructors.
They don't have any issues with membership or people signing up for training, and it's entirely voluntary. I wonder what the difference is with the fire service?
I'm not sure why the FS is different, but the main criteria for joining an On Call Station is that you have to be able to get to the station within 4 minutes of your alerter going, at normal road speed and following the highway code. In a posh little village, none of the lawyers/doctors/accountants or farmers are going to want to get involved, so you're fishing in a very small pool, for not much glory or treasure.
Hmm, in many a village, the lawyers etc will have houses there as second homes/holiday/weekend which doesn't help either.
I'm hoping the match is over before the start of the Grand Prix at 2pm.
At least Leon is getting a few hours of cricket to view in between slips of a ice cool glass of vino. He could easily have been packing up to come home before getting through his first bottle.
He’s in the slips? Thought the fielding has been better than that today.
Some good news for Rishi, Nigel Farage considering emigrating after he is denied a UK bank account. '"I've been considering over the course of the day, my options, I've spent time talking to lawyers, I've been considering legal action. I've been asking myself whether frankly, it's even worth staying in this country," he said." https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/30/brexit-leader-nigel-farage-considering-leaving-britain Perhaps a pad in Florida, near Mar a Lago?
They’ve already pledged all and indeed far more than the money that ‘abolishing tax breaks for private schools’ would raise for other things. So how will they pay for this?
Question - what is the cost of *not* paying to stop teachers quitting? I agree that spending the same money repeatedly is silly. But this is not a zero-sum transaction, where there is only cost on one side.
Where’s the research to show this would prevent quitting in any numbers to be cost effective. It’s just a headline grabbing initiative.
The cost of retaining these maths teachers through the policy is 32% lower than simply recruiting and training 104 additional teachers. Not only does this make the policy extremely cost-effective, it also means that there is an increase in the number of experienced maths teachers in the classroom.
As with much of the public sector we are well beyond the point at which reducing real terms pay saves any money, unless we are willing to reduce significanly the scope of what is covered. Otherwise we just end up with demotivated and stressed staff, increased time off sick, expensive "temporary" cover as an ongoing solution, and a lack of continuity and experience.
It is a nonsensical saving that clashes with reality.
It is interesting to see that the NHS workforce plan envisions a system where a lot of healthcare is delivered by health care associates in order to free up time for experienced clinicians to train:
There really are limits to how many people I can clinically supervise and train at one time.
As a matter of interest, does it really bother people on the receiving end of NHS care that a lot of stuff is qoing to be delivered by non-professional associates, or that medical and other degrees are going to be shortened?
Some care is better than dying on a waiting list.
A lot of care on hospital wards could be done by people without the skills and training we currently give to nurses. We have created a system with far too many chiefs and not nearly enough Indians. If these "associates" fill the latter roles it could be a good thing.
I was at an out patients appointment recently. There were several nurses hanging around the desk looking for something to do, or frankly not that bothered. Every now and again one would wander off to weigh a patient or collect someone's papers to take into the consultant for that appointment whilst the consultant was working his arse off trying to get through long lists of complex appointments.
I've no doubt that there were other nurses running themselves ragged in the same hospital trying to cope but the inefficiency and waste of resources was painful to see. All the work of fetching and weighing could be done by associates and those nurses should have been on the ward or in the operating theatres, etc.
That's 100% activity fallacy. On those grounds you'd abolish 99% of prison warders. They do nowt but sit around. There's only a riot or an assault every so often.
Sack the Fire Service, lazy bastards!
Quite right - productivity in the fire service is dreadful. Firefighters should be on zero-hours contracts, and can be called in when needed.
In rural areas they often are as they are just on call. And not only them. I had a partner in the Anstruther office of my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
A lot of small and medium towns still have the retained firefighters. One was a friend of the family growing up, he worked as a decorator during the day, but had a pager and needed to stay 5 mins away from the station. More than once his alarm went off in church, and he hurriedly tried to silence it as he exited via the side door.
The Fire Service couldn't function without retained (now called On Call) firefighters. The problem is retention. The Fire authority is legally bound to provide fire cover, but it's not affordable to have a whole time fire station in a village that gets minimal calls in its patch a month. So an on call station works but locals join, do some damn hard and time consuming training around their main job and family, qualify....then get no calls for days or even weeks at a time. In that time they have to keep their skills up via weekly training. They thought it was going to be like Chicago Fire, but it's more like Dad's Army so they lose motivation. But if there is a proper house fire in their patch, they are the only ones who can make it, with the nearest back up sometimes 10 or15 minutes away, longer if its a busy night elsewhere. They get paid a monthly retainer, and a firefighter hourly rate for actual jobs. For some, it ends up not being worth it.
Slightly related - had a mishap in the Cairngorms recently (friend, broken leg) and within 2 hours of me calling 999 we had 10 members of the local mountain rescue team fell running and ATVing up the mountain. Including two paramedics, an off duty coastguard pilot and loads of outdoor instructors.
They don't have any issues with membership or people signing up for training, and it's entirely voluntary. I wonder what the difference is with the fire service?
I'm not sure why the FS is different, but the main criteria for joining an On Call Station is that you have to be able to get to the station within 4 minutes of your alerter going, at normal road speed and following the highway code. In a posh little village, none of the lawyers/doctors/accountants or farmers are going to want to get involved, so you're fishing in a very small pool, for not much glory or treasure.
Ah, I think I've conflated volunteer firefights and retained. Where I grew up we had lots of the former.
Here's an idea which I don't think I've ever heard mentioned but does, I think, have real world merit.
Its not the effort in cooking which puts people off but the effort in washing up afterwards.
The affluent have dishwashers and so have minimal washing up, takeaways also have minimal washing up and eating out has none.
But to personally wash a big pile of pans and plates after you've eaten really is such a drag that it pushes people to an easier option.
Cue how can those dole scroungers afford 50” tvs, smartphones, 40 fags a day AND a dishwasher.
More to the point, produce food almost instantly for by now very hungry children after coming home, perhaps late, from a day at work, too. Or do you let them feed themselves an hour or two earlier with pizza and oven chips etc.? Edit: I now see as already adumbrated by @Stereodog .
A lot of the dole scroungers of DM fantasy are working for a living.
At least Leon is getting a few hours of cricket to view in between slips of a ice cool glass of vino. He could easily have been packing up to come home before getting through his first bottle.
Whilst popping diet pills and booking a table at Le Gavroche. (No idea what that place is like, just googled "London expensive restaurants)!
(Probably unintentionally) revealing from Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times;
At Winchester, Oxford, Stanford, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, Sunak was told that if he worked hard and solved problems, he would succeed in life. But political reward is more hard won. One cabinet minister put it this way: “In his mind the deal he struck with the universe is not working out. He’s very clever, but he knows that with cleverness comes responsibility to graft ... But if you work hard and do the right thing, the universe will reward you — and in his mind at the moment the universe is not keeping its side of the bargain.”
It's the risk with meritocracy, that those who succeed under it conclude that all their success is down to their talents and efforts, ignoring the inevitable contribution of luck. And whilst it can be a useful star to navigate your own life by, it's potentially a dangerous belief to have when leading a society.
Unfortunately to win a general election you need to win skilled working class and lower middle class voters in marginal seats. They are less easy for a very intelligent, very rich man to know how to appeal to than public school teachers, Oxford tutors and bankers and big corporate executives
What a shame they got given the vote, eh? Very unfair.
Phase 2 of election reforms started with voter ID?
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Its a luxury because people aren't going hungry, so there's no "need" to learn as much as people had to in the past.
That's not such a bad thing.
A bag of apples costs less than a bag of crisps but people like crisps so choose to buy them.
Right, now we're getting somewhere. So people are driven to choices by things other than cost and effort. We also have preference on the table now, as well as the subtler point of convenience undermining the motivation to learn to do things the "hard" way. This is good work.
I'd say "Big Food" is the problem. A handful of transnational companies industrially manufacture all the edible products that supermarkets sell as food and advertise them as the perfect food for our lifestyle. It's chock full of cheap substitutes for natural ingredients that provide less nutrition than fresh cooked food and doesn't sate you as much. It's almost addictive as it hits the bliss point of salt, fat, and sweeteners to make you want more. And it's cheap, colourful and might even say the words "healthy" "low fat" "light" and "sugar free " on the labels. It's quick to prepare and eat, with little fibre in it and made to be soft so you eat quicker and want more. That's why poor people eat bad diets.
No analysis of the problem of poor diet is complete without including what you've just said. Thank you.
I think too that we cannot ignore that a lot of people lead pretty bleak lives, of relentless grind to make ends nearly meet, and simple pleasures are desired at the end of the day. Much the same reason poor people also smoke more, are more often addicts, have worse mental health, more STDs and unplanned pregnancies etc.
Working class motivation for self improvement, and upward mobility still exists as it always has, but has never been universal.
Quite often, we'd attend an incident in a councill house or flat on the Saff, or Brauny or Beaumont Leys, and the occupants would have nothing of any real worth in the place, but maybe a big TV and a PlayStation. It used to really get to me, the unending bleakness of the places we make people live in. When Goscote House was emptied, we had access to it for a few months as a training site (genuinely really useful, some if the most helpful training I ever did, even though it was later in my career! ) and the grimness of the place was overwhelming. 20 floors up, in a concrete block, windows that only open up an inch, scary, dangerous stairs, crime, drugs. We broke a door in during entry training to find the usual, basic, scruffy flat. One one small bedroom was a nursery, with nice baby wallpaper on, actual carpet and a mobile hanging above where the cot would have been. It really bought home to you how we treat those less well off, and how they still strive to create happiness. Are they lazy, or just not as fortunate as others?
Since it's Sunday Morning, it's the thing the Anglo Catholics (many of whom were politically on the left).
Material charity to lift people out of poverty. Education to keep them there. Beauty (for want of a better word) to soothe people's spirits to be able to process the other stuff profitably.
Even if you don't believe the underlying story, the beauty still works. Perhaps the lack of beauty is why post war socialism or Thatcherism struggled to lift people off the very bottom.
I was pondering 'lack of beauty' the other day. When I was a callow youth popular music was all about love. Nowadays the little I hear emanating from young people's cars seems to be all about hate.
#3 in the single chart, “Miracle” by Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding: When you hold me There's a place I go It's a different high Oh, no When you touch me I get vulnerable In a different light Oh, no
#4, “Giving Me” by Jazzy: This feeling that I know you're giving me No lies or loving me, hugging me, touching me
#5, “Dancing is Healing”, by Rudimental etc.: Dancin' is healin', love is the answer Dancin' is healin', love is the answer, yeah, yeah, yeah When you need space, when you need time, when it gets heavy on your mind When you lose faith, put your hand in mine, when it gets heavy Dancin' is healin', love is the answer
Could we combine 1 and 2 and send our pensioners to Rwanda? The state pension would stretch a lot further there - heating bills are zero - and we have already established that Rwanda is a land of unprecedented opportunities with an unblemished human rights record so nobody could possibly object to being sent there. I bet they've got trad toilets, too. It's a 3 in 1 policy with something for everybody, Tory victory nailed on.
At least Leon is getting a few hours of cricket to view in between slips of a ice cool glass of vino. He could easily have been packing up to come home before getting through his first bottle.
Whilst popping diet pills and booking a table at Le Gavroche. (No idea what that place is like, just googled "London expensive restaurants)!
Was it the 80s where speed was marketed as diet pills. Can you imagine Leon on those things.
At least Leon is getting a few hours of cricket to view in between slips of a ice cool glass of vino. He could easily have been packing up to come home before getting through his first bottle.
Whilst popping diet pills and booking a table at Le Gavroche. (No idea what that place is like, just googled "London expensive restaurants)!
Was it the 80s where speed was marketed as diet pills. Can you imagine Leon on those things.
1950s, I believe. He'd be pedalling his little car very fast ...
Some good news for Rishi, Nigel Farage considering emigrating after he is denied a UK bank account. '"I've been considering over the course of the day, my options, I've spent time talking to lawyers, I've been considering legal action. I've been asking myself whether frankly, it's even worth staying in this country," he said." https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/30/brexit-leader-nigel-farage-considering-leaving-britain Perhaps a pad in Florida, near Mar a Lago?
Could he take Johnson and the rest of ERG with him
Completely off topic for now just something I was thinking about.
The first weekend of the month I normally have my father, his girlfriend and my ex stepbrother round on sunday for a meal. Out of curiousity because we keep getting told eating properly is too expensive for the poor I looked at my bill for the meal especially given the cost of living rise.
Ingredients cost me 40£ This will give 4 adults a 3 course meal today and all will take home enough left overs for a main meal tomorrow. That means 5£ a head for 2 days food.
If you take out the 3 course part the cost of ingredients according to my receipt is 25£. So for 4 adults to have a decent main meal for 2 days comes to £3.12
Prep time is about half an hour for the main meal and I think if you compare £3.12 to a big mac meal (£6.09) it comes out pretty decently. The claim the poor can't afford to eat well sorry doesn't stack up
Not everyone has the skills and confidence you do in the kitchen. And people make poor decisions when stressed and overworked.
And if I may say so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If it were so easy to eat well, why do you think so many do not? Your "analysis" seems to show that food is cheap enough, so what are the reasons?
Laziness. I left home at 16 unable to cook and this preinternet as it was 1983.
Today I am serving up pomegranite and goats cheese mousse drizzled in balsamic glaze, traditional spaghetti bolognese and an orange chocolate cheesecake.
If I can teach myself to that level from scratch I think its fair to say anyone could learn to make basic meals if they can be bothered. My point is the problem for the poor is not the cost of eating decently it is the motivation to do so.
Keep going. Where has this "laziness" come from?
Simply put too many prefer to sit on their ass watching Jeremey kyle etc and tap a phone to order deliveroo. Then complain they can't afford to eat properly. How hard is it to make mashed potato, grill a few sausages and make some instant gravy......A meal that costs little compared to a big mac?
People need to help themselves a bit not just whinge that they need more money and its not their fault they don't eat healthily.
You're just restating the point. I get it. People are lazy. Why are they lazy? Were they always this way or was there... how can I put this?... some golden age when you were younger when people were better?
There was indeed, back in the mists of time if you did not work you did not eat, there was no free money for gazillions of reasons, no free rents, council tax, tax credits , and the million other stupid ideas since. They are indulged to be lazy by free money.
So would you say free money is morally corrosive? Is that where you're coming from?
Yes , if long term and not just a short term safety net.
Does it matter whether the free money is from the state, or does the same apply to rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains?
That is not "Free money", you are putting up your own earned money and risking losing it, no clue on capital gains mind you as never made any. Have paid interest, lost money renting and on shares etc where dividends rarely cover loss of capital unless you are lucky.
Only the feckless risk their own money. The true winners sit on rent and dividends from money that their ancestors "hard earned".
Still, money for nothing is a thing. Cash ISAs and savings. And even in products where your capital is at risk, you're still getting free money most of the time. If you've got enough money, you can sit there and live on the interest, which puts your idea that "if you did not work you did not eat" into the shade. Capital accumulation is a real thing, and nothing brings in the cash quite like being rich. But I guess there's a big difference between good free money and bad free money.
Few people have enough money though and only a few are left enough to live on the interest etc. We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc. There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc. The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
So the thing I don't get is why we're talking about money at all. Pagan2 pointed out that raw ingredients are cheap, so I asked where the problem truly is. "Laziness" is the reply. Where does the laziness come from is the natural question. And the answer seems to be because people get money for nothing and that's what makes them lazy.
Quite apart from the diversion (my fault, I was being provocative) into the fact that money for nothing is wider phenomenon, it still doesn't really answer the question, because a lot of poor diet is associated with people who are stressed and overworked.
So laziness doesn't even seem to be the driving force. A couple of people have chimed in with other dimensions that are worthy of consideration: preference (crisps are tastier than apples) and the effect processed food has on the feeling of being sated. I think it's even fair to say that processed food is addictive, but I haven't checked the literature on that so I'm ready to be corrected if I'm wrong.
So if Pagan2 is right and it's not poverty, and if I'm right that it's not laziness... what is it? Perhaps we should explore the nature of bad food itself, and whether overwork is a factor.
What underlies my view is that I don't think people really change that much one generation to the next. What does change is social and economic patterns, and new products and technologies. Work has changed. the availability of foodlike products has changed.
Find the changes that actually correlate with the problem, than construct a plausible story that links them. And if laziness if your explanation, tell me how overwork correlates with poor diet because I'm fascinated.
Apologies for diving in again, and I'm nowhere near an expert, and probably the least educated fella on here (a few early 80s O Levels, a few factory jobs then 22 years putting out bin fires) but it is something that fascinates me. I've had lots of dealings with poverty, and been poor myself ( born in a Leicester council house in the 60s) and when I was a kid, money was tight, but we ate OKish. Lots of cottage pie and sausages and chips, cheap roasts, basic, but home cooked. The issue now is cultural, societal and as I bang on about, Big Food. We rely on technology to warm stuff up rather than cook it. Chemicals rather than actual food. Cooking from scratch costs time and money in ingredients and equipment. Poor people and busy people aren't lazy, they're just conditioned by society and Big Business to eat differently.
I think that, when there are children in a household there’s a great deal to be said for one parent being at home. One of today’s problems is that both rents and house purchase costs assume that both parents work. TWS lived in a house where the rent was such that that wasn’t necessary. My teacher grandchildren, parents of our great-grandson, don’t; they’re looking to a time when both of them will be working because otherwise they can’t afford the mortgage.
I worked full time as did my other half and we raised two kids who had home cooked meals apart from a takeaway once or twice a fortnight. A home made sauce with pasta takes less than 30 mins from start to finish, pork chops with veg and gravy the same time, we would have a roast on Sunday which is basically just bung everything in the oven until cooked, braised veg and roasties, and make the gravy from the meat juices. If working late could pick up a hot chicken from the supermarket and eat with a couple of pre prepared garlic bread sticks and a home prepared salad. Not hard, but I did grow up being taught the basics at home and school and had parents both from large families who grew up during rationing and knew how to get the most out of their food. Our leftovers always went into soup - meat, veg, rice, pasta, even salad. Just pressure cook the lot with a stock cube and maybe some lentils or beans. Blend it all up after if it looks like it needs it. One kid threw a wobbly when he found a lump of hated avocado in his soup - hadn't blended it enough, clearly.
Here's an idea which I don't think I've ever heard mentioned but does, I think, have real world merit.
Its not the effort in cooking which puts people off but the effort in washing up afterwards.
The affluent have dishwashers and so have minimal washing up, takeaways also have minimal washing up and eating out has none.
But to personally wash a big pile of pans and plates after you've eaten really is such a drag that it pushes people to an easier option.
Cue how can those dole scroungers afford 50” tvs, smartphones, 40 fags a day AND a dishwasher.
More to the point, produce food almost instantly for by now very hungry children after coming home, perhaps late, from a day at work, too. Or do you let them feed themselves an hour or two earlier with pizza and oven chips etc.? Edit: I now see as already adumbrated by @Stereodog .
A lot of the dole scroungers of DM fantasy are working for a living.
Here's an idea which I don't think I've ever heard mentioned but does, I think, have real world merit.
Its not the effort in cooking which puts people off but the effort in washing up afterwards.
The affluent have dishwashers and so have minimal washing up, takeaways also have minimal washing up and eating out has none.
But to personally wash a big pile of pans and plates after you've eaten really is such a drag that it pushes people to an easier option.
Genuinely think this is correct, which I've also not seen before. I cook and bake occasionally, and it's a right hassle.
We're living in a shack by the river while we look for a new house. We're used to a dishwasher, but not got one here. We cook from scratch everyday, and the sink is never empty!
Comments
20 floors up, in a concrete block, windows that only open up an inch, scary, dangerous stairs, crime, drugs. We broke a door in during entry training to find the usual, basic, scruffy flat. One one small bedroom was a nursery, with nice baby wallpaper on, actual carpet and a mobile hanging above where the cot would have been. It really bought home to you how we treat those less well off, and how they still strive to create happiness. Are they lazy, or just not as fortunate as others?
It nearly got me into trouble once when I was pulled over in Cologne for a minor accidental traffic offence. The copper thought I was lying when I told him I was English. It was a compliment but an annoying one at the time.
Tbf they don’t seem to do a lot of sitting around except in queues outside A&E trying to stop their passengers pegging out.
my law firm that startled more than one client by dropping everything and running for the lifeboats when the alarm went off.
I'm not sure if I can find studies due to time.
Breaking his promise to protect Sure Start was one of the worst things David Cameron did imo, amongst a very long list of salami-sliced cuts.
Now, I know some like to cast Starmer as an out of touch Islingtonian - but compared to Sunak is a son of toil having had adversity in his personal life (a very ill parent), and a fairly varied legal career. Plus politically, while also elected in 2015, so in theory just as inexperienced as Sunak, has had to navigate Labour's forever wars and its unpopularity so has been much more unflappable when under pressure and prepared to take on his party's fruitcakes, rather than appease them and hope they go away.
For example if they spent 10 billion on an adult literacy programme....if they increased adult literacy levels by 50% we might think it money well spent....if the programme only increased adult literacy by 1% however its obviously not providing value for the money spent and we should drop it and spend the 10 billion on something that does provide value, perhaps even a different adult literacy idea.
Too often we see things continue because its some politicians pet idea even if it is not working as intended.
Any initiative in my view should have a stated aim and measurable target and a timeframe to achieve that target
Material charity to lift people out of poverty.
Education to keep them there.
Beauty (for want of a better word) to soothe
people's spirits to be able to process the other stuff profitably.
Even if you don't believe the underlying story, the
beauty still works. Perhaps the lack of beauty is
why post war socialism or Thatcherism struggled to lift people off the very bottom.
These are the riches of the poor.
We were discussing poor diet and obese burger eaters , not many of them will be people left millions by parents etc.
There are also issues at the top end where people really get shedloads of free money from dubious sources including government etc. Different topic though and diametrically opposite of the discussion that was taking place, even if it encourages similar but very different topics and worse at the rich end even if at the poor end it costs us a fortune in health care etc.
The two points would not in any way have the same resolution.
Tory MP on R4 this morning suggesting that several of the water companies have issued debt paying well over market rates - to connected companies.
So they have been reducing reported profits artificially - and thus paid less U.K. tax - while remitting them overseas via debt interest payments.
If this is the case with Thames, there is an excellent opportunity (and overwhelming case) to take it down, rather than allowing it to refinance at the expense of its customers - which is what the industry is proposing.
And of course tech companies aren’t leaving because of regulation, but the massively greater availability of capital - from both the market and government - in the US.
get paid a monthly retainer, and a firefighter hourly rate for actual jobs. For some, it ends up not being worth it.
He's great to watch because he also concedes runs. Something almost every ball.
But with something like surestart the differences are both marginal and it wont be clear which costs and benefits are down to surestart and which are down to other changes like the economy, covid or technology. So the ideological will be able to produce plausible reports and analysis that show surestart is a great success and others a waste of money.
It will be very difficult for the voting public to know with confidence which is correct.
Around here most firemen seem to spend most of their days cutting people out of smashed up cars. I suppose it depends on what sort of road network you have locally. The Dundee to Perth A90 keeps them pretty busy.
I see the poverty/lazy argument and how we handle it as coparable to the guilt/innocence of persons accused of a crime.
There are people who choose to commit crime and there are people (the vast majority) who do not.
There are people in poverty who are lazy and feckless and there are people (the vast majority) who are not.
In the criminal justice system we have long ago decided that it is not always possible to identify who is guilty and who is not but the most important thing is that the innocent should go free rather than the guilty be caught. This does not mean we do not try to catch the guilty but it means that in the end we accept some will get away with it and that is better than someone innocent being punished. There are some who argue the opposite should be the norm. Better to punish all in the certainty that you will at least get the guilty ones.
In the world of poverty it seems we (or at least many in society as a whole) have adopted the exact opposite idea. It is better that the genuinely unfortunate should suffer rather than some of the feckless get away with it. Rather than putting more effort into identifying the feckless we would rather just punish all the poor and justify this on the basis that at least we are also punishing the feckless. At the same time the opposition to this is also unwilling to put effort into identifying the feckless and would do exactly the opposite - work on the basis that the feckless do not exist and every case is one of genuine misfortune.
It is perhaps inevitable that, given the scale of problems and the ever increasing size of the population, only broad sweep solutions are considered. But I can't help thinking that the answer - though I don't know exactly what it is - lies far more in treating each person as an individual case and handliung them accordingly, much as we still try to do in the criminal justice system.
That seems quite an unsatisfactory comment by me but I will post it anyway as I took long enough to write it and I think in the confused ramblings there is at least some truth.
The issue now is cultural, societal and as I bang on about, Big Food. We rely on technology to warm stuff up rather than cook it. Chemicals rather than actual food. Cooking from scratch costs time and money in ingredients and equipment. Poor people and busy people aren't lazy, they're just conditioned by society and Big Business to eat differently.
1) Ultra processed food is an endorphin hit
2) Advertising driving it even the subtle form of seeing for example people in a film showing eating at a burger joint as a happy event
3) People making excuses and telling them its not their fault that they choose to eat like that
4) The fear factor of I have never cooked
5) Taking the easiest perceived path
1) We can and do regulate for what manufacturers can put into food....do we do enough probably not.
2) We banned advertising for cigarettes, frankly I am not sure we shouldn't have an end to fast food ads
3) Stop telling people its not their fault, we don't do that to our kids when raising them we teach them they are making choices and choices are down to them but have consequences or at least good parents do otherwise we enable them
4) I have suggest local authorities should run free courses to teach the basics of cooking
5) Not sure what to do about that one, and I used the word perceived advisedly. It often takes as long to wait for your burger to be cooked and ready as for example whipping up a cheese omelette....difference is you cant do the latter while glued to your phone.
5) Is where laziness comes in I would guess....I don't want to spend time cooking when I could be on instafacebookgram
In my case it’s 100% an excuse but I can imagine if I had a really horrible shift job, had several kids to look after alone etc then it would be a temptation I’d give into more often. We don’t have to endorse it as a choice but we shouldn’t judge it either.
They don't have any issues with membership or people signing up for training, and it's entirely voluntary. I wonder what the difference is with the fire service?
Also, I've known some rather wealthy people who live off ready meals and couldn't cook even some boiled spuds without some hand-holding. So I'm not sure it's just confined to the poor.
Also when poor people do a 'bad thing' it's generally frowned on much more than if a relatively wealthy person does it. By and large anyway. Poor person who necks a bottle of wine every night - alky! Get social services involved! Middle-class person who necks a bottle of wine every night - bon viveur! And besides - they drink good wine. Not that Echo Falls stuff.
Now all parties have the same strategy of increasing wealth consumption, in particular increasing wealth consumption among their voter bases.
Pick on form, conditions and injury prevention, but not age.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/revealed-how-peers-partied-with-the-russian-ambassador-in-london-r7whvxf0r
Time for TSE to repeat his call for abolition.
“Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.”
Between 2016-2020 the Votkinsk Plant, sole producer of the solid-propellant missiles (ICBM Yars, SLBM Bulava, ballistic missiles for the SRBM Iskander) in Russia constructed a new forging plant. It ordered the forging press from the Danieli Breda
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1675459630032461825
You must then do one of the following until you’re 18:
-stay in full-time education, for example at a college
-start an apprenticeship or traineeship
-spend 20 hours or more a week working or volunteering, while in part-time education or training
Blair and Boris and to an extent Cameron whatever you think of them could appeal to the average voter, Rishi is intelligent and competent but doesn't have the same natural charisma and appeal they had.
It is often said too Thatcher spent her early life trying to advance from the lower middle class to the upper middle class via Oxford and the law and her rich husband, before realising as a politician she needed to connect again with the lower middle classes she was raised with if she was to win elections!
The UK doesn’t really have a food culture (that is Pa and Ma normal going down the market to buy fresh ingredients rather than watch cooking programmes and buying Tesco Finest ready meal deals) like say Spain or Italy, and probably never will at this late stage.
Here's an idea which I don't think I've ever heard mentioned but does, I think, have real world merit.
Its not the effort in cooking which puts people off but the effort in washing up afterwards.
The affluent have dishwashers and so have minimal washing up, takeaways also have minimal washing up and eating out has none.
But to personally wash a big pile of pans and plates after you've eaten really is such a drag that it pushes people to an easier option.
Uxbridge it seems Labour now taking for granted as a gain. Yet with a strong pro Rishi Hindu vote there, still a Tory held council and the Tory candidate a local councillor and the Labour candidate from Camden sounds a bit complacent
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/30/brexit-leader-nigel-farage-considering-leaving-britain
Perhaps a pad in Florida, near Mar a Lago?
A lot of the dole scroungers of DM fantasy are working for a living.
At least Leon is getting a few hours of cricket to view in between slips of a ice cool glass of vino. He could easily have been packing up to come home before getting through his first bottle.
Whilst popping diet pills and booking a table at Le Gavroche. (No idea what that place is like, just googled "London expensive restaurants)!
If they manage that then perhaps Sunak has a better chance of weather his years of discontent than I thought.
When you hold me
There's a place I go
It's a different high
Oh, no
When you touch me
I get vulnerable
In a different light
Oh, no
#4, “Giving Me” by Jazzy:
This feeling that I know you're giving me
No lies or loving me, hugging me, touching me
#5, “Dancing is Healing”, by Rudimental etc.:
Dancin' is healin', love is the answer
Dancin' is healin', love is the answer, yeah, yeah, yeah
When you need space, when you need time, when it gets heavy on your mind
When you lose faith, put your hand in mine, when it gets heavy
Dancin' is healin', love is the answer
[ducks]
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/lib-dem-farmers-candidate-in-somerset-by-election-is-pro-vegan-extinction-rebellion-supporter/ar-AA1dfXH9
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/30/politico-summer-reading-list-2023-00103818
I might pick up the Ford biography.
Also, America in 1857.
Tories "say"