They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
The Roman military dogs reminds me of a funny story I heard where a guy was watching Gladiator with his girlfriend and at the beginning the legionaries are lined up ready to face the German’s and Russell Crowe is walking along with his Alsatian on a chain. He instructs someone “on my command unleash Hell” and the guys girlfriend said “that’s a strange name for a dog.”
On the subject of comical dog names, a friend had one called Timber. She was Canadian, and often walked it in the woods.
I genuinely heard a middle aged couple refer to their small curly haired black dog as 'Rover' on Friday. This was Chorlton Green so may have been ironic, or something.
I might be being slow, but what's wrong with 'Rover' as a name to give a dog?
I know it's the archetypal dog name, but it isn't all that common in practice, is quite pleasing to say, and is a dog name rather than a re-purposed human name (which is common but always sounds vaguely weird to me).
Indeed.
I have met dogs called David, Lionel — and John.
This hounds with people names thing has to stop.
Whatever happened to the Wellards and Bouncers that abounded in days of yore? There was a time in this once-great nation when men were men, women were women, and dogs were dogs.
Americans have that solved already, giving babies all the dumb names leaving dogs with the sensible ones
I love things like this. The reason why people in Afghanistan carried zip-ties was that in the event of traumatic amputations they provided a very quick way of tourniqueting. The increased incidence of female soldiers led to the discovery that tampons are a great way to stanch bullet wounds.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 45m I see we have reached the Dangerous Dogs Bill stage of this Government’s term of office…
Although note the date of the Dangerous Dogs Act - it was 1991, not 1996!
The Dangerous Dogs Act is often cited as a classic case of an awful, rushed bit of legislation. Maybe it was. But perhaps worth pointing out it is still in force three decades later.
And it hasn't stopped incidents like the one in Birmingham
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. And I'm wildly inconsistent with my standards on saliva. I really would rather dogs did not lick me. I have in the past had to rig up little defensive fortifications when visiting houses with large dogs to ward this off. But the daft soggy catty who gets so delighted with being stroked that she has a little dribble out of sheer pleasure? Absolutely charming. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
The Roman military dogs reminds me of a funny story I heard where a guy was watching Gladiator with his girlfriend and at the beginning the legionaries are lined up ready to face the German’s and Russell Crowe is walking along with his Alsatian on a chain. He instructs someone “on my command unleash Hell” and the guys girlfriend said “that’s a strange name for a dog.”
On the subject of comical dog names, a friend had one called Timber. She was Canadian, and often walked it in the woods.
I genuinely heard a middle aged couple refer to their small curly haired black dog as 'Rover' on Friday. This was Chorlton Green so may have been ironic, or something.
I might be being slow, but what's wrong with 'Rover' as a name to give a dog?
I know it's the archetypal dog name, but it isn't all that common in practice, is quite pleasing to say, and is a dog name rather than a re-purposed human name (which is common but always sounds vaguely weird to me).
Well there's nothing wrong with it per se - but as you say it is the archetypal dog name which isn't all that common in practice - so uncommon in fact (because it is the archetypal dog name) that I have never come across one before.
Most dogs I know nowadays have names which could conceivably be given to humans - Max, Minnie, Charlie, Georgie, Olive.
I was told a dog’s name should be two syllables, both hard.
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
The Roman military dogs reminds me of a funny story I heard where a guy was watching Gladiator with his girlfriend and at the beginning the legionaries are lined up ready to face the German’s and Russell Crowe is walking along with his Alsatian on a chain. He instructs someone “on my command unleash Hell” and the guys girlfriend said “that’s a strange name for a dog.”
On the subject of comical dog names, a friend had one called Timber. She was Canadian, and often walked it in the woods.
I genuinely heard a middle aged couple refer to their small curly haired black dog as 'Rover' on Friday. This was Chorlton Green so may have been ironic, or something.
I might be being slow, but what's wrong with 'Rover' as a name to give a dog?
I know it's the archetypal dog name, but it isn't all that common in practice, is quite pleasing to say, and is a dog name rather than a re-purposed human name (which is common but always sounds vaguely weird to me).
Well there's nothing wrong with it per se - but as you say it is the archetypal dog name which isn't all that common in practice - so uncommon in fact (because it is the archetypal dog name) that I have never come across one before.
Most dogs I know nowadays have names which could conceivably be given to humans - Max, Minnie, Charlie, Georgie, Olive.
I was told a dog’s name should be two syllables, both hard.
Easier to call them that way
... like "Cookie"?!
To be fair, Cookie isn't my given name. Though many have used it - possibly for the reasons above!
🚨 BREAKING: The UK has leapfrogged France to become the 8th largest manufacturer in the world.
With an annual output of £224 billion, the buoyant sector now supports 2.6 million jobs according to new data released this morning by trade association @MakeUK_ .
I can't find any report or press release from MakeUK from this week. The most recent data I can find for other countries on their site is from 4 years ago Other sites show different figures, so MakeUK's so methodology needs to be considered. E.g. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/manufacturing-output
I mean, I don't know. I don't know MakeUK so I was curious to see exactly what they said, maybe dig into the methodology. Nothing so far. Hoping to hand the question over to someone whose IQ is at least thirty points higher.
Seeing as you ask so nicely, the tweet was by a pro manufacturing group with 70k followers. Looks legit. Go check
I already did "go check", and I found nothing. That's the point.
WHY ARE YOU SO STUPID
One person says "where is this report that's being referred to, I'd like to know more about the methodology". Another person says "they've got 70k followers, seems legit".
I guess I'm too stupid to work out which of those two stances is the stupider.
Right, I found that page and the sister page "publications", but the 2023 publication isn't there AFAICS. Found the 2022 one and previous years, but no 2023. That's when I came back on here to say "well, where is it?"
I thought you might be able to quench your thirst for methodology by reading their previous reports
Right, but I'd still want to check they haven't changed the methodology for this time around. You can already see they changed the reporting period prior to 2022, so I'm going to wait for the 2023 to appear.
Very professional 👍🏻
No need for sarcasm, I'm just wanting to do the donkey work that nobody else seems to want to do. It's a good idea to check these things and not just rely on some random Twitter account that the forum drunkard groks is reliable enough to trust.
Yes, I thought looking at the methodology of their previous reports might help to see if they were trustworthy, or just Twitter randoms.
Apparently not, fair enough
I don't want to judge them, I want to judge what they are saying here. First step is to consume that in their own words. Go to the source to avoid potential reporting bias and make sure I understand exactly what is being claimed.
I want to read the report to understand what is good out there and what isn't. Make UK represent an awful lot of manufacturers, so its worth reading if we want to know lived reality.
What is odd is that the only coverage is reportage, and the only reportage is two rather obscure outlets. That there is no actual report or press release about the report makes this even odder.
🚨 BREAKING: The UK has leapfrogged France to become the 8th largest manufacturer in the world.
With an annual output of £224 billion, the buoyant sector now supports 2.6 million jobs according to new data released this morning by trade association @MakeUK_ .
I can't find any report or press release from MakeUK from this week. The most recent data I can find for other countries on their site is from 4 years ago Other sites show different figures, so MakeUK's so methodology needs to be considered. E.g. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/manufacturing-output
It's worth noting dogs have a fantastic degree of variation given all the breeds are a single species. Traits assigned to breeds have long been considered a genuine thing, though there's also a degree of self-determination from pet owners. If some oafish thug wants a status/attack dog, he's going to go for a big dog that has said reputation, reinforcing the perception that that's how such dogs behave when it's more down to the owner than the dog.
There is at least one case of someone being killed by dachshunds.
All dogs are potentially dangerous, and my understanding is that a pack mentality can take over with a group of dogs even if they are a mix of breeds. There are occasionally media reports of some one being attacked by a previously placid family pet, or an breed not known to be aggressive. Some dog owners do not train their dog, others train their dog to be aggressive. On top of this, some dogs (breeds?) have a propensity to be aggressive. This is why legislation banning specific breeds is unlikely to be successful, and can end up having to be tweaked to play catch up with new breeds, or breeds newly identified as being problematic.
It can also be difficult to get two vets to agree on whether a cross bred dog is or is not predominantly a dangerous breed.
Seeing as we are talking about vicious dogs, this is mine. He is deadly. He has licked many into submission.
PS He seems to have fallen over.
In case you are wondering how I got him to sit so obediently I was eating an apple and he was waiting for the core. Second choice as a treat only to banana skins which people throw all over the place and he hoovers up.
You wouldn't believe it to look at him but he got expelled from training classes for quote 'being belligerent'. He caused havoc. He knows a huge number of commands and will even do them if he feels like it, but he is (and this is the consensus of everyone who has met him) the most excitable dog on the planet.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 45m I see we have reached the Dangerous Dogs Bill stage of this Government’s term of office…
Although note the date of the Dangerous Dogs Act - it was 1991, not 1996!
The Dangerous Dogs Act is often cited as a classic case of an awful, rushed bit of legislation. Maybe it was. But perhaps worth pointing out it is still in force three decades later.
And it hasn't stopped incidents like the one in Birmingham
I don't have a particular view on the effectiveness or otherwise of the 1991 legislation, but I'm not sure it's realistic to think it's possible to eliminate dog attacks through legislation.
There's a possible criticism of the Government that they didn't use powers in the legislation to ban the American XL Bully breed earlier (although as has been discussed here, it isn't a totally straightforward call). But the 1991 Act does actually empower them to do it without primary legislation.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
The Roman military dogs reminds me of a funny story I heard where a guy was watching Gladiator with his girlfriend and at the beginning the legionaries are lined up ready to face the German’s and Russell Crowe is walking along with his Alsatian on a chain. He instructs someone “on my command unleash Hell” and the guys girlfriend said “that’s a strange name for a dog.”
On the subject of comical dog names, a friend had one called Timber. She was Canadian, and often walked it in the woods.
I genuinely heard a middle aged couple refer to their small curly haired black dog as 'Rover' on Friday. This was Chorlton Green so may have been ironic, or something.
I might be being slow, but what's wrong with 'Rover' as a name to give a dog?
I know it's the archetypal dog name, but it isn't all that common in practice, is quite pleasing to say, and is a dog name rather than a re-purposed human name (which is common but always sounds vaguely weird to me).
Indeed.
I have met dogs called David, Lionel — and John.
This hounds with people names thing has to stop.
Whatever happened to the Wellards and Bouncers that abounded in days of yore? There was a time in this once-great nation when men were men, women were women, and dogs were dogs.
Americans have that solved already, giving babies all the dumb names leaving dogs with the sensible ones
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
It's a shame. My local one I used quite regularly for homebrew bits n bobs. Mind you a large Boyes moved next to it and seemed far better laid out and stocked.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Debt can normally be managed (or at least negotiated down via the insolvency process). That it seems it can't be saved suggests a more structural problem. One suggestion I've seen reported, as you say, is the wrong estate - relatively expensive, increasingly unpopular town centre sites on quite inflexible long-term arrangements, whilst peers had shifted to retail parks.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
It's a shame. My local one I used quite regularly for homebrew bits n bobs. Mind you a large Boyes moved next to it and seemed far better laid out and stocked.
Doesn't Wilco fish in the same pool as B and M, and Home Bargains? Sometimes brands just die, as a result of poor decisions, competition from other traders and customer choice.
🚨 BREAKING: The UK has leapfrogged France to become the 8th largest manufacturer in the world.
With an annual output of £224 billion, the buoyant sector now supports 2.6 million jobs according to new data released this morning by trade association @MakeUK_ .
I can't find any report or press release from MakeUK from this week. The most recent data I can find for other countries on their site is from 4 years ago Other sites show different figures, so MakeUK's so methodology needs to be considered. E.g. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/manufacturing-output
I mean, I don't know. I don't know MakeUK so I was curious to see exactly what they said, maybe dig into the methodology. Nothing so far. Hoping to hand the question over to someone whose IQ is at least thirty points higher.
Seeing as you ask so nicely, the tweet was by a pro manufacturing group with 70k followers. Looks legit. Go check
I already did "go check", and I found nothing. That's the point.
WHY ARE YOU SO STUPID
One person says "where is this report that's being referred to, I'd like to know more about the methodology". Another person says "they've got 70k followers, seems legit".
I guess I'm too stupid to work out which of those two stances is the stupider.
Right, I found that page and the sister page "publications", but the 2023 publication isn't there AFAICS. Found the 2022 one and previous years, but no 2023. That's when I came back on here to say "well, where is it?"
I thought you might be able to quench your thirst for methodology by reading their previous reports
Right, but I'd still want to check they haven't changed the methodology for this time around. You can already see they changed the reporting period prior to 2022, so I'm going to wait for the 2023 to appear.
Very professional 👍🏻
No need for sarcasm, I'm just wanting to do the donkey work that nobody else seems to want to do. It's a good idea to check these things and not just rely on some random Twitter account that the forum drunkard groks is reliable enough to trust.
Yes, I thought looking at the methodology of their previous reports might help to see if they were trustworthy, or just Twitter randoms.
Apparently not, fair enough
I don't want to judge them, I want to judge what they are saying here. First step is to consume that in their own words. Go to the source to avoid potential reporting bias and make sure I understand exactly what is being claimed.
I see. Personally, I reckon I could do that by looking at their previous work. But each to their own
'Suella Braverman is pushing for a ban on American bully XL dogs, arguing they are a “clear and lethal danger”, particularly to children.
The home secretary announced she has commissioned urgent advice on outlawing the dogs after she highlighted an “appalling” attack on an 11-year-old girl in Birmingham.
However, adding dogs to the banned list is the responsibility of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) under the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey. The PA news agency understands there are concerns within Defra over the feasibility of adding the American bully.'
The idea Coffey would overrule Braverman on this is laughable.
Braverman will have got Sunak's approval for this popular ban, civil servants will do what the elected government tells them to do and most MPs would also almost certainly vote it into law
What makes you think Braverman has Sunak’s approval?
She’s quite clearly politicking to be her successor by parking her tanks on someone else’s lawn. If Sunak had any authority he’d slap her down. But he doesn’t have that power.
Ms Braverman got lots of publicity over cats - cat lessons, not her dept at all.
Now it's dogs.
What next, gerbils or newts?
If she's talking about banning the breed, then it's not her dept at all. She can't override a fellow minister, as HYUFD seems to think - but he thought yesterday that just because Ms Braverman said she wanted X that meant it has already happened as ordered by the PM.
There may be scope within the HO for non-breed based solutions for what is a real problem - insurance, and so on - and those to my mind have more merit. But those would impact some, or all, other dogs. And, of course, there are existing laws on reckless behaviour.
Loving your insouciance about kids being mauled.
I'm concerned what she is doing won't stop it in future. Or even now.
A concern and nuance that you didn't apply to the issue of Ulez I seem to remember, where your response was more 'Won't somebody think of the children???'.
You mighyt have a point if ULEZ was restricted solely on the basis of Austin 7s and Ford Escort GTs without any consideration of variants and rebadges, not to mention future makes.
ULEZ is defined on the sensible criterion of emissions. Not on an out of date list of car makes.
Seeing as we are talking about vicious dogs, this is mine. He is deadly. He has licked many into submission.
PS He seems to have fallen over.
In case you are wondering how I got him to sit so obediently I was eating an apple and he was waiting for the core. Second choice as a treat only to banana skins which people throw all over the place and he hoovers up.
You wouldn't believe it to look at him but he got expelled from training classes for quote 'being belligerent'. He caused havoc. He knows a huge number of commands and will even do them if he feels like it, but he is (and this is the consensus of everyone who has met him) the most excitable dog on the planet.
You shouldnt be feeding dogs apple cores tbh, as the seeds are toxic and the core a choke hazard
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 45m I see we have reached the Dangerous Dogs Bill stage of this Government’s term of office…
Although note the date of the Dangerous Dogs Act - it was 1991, not 1996!
The Dangerous Dogs Act is often cited as a classic case of an awful, rushed bit of legislation. Maybe it was. But perhaps worth pointing out it is still in force three decades later.
And it hasn't stopped incidents like the one in Birmingham
I don't have a particular view on the effectiveness or otherwise of the 1991 legislation, but I'm not sure it's realistic to think it's possible to eliminate dog attacks through legislation.
There's a possible criticism of the Government that they didn't use powers in the legislation to ban the American XL Bully breed earlier (although as has been discussed here, it isn't a totally straightforward call). But the 1991 Act does actually empower them to do it without primary legislation.
I think you'rer right. No doubt - and one hopes so too anyway - HMG will do a u-turn and ban that breed or subbreed (what about plain American Bullies?). But there is certainly scope for a wider reassessment of dog law - licensing, insurance, training, possible suppression of more breeds.
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
The Roman military dogs reminds me of a funny story I heard where a guy was watching Gladiator with his girlfriend and at the beginning the legionaries are lined up ready to face the German’s and Russell Crowe is walking along with his Alsatian on a chain. He instructs someone “on my command unleash Hell” and the guys girlfriend said “that’s a strange name for a dog.”
On the subject of comical dog names, a friend had one called Timber. She was Canadian, and often walked it in the woods.
I genuinely heard a middle aged couple refer to their small curly haired black dog as 'Rover' on Friday. This was Chorlton Green so may have been ironic, or something.
I might be being slow, but what's wrong with 'Rover' as a name to give a dog?
I know it's the archetypal dog name, but it isn't all that common in practice, is quite pleasing to say, and is a dog name rather than a re-purposed human name (which is common but always sounds vaguely weird to me).
Indeed.
I have met dogs called David, Lionel — and John.
This hounds with people names thing has to stop.
Whatever happened to the Wellards and Bouncers that abounded in days of yore? There was a time in this once-great nation when men were men, women were women, and dogs were dogs.
Americans have that solved already, giving babies all the dumb names leaving dogs with the sensible ones
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
The Roman military dogs reminds me of a funny story I heard where a guy was watching Gladiator with his girlfriend and at the beginning the legionaries are lined up ready to face the German’s and Russell Crowe is walking along with his Alsatian on a chain. He instructs someone “on my command unleash Hell” and the guys girlfriend said “that’s a strange name for a dog.”
On the subject of comical dog names, a friend had one called Timber. She was Canadian, and often walked it in the woods.
I genuinely heard a middle aged couple refer to their small curly haired black dog as 'Rover' on Friday. This was Chorlton Green so may have been ironic, or something.
I might be being slow, but what's wrong with 'Rover' as a name to give a dog?
I know it's the archetypal dog name, but it isn't all that common in practice, is quite pleasing to say, and is a dog name rather than a re-purposed human name (which is common but always sounds vaguely weird to me).
Indeed.
I have met dogs called David, Lionel — and John.
This hounds with people names thing has to stop.
Whatever happened to the Wellards and Bouncers that abounded in days of yore? There was a time in this once-great nation when men were men, women were women, and dogs were dogs.
Americans have that solved already, giving babies all the dumb names leaving dogs with the sensible ones
QED spotted by a friend who lives in the US.
Should marry someone called Winter and take the name.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
They just crap in the neighbour's garden.
Having neighbours with cats is another good reason for getting a dog
🚨 BREAKING: The UK has leapfrogged France to become the 8th largest manufacturer in the world.
With an annual output of £224 billion, the buoyant sector now supports 2.6 million jobs according to new data released this morning by trade association @MakeUK_ .
I can't find any report or press release from MakeUK from this week. The most recent data I can find for other countries on their site is from 4 years ago Other sites show different figures, so MakeUK's so methodology needs to be considered. E.g. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/manufacturing-output
I mean, I don't know. I don't know MakeUK so I was curious to see exactly what they said, maybe dig into the methodology. Nothing so far. Hoping to hand the question over to someone whose IQ is at least thirty points higher.
Seeing as you ask so nicely, the tweet was by a pro manufacturing group with 70k followers. Looks legit. Go check
I'm not interested in wading into the specifics of this tweet, but the fact a Twitter user has 70k followers is a pretty poor guarantor of the factual accuracy of its tweets. I'd trust it more than an egg with three followers, but nevertheless.
Depends on the tweeter. Some random influencer, with a grievance? - sure
But this is a trade body representing UK manufacturing, as far as I can see, so they’d look extremely dumb and undermine their USP if they “wheeled out” some mad made-up stats
FWIW, I suspect the figures are true. I suspect that the UK has passed France in manufacturing output.
Unfortunately, this comes with a rather big caveat: it's because France has gone backward faster than the UK. In both countries, manufacturing levels are well down on where they were in 2008, and France will have taken a second hit this year as industrial output will have been affected by protests and other industrial action.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
🚨 BREAKING: The UK has leapfrogged France to become the 8th largest manufacturer in the world.
With an annual output of £224 billion, the buoyant sector now supports 2.6 million jobs according to new data released this morning by trade association @MakeUK_ .
I can't find any report or press release from MakeUK from this week. The most recent data I can find for other countries on their site is from 4 years ago Other sites show different figures, so MakeUK's so methodology needs to be considered. E.g. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/manufacturing-output
I mean, I don't know. I don't know MakeUK so I was curious to see exactly what they said, maybe dig into the methodology. Nothing so far. Hoping to hand the question over to someone whose IQ is at least thirty points higher.
Seeing as you ask so nicely, the tweet was by a pro manufacturing group with 70k followers. Looks legit. Go check
I already did "go check", and I found nothing. That's the point.
WHY ARE YOU SO STUPID
One person says "where is this report that's being referred to, I'd like to know more about the methodology". Another person says "they've got 70k followers, seems legit".
I guess I'm too stupid to work out which of those two stances is the stupider.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
Get a 3 legged one; hardly ever goes out, no shitting in neighbours' gardens, no bird killing.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
Get a 3 legged one, hardly ever goes out, no shitting in neighbours' gardens, no bird killing.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
Cats not very welcome here also because they kill the birds in our garden - very noticeable drop since the neighboursa got two. Particularly upsetting when they got the cock of our resident bullfinch pair.
🚨 BREAKING: The UK has leapfrogged France to become the 8th largest manufacturer in the world.
With an annual output of £224 billion, the buoyant sector now supports 2.6 million jobs according to new data released this morning by trade association @MakeUK_ .
I can't find any report or press release from MakeUK from this week. The most recent data I can find for other countries on their site is from 4 years ago Other sites show different figures, so MakeUK's so methodology needs to be considered. E.g. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/manufacturing-output
I mean, I don't know. I don't know MakeUK so I was curious to see exactly what they said, maybe dig into the methodology. Nothing so far. Hoping to hand the question over to someone whose IQ is at least thirty points higher.
Seeing as you ask so nicely, the tweet was by a pro manufacturing group with 70k followers. Looks legit. Go check
I already did "go check", and I found nothing. That's the point.
WHY ARE YOU SO STUPID
One person says "where is this report that's being referred to, I'd like to know more about the methodology". Another person says "they've got 70k followers, seems legit".
I guess I'm too stupid to work out which of those two stances is the stupider.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
Get a 3 legged one; hardly ever goes out, no shitting in neighbours' gardens, no bird killing.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
Must be frustrating buying shoes for it as I imagine they come in fours?
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
Get a 3 legged one, hardly ever goes out, no shitting in neighbours' gardens, no bird killing.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
Cats not very welcome here also because they kill the birds in our garden - very noticeable drop since the neighboursa got two. Particularly upsetting when they got the cock of our resident bullfinch pair.
We had a cat for about 10 years and he never killed any birds as far as we knew. Maybe he was too lazy.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
From personal observation, the economy is sectionalised at the moment, some areas up, some down.
My guess is with Wilkos is that a lot of their trade has been lost to online - lock down got a lot of people shopping for small stuff online. And they are in a segment where price competition is very keen.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Yebbut - Wilko isn't really discretionary spend. The stuff I buy from Wilko - a dustpan and brush, a drying rack - isn't really discretionary spend. They are things I need because I have broken the old one. And my local Wilko is now surrounded by seven or eight bars/restaurants which have opened in the last two or three years and appear to be full pretty much all the time. Plus a WHSmith which is handy but must surely be on borrowed time and a Meek's shoes, ditto.
My local town centre is doing quite well. Certainly doing better than at any time since I moved here in 2007. But the most visible growth is in hospitality and other bits of discretionary spend. Places selling things we want are doing well. Places selling things we need are not.
Which gives us our answer: Wilko sells the sort of stuff we now buy online.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
Get a 3 legged one; hardly ever goes out, no shitting in neighbours' gardens, no bird killing.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
Must be frustrating buying shoes for it as I imagine they come in fours?
You could simply buy the full set of four, and sell on the spare to owners of one-legged cats.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
Get a 3 legged one, hardly ever goes out, no shitting in neighbours' gardens, no bird killing.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
Cats not very welcome here also because they kill the birds in our garden - very noticeable drop since the neighboursa got two. Particularly upsetting when they got the cock of our resident bullfinch pair.
We had a cat for about 10 years and he never killed any birds as far as we knew. Maybe he was too lazy.
Always the way with killers, you never know they’ve killed until they get caught. Look at Harold Shipman.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
Get a 3 legged one, hardly ever goes out, no shitting in neighbours' gardens, no bird killing.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
Cats not very welcome here also because they kill the birds in our garden - very noticeable drop since the neighboursa got two. Particularly upsetting when they got the cock of our resident bullfinch pair.
We had a cat for about 10 years and he never killed any birds as far as we knew. Maybe he was too lazy.
Always the way with killers, you never know they’ve killed until they get caught. Look at Harold Shipman.
Now I think of it, although I've not got direct evidence that my cat is a killer, it has been named as beneficiary in the wills of a remarkable number of elderly birds over the years.
So CDU/CSU and AfD on 48% and governing SPD, Greens and FDP combined on 38%.
Either way it looks like the Union will return to government at the next election, most likely in another grand coalition with the SPD or with the Greens
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
They're very useful for preventing the mice moving in. They're companionable. They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats). You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them. You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
The neighbours have to deal with their faeces, full of toxoplasmosis, instead?
Get a 3 legged one, hardly ever goes out, no shitting in neighbours' gardens, no bird killing.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
Cats not very welcome here also because they kill the birds in our garden - very noticeable drop since the neighboursa got two. Particularly upsetting when they got the cock of our resident bullfinch pair.
The magpies are the worst killers round my bit. I was raging when they tag teamed a beautiful little dove.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
When I was a kid we brought our cat on holiday with us, in a basket on the train. The other day there was someone on the train with a beautiful fluffy cat on a lead. It was very cute.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Yebbut - Wilko isn't really discretionary spend. The stuff I buy from Wilko - a dustpan and brush, a drying rack - isn't really discretionary spend. They are things I need because I have broken the old one. And my local Wilko is now surrounded by seven or eight bars/restaurants which have opened in the last two or three years and appear to be full pretty much all the time. Plus a WHSmith which is handy but must surely be on borrowed time and a Meek's shoes, ditto.
My local town centre is doing quite well. Certainly doing better than at any time since I moved here in 2007. But the most visible growth is in hospitality and other bits of discretionary spend. Places selling things we want are doing well. Places selling things we need are not.
Which gives us our answer: Wilko sells the sort of stuff we now buy online.
Which is the long term problem trying to sell GM - someone will sell it cheaper online. Wilko does a lot of DIY and garden stuff - that is the discretionary part - and was trying to steal sales and share from supermarkets in non-food (household, health and beauty etc). Their problem is that they weren't a discounter like a Home Bargains who were cheaper.
Glad your town centre is thriving. Most aren't. And will continue not to thrive as long as the retail outlets continue to be owned by OffShoreCo who have minimal interest in actually letting out their asset. We need small local independent businesses so that people have a reason to actually shop in bricks and mortar.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
When I was a kid we brought our cat on holiday with us, in a basket on the train. The other day there was someone on the train with a beautiful fluffy cat on a lead. It was very cute.
Did they have a portable litter box? I have to ask.
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has never been a strong manufacturing economy. Italy is the Eurozone's second largest manufacturer. Up until the 1970s-80s deindustrialisation we had a much bigger industrial sector than France, like Germany, but since then we have been similar to France. Western European manufacturers outside Germany have struggled to compete with competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany is now facing similar pressures as its competitive advantage in high end manufacturing is eroded. The German economy faces big problems IMHO. Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
When I was a kid we brought our cat on holiday with us, in a basket on the train. The other day there was someone on the train with a beautiful fluffy cat on a lead. It was very cute.
Did they have a portable litter box? I have to ask.
No. Cats can go a long time without needing to use the toilet, if they have no medical problems. When we took our cat in her basket there were no "accidents".
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Yebbut - Wilko isn't really discretionary spend. The stuff I buy from Wilko - a dustpan and brush, a drying rack - isn't really discretionary spend. They are things I need because I have broken the old one. And my local Wilko is now surrounded by seven or eight bars/restaurants which have opened in the last two or three years and appear to be full pretty much all the time. Plus a WHSmith which is handy but must surely be on borrowed time and a Meek's shoes, ditto.
My local town centre is doing quite well. Certainly doing better than at any time since I moved here in 2007. But the most visible growth is in hospitality and other bits of discretionary spend. Places selling things we want are doing well. Places selling things we need are not.
Which gives us our answer: Wilko sells the sort of stuff we now buy online.
Which is the long term problem trying to sell GM - someone will sell it cheaper online. Wilko does a lot of DIY and garden stuff - that is the discretionary part - and was trying to steal sales and share from supermarkets in non-food (household, health and beauty etc). Their problem is that they weren't a discounter like a Home Bargains who were cheaper.
Glad your town centre is thriving. Most aren't. And will continue not to thrive as long as the retail outlets continue to be owned by OffShoreCo who have minimal interest in actually letting out their asset. We need small local independent businesses so that people have a reason to actually shop in bricks and mortar.
"trying to sell GM"?
The revival of my local town centre has been interesting. It's been weak ever since the Trafford centre opened. Materially, there is a pedestrianised street with a variety of buildings ranging from moderately attractive Edwardiana to functional 60s, backing on to which there is a large, unattractive 60s development: a mix of pedestrianised dead-end, gloomy indoor bit which probably looked quite futuristic for the first ten minutes it was open, a ten-storey office block (which I think is now very low end resi) and a Tesco - all done in the same ugly grey/purple brick. Presumably the Tesco is owned by Tesco, but I think everything else has the same landlord, which turned out to be some holding company in Northern Ireland. I was slightly surprised that one company owned so much of the town - I wonder if it is a front for some aristocrat? And I wonder how typical this is? I certainly agree it would probably be better for towns if this sort of monopoly didn't exist. That said, whoever the landlord is, they had clearly decided by 2019 that their asset was severely underperforming. This is one of Greater Manchester's more prosperous suburbs - there's a fair bit of spending power around with nothing much to spend on. Clearly it was decided that the strategy was less retail, more hospitality - which I think is the right strategy for towns in general. I don't want to see retail edged out completely, but its an undeniable fact that online has taken a huge chunk out of the spend which previously went on town centre retail, and its shops at the functional end of the spectrum (e.g. Wilko) - which we go to out of necessity rather than for fun - which has borne the brunt of this. They've also done quite a good job in de-uglifying much of it, though I have no idea what to do about the humdrum indoor bit and the ten-storey block and apparently neither does the landlord. It certainly isn't unique in its improvement - I'd say every town centre I can think of in GM has been on an upward trajectory over the last ten years.
I wonder what the Venn diagrams looks like for support for banning dangerous dogs and banning guns?
I would have expected the overlap would be close to 100%. The arguments seem almost exactly the same to me. The only reason (and it is a compelling one) for not banning either is the general principle that government should try to intervene as little as possible. But if we accept the argument that there are potentially dangerous things which we would rather the population did not own, guns and certain breeds of aggressive dogs both strike me as quite close to the top of the list.
FWIW, up until about a year ago I thought this issue had been solved with the dangerous dogs act. My circle of acquaintances was very middle class and this was honestly an issue which I never encountered. As a result of junior football I spend a lot more time with people who live in the less salubrious parts of town, where the presence of dogs like these are a major concern. (But their owners must walk them almost solely around the council estates on which they live; you never see them in the parks and open spaces which I and my middle class bubble tend to frequent.)
The catch with all these proposals is that there is barely any enforcement of such things nowadays, and no money for such. It just means that when there is an incident, the owner is in even deeper water
I am marginally in favour of banning guns, and marginally not in favour of banning dogs by breed - mostly because I see credible evidence that number of guns relate to number of gun deaths, and do not see the same credible evidence for specific dog breeds, and that the positive argument for the necessity the own guns is outweighed by the credible evidence of their harm which again I don't think replicates for dog ownership.
I would be in favour, for both, a necessity to be licensed and trained and have highly regulated the production (breeding for dogs) and selling of them for both.
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has had massive strikes, and Brexit has already done us almost as much damage and probably permanently and still rising
Make your frigging mind up. One minute Brexit is the greatest disaster since the asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs - now it’s about the same as regular French strikes?
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Who could have foreseen that hoovering up failed businesses would result in your own business failing.
See it all the time with pubs and restaurants closing, reopening, then closing again.
Or when Staples went bust, their local one was replaced with a new stationery store ... that went bust.
Failed business models are hard to turn around if the fundamental business model is broken.
As for the economy, its time to move with the times. Why the heck would you want to go to Wilko to buy a new washing line, or dustpan and brush, or whatever, when you can get it for the same price next day via Amazon dropped off at your door?
And if you do want to go to a store, then firms like The Range seem to have much more sensible estates, with much easier to access parking.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
I find I go into town less and less these days, even though there are shops there that I like and aren't anywhere else, because it's simply too hard to get to, what with one way systems, pedestrianisation, excessive parking charges and the like. I have two big boxes full of book donations for the charity shop, but I think they will be going to the tip soon as I can't get close enough to any of the shops to donate them.
I realise that we have to restrict car use to protect the environment but there are all sorts of unintended consequences.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
When I was a kid we brought our cat on holiday with us, in a basket on the train. The other day there was someone on the train with a beautiful fluffy cat on a lead. It was very cute.
Did they have a portable litter box? I have to ask.
No. Cats can go a long time without needing to use the toilet, if they have no medical problems. When we took our cat in her basket there were no "accidents".
What is this twee non-U nonsense. Cats don’t “go to the toilet”. They shit and piss
Like dogs
This is almost as bad as those American media which coyly refer to pets “needing the bathroom”
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
I find I go into town less and less these days, even though there are shops there that I like and aren't anywhere else, because it's simply too hard to get to, what with one way systems, pedestrianisation, excessive parking charges and the like. I have two big boxes full of book donations for the charity shop, but I think they will be going to the tip soon as I can't get close enough to any of the shops to donate them.
I realise that we have to restrict car use to protect the environment but there are all sorts of unintended consequences.
But we don't have to restrict car use for any reason, and doing so results in cutting off your own nose to spite your face.
Out of town or other estates where cars are welcome don't seem to struggle anywhere near as much as High Streets do. Gee, I wonder why. 🤦♂️
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
When I was a kid we brought our cat on holiday with us, in a basket on the train. The other day there was someone on the train with a beautiful fluffy cat on a lead. It was very cute.
Did they have a portable litter box? I have to ask.
No. Cats can go a long time without needing to use the toilet, if they have no medical problems. When we took our cat in her basket there were no "accidents".
What is this twee non-U nonsense. Cats don’t “go to the toilet”. They shit and piss
Like dogs
This is almost as bad as those American media which coyly refer to pets “needing the bathroom”
Please, this is a family website. And why wouldn't I be non-U? I am non-U, and entirely proud of it.
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
Once again - this historical example does nothing to suggest aggression is heritable. Yes, the Romans may have bred for those things, but they also would have heavily trained them as well. So even with this example it is hard to know if it was breeding or training that made soldier dogs aggressive.
I don't think we have evidence that intelligence (in dogs or humans) is a heritable trait at all - again, would be interested in any evidence to the contrary (on dogs - I know the literature around humans and why it certainly isn't primarily a heritable trait).
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has never been a strong manufacturing economy. Italy is the Eurozone's second largest manufacturer. Up until the 1970s-80s deindustrialisation we had a much bigger industrial sector than France, like Germany, but since then we have been similar to France. Western European manufacturers outside Germany have struggled to compete with competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany is now facing similar pressures as its competitive advantage in high end manufacturing is eroded. The German economy faces big problems IMHO. Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
While Italy is still above the UK and France, it is also well down on 2008 levels.
Basically, if you look at Europe and ask "who's up in the last 15 years?", then the answer is:
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and - most of all - Eastern Europe.
While everyone else is down.
Edit to add: Switzerland is also up. (Albeit Norway is down.)
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
When I was a kid we brought our cat on holiday with us, in a basket on the train. The other day there was someone on the train with a beautiful fluffy cat on a lead. It was very cute.
Did they have a portable litter box? I have to ask.
No. Cats can go a long time without needing to use the toilet, if they have no medical problems. When we took our cat in her basket there were no "accidents".
I wish my neighbours cats were in that category. The bloody things dump on my lawn almost daily.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
I find I go into town less and less these days, even though there are shops there that I like and aren't anywhere else, because it's simply too hard to get to, what with one way systems, pedestrianisation, excessive parking charges and the like. I have two big boxes full of book donations for the charity shop, but I think they will be going to the tip soon as I can't get close enough to any of the shops to donate them.
I realise that we have to restrict car use to protect the environment but there are all sorts of unintended consequences.
Have a word with one of the shops - they usually collect such things if there is enough to be worthwhile. That's what we do.
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has never been a strong manufacturing economy. Italy is the Eurozone's second largest manufacturer. Up until the 1970s-80s deindustrialisation we had a much bigger industrial sector than France, like Germany, but since then we have been similar to France. Western European manufacturers outside Germany have struggled to compete with competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany is now facing similar pressures as its competitive advantage in high end manufacturing is eroded. The German economy faces big problems IMHO. Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
While Italy is still above the UK and France, it is also well down on 2008 levels.
Basically, if you look at Europe and ask "who's up in the last 15 years?", then the answer is:
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and - most of all - Eastern Europe.
While everyone else is down.
Though Germany is up in the last 15 years having done very poorly in the decade+ before then.
If you take when the EEC became the EU in 1993 as a starting point and ask who in the EU is up relative to a benchmark of comparable other developed nations . . . then the answer is nobody really. Europe and the EU has really struggled for the past thirty years.
Demographics is a big factor why, but not the only one.
Why do you all keep swallowing down what you see on Twitter or X or whatever without even doing some basic checks?
The Brexiteers:
Look, Brexit is done, it's time we all moved on and talked about other stuff.
Also the Brexiteers, breaking into girlish squeals at some unverified bit of news:
Rejoice, rejoice, Brexit is a success!!!
Both are entirely consistent.
Brexit is done.
Brexit is a success.
You could equally argue that Brexit is done and a failure.
What's not correct to say is that Brexit isn't done, since Brexit was done the second we left the EU.
Brexit is a success 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Really not sure what planet you live on but it is in a very different reality to the one most sane people live in. But then you spend most of your time on here anonymously and pointlessly debating matters that you have almost zero real life experience of. Keep taking the gullibility tablets Barty!
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
The Roman military dogs reminds me of a funny story I heard where a guy was watching Gladiator with his girlfriend and at the beginning the legionaries are lined up ready to face the German’s and Russell Crowe is walking along with his Alsatian on a chain. He instructs someone “on my command unleash Hell” and the guys girlfriend said “that’s a strange name for a dog.”
On the subject of comical dog names, a friend had one called Timber. She was Canadian, and often walked it in the woods.
I genuinely heard a middle aged couple refer to their small curly haired black dog as 'Rover' on Friday. This was Chorlton Green so may have been ironic, or something.
I might be being slow, but what's wrong with 'Rover' as a name to give a dog?
I know it's the archetypal dog name, but it isn't all that common in practice, is quite pleasing to say, and is a dog name rather than a re-purposed human name (which is common but always sounds vaguely weird to me).
Indeed.
I have met dogs called David, Lionel — and John.
This hounds with people names thing has to stop.
Whatever happened to the Wellards and Bouncers that abounded in days of yore? There was a time in this once-great nation when men were men, women were women, and dogs were dogs.
Americans have that solved already, giving babies all the dumb names leaving dogs with the sensible ones
QED spotted by a friend who lives in the US.
Should marry someone called Winter and take the name.
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
Once again - this historical example does nothing to suggest aggression is heritable. Yes, the Romans may have bred for those things, but they also would have heavily trained them as well. So even with this example it is hard to know if it was breeding or training that made soldier dogs aggressive.
I don't think we have evidence that intelligence (in dogs or humans) is a heritable trait at all - again, would be interested in any evidence to the contrary (on dogs - I know the literature around humans and why it certainly isn't primarily a heritable trait).
Well, fighting dog owners in the USA have been breeding for aggression for many decades - and given that their money depends on it, I suggest they know what they’re doing, more than anyone else
Ditto horse breeders etc. Ask the people whose livelihood depends on this stuff
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has never been a strong manufacturing economy. Italy is the Eurozone's second largest manufacturer. Up until the 1970s-80s deindustrialisation we had a much bigger industrial sector than France, like Germany, but since then we have been similar to France. Western European manufacturers outside Germany have struggled to compete with competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany is now facing similar pressures as its competitive advantage in high end manufacturing is eroded. The German economy faces big problems IMHO. Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
While Italy is still above the UK and France, it is also well down on 2008 levels.
Basically, if you look at Europe and ask "who's up in the last 15 years?", then the answer is:
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and - most of all - Eastern Europe.
While everyone else is down.
Though Germany is up in the last 15 years having done very poorly in the decade+ before then.
If you take when the EEC became the EU in 1993 as a starting point and ask who in the EU is up relative to a benchmark of comparable other developed nations . . . then the answer is nobody really. Europe and the EU has really struggled for the past thirty years.
Demographics is a big factor why, but not the only one.
Sure, but on that basis, the EEC would have been absolutely amazing, giving Europe's outperformance of the US between 1970 and about 1988.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Yebbut - Wilko isn't really discretionary spend. The stuff I buy from Wilko - a dustpan and brush, a drying rack - isn't really discretionary spend. They are things I need because I have broken the old one. And my local Wilko is now surrounded by seven or eight bars/restaurants which have opened in the last two or three years and appear to be full pretty much all the time. Plus a WHSmith which is handy but must surely be on borrowed time and a Meek's shoes, ditto.
My local town centre is doing quite well. Certainly doing better than at any time since I moved here in 2007. But the most visible growth is in hospitality and other bits of discretionary spend. Places selling things we want are doing well. Places selling things we need are not.
Which gives us our answer: Wilko sells the sort of stuff we now buy online.
Which is the long term problem trying to sell GM - someone will sell it cheaper online. Wilko does a lot of DIY and garden stuff - that is the discretionary part - and was trying to steal sales and share from supermarkets in non-food (household, health and beauty etc). Their problem is that they weren't a discounter like a Home Bargains who were cheaper.
Glad your town centre is thriving. Most aren't. And will continue not to thrive as long as the retail outlets continue to be owned by OffShoreCo who have minimal interest in actually letting out their asset. We need small local independent businesses so that people have a reason to actually shop in bricks and mortar.
The problem is that online beats physical shops on everything but immediacy.
Light bulbs, bin bags etc are exactly the kind of things that repeat online orders are good for.
My daughters generation are wired to order clothes online, try at home and return the unwanted.
Finding a reason for bricks and mortar is hard. One success I came across, pre COVID, was a toy store out in the sticks.
He pivoted away from the stuff that was being sold online, to what people needed *now* to complete projects on the weekend. So paint and painting gear and lots of remote control stuff - many remote control aircraft come without radio gear. That and all the spare blades for all the quadcopters….
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
When I was a kid we brought our cat on holiday with us, in a basket on the train. The other day there was someone on the train with a beautiful fluffy cat on a lead. It was very cute.
Did they have a portable litter box? I have to ask.
No. Cats can go a long time without needing to use the toilet, if they have no medical problems. When we took our cat in her basket there were no "accidents".
I wish my neighbours cats were in that category. The bloody things dump on my lawn almost daily.
If you don't want cats going to the toilet* on your lawn you should get a cat.
* just to wind up Leon. Kind of surprised that Nancy is his favourite Mitford sister.
Not that it's relevant to the flow of the argument, but I had always thought I was in the middle of the bell curve with regard to both cats and dogs. Dogs are fine, but I'd quite like them to be *over there* having a nice time in a field, rather than right here in my face barking angrily at me. But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog. And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me. Anyway - that's all. As you were.
The difference between dogs and cats is that a dog will feel the need to specifically reassure that "he doesn't bite", whereas a cat owner will only feel the need to warn if their cat does. It's low-key assumed that a dog might be nasty and a cat probably isn't.
Which isn't to say that cats can't sometimes be vicious little shits. They can. But you rarely hear about one killing a person.
That's all the evidence I need for my conclusion that cats are better than dogs. YMMV.
Despite being useful for f**k all, unless you have mice, and being so loyal that they will move in down the street if they get better food.
I've had mice before and my cat has done sod all about it. It's also pretty common for cats to eat their owners, starting with the face, if they die alone (dogs do this a bit as well at a severe push), so that's one for me to look forward to.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
A modern, entitled cat that can't even be arsed to chase away vermin, eh .
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
When I was a kid we brought our cat on holiday with us, in a basket on the train. The other day there was someone on the train with a beautiful fluffy cat on a lead. It was very cute.
Did they have a portable litter box? I have to ask.
No. Cats can go a long time without needing to use the toilet, if they have no medical problems. When we took our cat in her basket there were no "accidents".
What is this twee non-U nonsense. Cats don’t “go to the toilet”. They shit and piss
Like dogs
This is almost as bad as those American media which coyly refer to pets “needing the bathroom”
My cats 'use the toilet', albeit that their toilet is a litter tray. We had hoped, early on, once we started letting them out, they would move on to 'burying their shit in the flower bed' (neighbours are pretty safe here - we have the wettest cats on the street and they rarely leave the cutilage.) But no. We still get them hurrying in with a panicked expression on their face, shitting in the litter tray, then going straight back out to frolic afresh. We COULD try taking the litter tray away, but you can immediately see why that is a risky gambit. They are not the brightest of cats. The only place I have ever seen them shitting outside - disappointingly - was on the tarpaulin I had placed on top of the rooflights on the flat roof of the extension which I had placed there to hold back a leak. After which they'd half-heartedly try to cover it up with other bits of tarpaulin. What thought processes led to that being deemed the only other acceptable cat toilet is beyond me. (Happily the leak is now fixed and with the tarp removed they show no signs of now considering it a toilet.) You see how useful the word 'toilet' is in a feline sense?
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
I find I go into town less and less these days, even though there are shops there that I like and aren't anywhere else, because it's simply too hard to get to, what with one way systems, pedestrianisation, excessive parking charges and the like. I have two big boxes full of book donations for the charity shop, but I think they will be going to the tip soon as I can't get close enough to any of the shops to donate them.
I realise that we have to restrict car use to protect the environment but there are all sorts of unintended consequences.
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has never been a strong manufacturing economy. Italy is the Eurozone's second largest manufacturer. Up until the 1970s-80s deindustrialisation we had a much bigger industrial sector than France, like Germany, but since then we have been similar to France. Western European manufacturers outside Germany have struggled to compete with competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany is now facing similar pressures as its competitive advantage in high end manufacturing is eroded. The German economy faces big problems IMHO. Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
While Italy is still above the UK and France, it is also well down on 2008 levels.
Basically, if you look at Europe and ask "who's up in the last 15 years?", then the answer is:
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and - most of all - Eastern Europe.
While everyone else is down.
Though Germany is up in the last 15 years having done very poorly in the decade+ before then.
If you take when the EEC became the EU in 1993 as a starting point and ask who in the EU is up relative to a benchmark of comparable other developed nations . . . then the answer is nobody really. Europe and the EU has really struggled for the past thirty years.
Demographics is a big factor why, but not the only one.
Sure, but on that basis, the EEC would have been absolutely amazing, giving Europe's outperformance of the US between 1970 and about 1988.
Yes it was, and I have a theory why.
The EEC was about opening up Europe's markets and removing barriers. The fundamental guiding principle of the EEC was about equivalency, it wasn't regulating most markets but it was saying that even if the French had different standards to the Germans then they'd recognise each other's standards as equivalent and reciprocally accept them.
The EU though has been a far more sclerotic institution. Its far more unifying standards and coming up with one size fits all solutions, which doesn't work well with nimble economic growth or developing markets.
We ought to go back to the former. Hopefully with Brexit we can take a step in that direction, I don't want us tied to EU standards, but I don't want us to reject the EU's standards either. This is a debate I've had with @RochdalePioneers and @Carnyx a few times, I don't think we should ever implement unnecessary customs barriers, we should waive through Europe's products as equivalent to our own, even if we're able to make products they won't accept themselves.
People scorn that if we can't export to the EU all our products then that puts us at a disadvantage, but the opposite can be the case. It may mean products can come to market in the UK first, then the EU gets around to accepting them, at which point we're in a competitive advantage of having been first movers.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Yebbut - Wilko isn't really discretionary spend. The stuff I buy from Wilko - a dustpan and brush, a drying rack - isn't really discretionary spend. They are things I need because I have broken the old one. And my local Wilko is now surrounded by seven or eight bars/restaurants which have opened in the last two or three years and appear to be full pretty much all the time. Plus a WHSmith which is handy but must surely be on borrowed time and a Meek's shoes, ditto.
My local town centre is doing quite well. Certainly doing better than at any time since I moved here in 2007. But the most visible growth is in hospitality and other bits of discretionary spend. Places selling things we want are doing well. Places selling things we need are not.
Which gives us our answer: Wilko sells the sort of stuff we now buy online.
Which is the long term problem trying to sell GM - someone will sell it cheaper online. Wilko does a lot of DIY and garden stuff - that is the discretionary part - and was trying to steal sales and share from supermarkets in non-food (household, health and beauty etc). Their problem is that they weren't a discounter like a Home Bargains who were cheaper.
Glad your town centre is thriving. Most aren't. And will continue not to thrive as long as the retail outlets continue to be owned by OffShoreCo who have minimal interest in actually letting out their asset. We need small local independent businesses so that people have a reason to actually shop in bricks and mortar.
"trying to sell GM"?
The revival of my local town centre has been interesting. It's been weak ever since the Trafford centre opened. Materially, there is a pedestrianised street with a variety of buildings ranging from moderately attractive Edwardiana to functional 60s, backing on to which there is a large, unattractive 60s development: a mix of pedestrianised dead-end, gloomy indoor bit which probably looked quite futuristic for the first ten minutes it was open, a ten-storey office block (which I think is now very low end resi) and a Tesco - all done in the same ugly grey/purple brick. Presumably the Tesco is owned by Tesco, but I think everything else has the same landlord, which turned out to be some holding company in Northern Ireland. I was slightly surprised that one company owned so much of the town - I wonder if it is a front for some aristocrat? And I wonder how typical this is? I certainly agree it would probably be better for towns if this sort of monopoly didn't exist. That said, whoever the landlord is, they had clearly decided by 2019 that their asset was severely underperforming. This is one of Greater Manchester's more prosperous suburbs - there's a fair bit of spending power around with nothing much to spend on. Clearly it was decided that the strategy was less retail, more hospitality - which I think is the right strategy for towns in general. I don't want to see retail edged out completely, but its an undeniable fact that online has taken a huge chunk out of the spend which previously went on town centre retail, and its shops at the functional end of the spectrum (e.g. Wilko) - which we go to out of necessity rather than for fun - which has borne the brunt of this. They've also done quite a good job in de-uglifying much of it, though I have no idea what to do about the humdrum indoor bit and the ten-storey block and apparently neither does the landlord. It certainly isn't unique in its improvement - I'd say every town centre I can think of in GM has been on an upward trajectory over the last ten years.
GM - General Merchandise. Your "dustpan and brush"
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
I was around the Oxford Street area last week and it was absolutely bumping
Why do you all keep swallowing down what you see on Twitter or X or whatever without even doing some basic checks?
The Brexiteers:
Look, Brexit is done, it's time we all moved on and talked about other stuff.
Also the Brexiteers, breaking into girlish squeals at some unverified bit of news:
Rejoice, rejoice, Brexit is a success!!!
Both are entirely consistent.
Brexit is done.
Brexit is a success.
You could equally argue that Brexit is done and a failure.
What's not correct to say is that Brexit isn't done, since Brexit was done the second we left the EU.
Brexit is a success 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Really not sure what planet you live on but it is in a very different reality to the one most sane people live in. But then you spend most of your time on here anonymously and pointlessly debating matters that you have almost zero real life experience of. Keep taking the gullibility tablets Barty!
To be fair to Barty, those of us who have been here more than three or four years know perfectly well what his IRL name is and indeed his rough area of work, geography, etc. He's one of the least anonymous people on here.
I was never sure with you whether 'Nigel Foremain' was your name or just an expression that you were 'For Remain'. If the former, kudos for using your real name, though obviously I mean no censure for those who prefer not to.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Yebbut - Wilko isn't really discretionary spend. The stuff I buy from Wilko - a dustpan and brush, a drying rack - isn't really discretionary spend. They are things I need because I have broken the old one. And my local Wilko is now surrounded by seven or eight bars/restaurants which have opened in the last two or three years and appear to be full pretty much all the time. Plus a WHSmith which is handy but must surely be on borrowed time and a Meek's shoes, ditto.
My local town centre is doing quite well. Certainly doing better than at any time since I moved here in 2007. But the most visible growth is in hospitality and other bits of discretionary spend. Places selling things we want are doing well. Places selling things we need are not.
Which gives us our answer: Wilko sells the sort of stuff we now buy online.
Which is the long term problem trying to sell GM - someone will sell it cheaper online. Wilko does a lot of DIY and garden stuff - that is the discretionary part - and was trying to steal sales and share from supermarkets in non-food (household, health and beauty etc). Their problem is that they weren't a discounter like a Home Bargains who were cheaper.
Glad your town centre is thriving. Most aren't. And will continue not to thrive as long as the retail outlets continue to be owned by OffShoreCo who have minimal interest in actually letting out their asset. We need small local independent businesses so that people have a reason to actually shop in bricks and mortar.
"trying to sell GM"?
The revival of my local town centre has been interesting. It's been weak ever since the Trafford centre opened. Materially, there is a pedestrianised street with a variety of buildings ranging from moderately attractive Edwardiana to functional 60s, backing on to which there is a large, unattractive 60s development: a mix of pedestrianised dead-end, gloomy indoor bit which probably looked quite futuristic for the first ten minutes it was open, a ten-storey office block (which I think is now very low end resi) and a Tesco - all done in the same ugly grey/purple brick. Presumably the Tesco is owned by Tesco, but I think everything else has the same landlord, which turned out to be some holding company in Northern Ireland. I was slightly surprised that one company owned so much of the town - I wonder if it is a front for some aristocrat? And I wonder how typical this is? I certainly agree it would probably be better for towns if this sort of monopoly didn't exist. That said, whoever the landlord is, they had clearly decided by 2019 that their asset was severely underperforming. This is one of Greater Manchester's more prosperous suburbs - there's a fair bit of spending power around with nothing much to spend on. Clearly it was decided that the strategy was less retail, more hospitality - which I think is the right strategy for towns in general. I don't want to see retail edged out completely, but its an undeniable fact that online has taken a huge chunk out of the spend which previously went on town centre retail, and its shops at the functional end of the spectrum (e.g. Wilko) - which we go to out of necessity rather than for fun - which has borne the brunt of this. They've also done quite a good job in de-uglifying much of it, though I have no idea what to do about the humdrum indoor bit and the ten-storey block and apparently neither does the landlord. It certainly isn't unique in its improvement - I'd say every town centre I can think of in GM has been on an upward trajectory over the last ten years.
GM - General Merchandise. Your "dustpan and brush"
Thanks! As you can see, it instinctively has a different meaning for me!
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
Once again - this historical example does nothing to suggest aggression is heritable. Yes, the Romans may have bred for those things, but they also would have heavily trained them as well. So even with this example it is hard to know if it was breeding or training that made soldier dogs aggressive.
I don't think we have evidence that intelligence (in dogs or humans) is a heritable trait at all - again, would be interested in any evidence to the contrary (on dogs - I know the literature around humans and why it certainly isn't primarily a heritable trait).
We have ample evidence that intelligence is at least partly heritable in humans; no one seriously denies this. Why would intelligence be uniquely environmental when virtually every other human attribute - from height to hair colour to depression to alcoholism - is partly genetic?
Wiki:
“Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%,[6] with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.[7] IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults.”
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Who could have foreseen that hoovering up failed businesses would result in your own business failing.
See it all the time with pubs and restaurants closing, reopening, then closing again.
Or when Staples went bust, their local one was replaced with a new stationery store ... that went bust.
Failed business models are hard to turn around if the fundamental business model is broken.
As for the economy, its time to move with the times. Why the heck would you want to go to Wilko to buy a new washing line, or dustpan and brush, or whatever, when you can get it for the same price next day via Amazon dropped off at your door?
And if you do want to go to a store, then firms like The Range seem to have much more sensible estates, with much easier to access parking.
A lot of people like shopping / won't use online. The problem with a General Merchandise (GM) specialist retailer is that much of the product range can be bought elsewhere. The "all under one roof" thing which used to have so much appeal no longer does.
One thing which boggled my mind when I read it. Wilko have this mad idea to distribute items across their estate. Which means sending heavy items to town centre and high street stores. This is the same stupid which Woolies were diseased with towards the end - in their case store managers would phone each other up and do stock swaps in their personal cars. Woolies wouldn't know as their computer had no visibility once dispatched to store...
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has never been a strong manufacturing economy. Italy is the Eurozone's second largest manufacturer. Up until the 1970s-80s deindustrialisation we had a much bigger industrial sector than France, like Germany, but since then we have been similar to France. Western European manufacturers outside Germany have struggled to compete with competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany is now facing similar pressures as its competitive advantage in high end manufacturing is eroded. The German economy faces big problems IMHO. Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
While Italy is still above the UK and France, it is also well down on 2008 levels.
Basically, if you look at Europe and ask "who's up in the last 15 years?", then the answer is:
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and - most of all - Eastern Europe.
While everyone else is down.
Though Germany is up in the last 15 years having done very poorly in the decade+ before then.
If you take when the EEC became the EU in 1993 as a starting point and ask who in the EU is up relative to a benchmark of comparable other developed nations . . . then the answer is nobody really. Europe and the EU has really struggled for the past thirty years.
Demographics is a big factor why, but not the only one.
Sure, but on that basis, the EEC would have been absolutely amazing, giving Europe's outperformance of the US between 1970 and about 1988.
Yes it was, and I have a theory why.
The EEC was about opening up Europe's markets and removing barriers. The fundamental guiding principle of the EEC was about equivalency, it wasn't regulating most markets but it was saying that even if the French had different standards to the Germans then they'd recognise each other's standards as equivalent and reciprocally accept them.
The EU though has been a far more sclerotic institution. Its far more unifying standards and coming up with one size fits all solutions, which doesn't work well with nimble economic growth or developing markets.
We ought to go back to the former. Hopefully with Brexit we can take a step in that direction, I don't want us tied to EU standards, but I don't want us to reject the EU's standards either. This is a debate I've had with @RochdalePioneers and @Carnyx a few times, I don't think we should ever implement unnecessary customs barriers, we should waive through Europe's products as equivalent to our own, even if we're able to make products they won't accept themselves.
People scorn that if we can't export to the EU all our products then that puts us at a disadvantage, but the opposite can be the case. It may mean products can come to market in the UK first, then the EU gets around to accepting them, at which point we're in a competitive advantage of having been first movers.
Seeing as we are talking about vicious dogs, this is mine. He is deadly. He has licked many into submission.
PS He seems to have fallen over.
In case you are wondering how I got him to sit so obediently I was eating an apple and he was waiting for the core. Second choice as a treat only to banana skins which people throw all over the place and he hoovers up.
You wouldn't believe it to look at him but he got expelled from training classes for quote 'being belligerent'. He caused havoc. He knows a huge number of commands and will even do them if he feels like it, but he is (and this is the consensus of everyone who has met him) the most excitable dog on the planet.
You shouldnt be feeding dogs apple cores tbh, as the seeds are toxic and the core a choke hazard
What we should be feeding him and what he eats are two completely different topics. We have spent a fortune on vets and the 'toxic helpline' (£45 a throw)
Banana skins and corn husks are other choke hazards, but you try getting them off him. He hunts for them and they are everywhere.
A couple of weeks ago he ate a cricket sized ball of tinfoil that had previously had a cake in it. He was pooing sparkling poo for several days.
He ate a bag of potatoes. We only found out because he was running around the garden with a sweet potato in his mouth. We got that off him and were relieved only to find an empty potato bag. That cost £45 (one of our cheaper bills).
He ate my wallet, money and all. Just a few chewed up credit cards left.
He is a skilled thief. He will steal something that matters (glasses, binoculars, etc) while you are eating. When you try and recover that he will have pinched your sandwich.
On his numerous visits to the vet, which he loves, they often have to sedate him. The vet said for most dogs this makes them a bit sleepy, for yours it will probably turn him into a normal dog for a bit.
Meanwhile, the fat lady has sung with regards to Wilco...
That is sad. And also baffling. It always seemed to be doing well when I went in there. And you'd have thought it recession-proof - sell stuff that people actually need, cheaply. It's not like when Whittard teas went out of business.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
Is Wilko closing down the kind of "all is ok, lots of discretionary spending going on" thing you were talking about earlier?
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Who could have foreseen that hoovering up failed businesses would result in your own business failing.
See it all the time with pubs and restaurants closing, reopening, then closing again.
Or when Staples went bust, their local one was replaced with a new stationery store ... that went bust.
Failed business models are hard to turn around if the fundamental business model is broken.
As for the economy, its time to move with the times. Why the heck would you want to go to Wilko to buy a new washing line, or dustpan and brush, or whatever, when you can get it for the same price next day via Amazon dropped off at your door?
And if you do want to go to a store, then firms like The Range seem to have much more sensible estates, with much easier to access parking.
A lot of people like shopping / won't use online. The problem with a General Merchandise (GM) specialist retailer is that much of the product range can be bought elsewhere. The "all under one roof" thing which used to have so much appeal no longer does.
One thing which boggled my mind when I read it. Wilko have this mad idea to distribute items across their estate. Which means sending heavy items to town centre and high street stores. This is the same stupid which Woolies were diseased with towards the end - in their case store managers would phone each other up and do stock swaps in their personal cars. Woolies wouldn't know as their computer had no visibility once dispatched to store...
A similar anecdote from 20 years ago: Boots the Chemist did a similar thing. Promoted the same items across all its stores. Sometimes this was fine, other times it met opposition from store managers. One time, the company had acquired a shit-tonne of Brita water filters and insisted these occupy prime promotional space. Got very irate with, mainly, Scottish, Welsh and Northern English store managers who protested no-one would buy the things and it was a waste of promotional space - as of course turned out to be the case: because why buy a Brita water filter when your water is already nice? A grand total of zero Brita water filters were sold in the Inverness store, prompting a very long round trip to see if the store really was promoting it (it was, obediently but fruitlessly). Whether any lessons were learned I couldn't say.
They're ain't any devil dogs, just moronic owners. Obviously some dog breeds don't make good pets and I can understand limiting those breeds in some way. Far too many people want a dog to be something it's not. It's not a toy for the kids or a fashion accessory or a tool to show how hard you are. It's a living, sentiment being that has its own moods and foibles. Some days it might want to lick your face and chase after a ball. Other days it might want to lick its own balls and then bite your balls. They take time, money and commitment and they deserve to be respected and treated well. Some dogs shouldn't be pets, but there's more families that shouldn't be pet owners!
Wrong. There ARE devil dogs - do your research. The American bully XL has been specifically bred for unhinged aggression and ferocious tenacity - so as to win dog fights in the USA. It will fight and fight until it dies, it is extremely powerful and muscled, and it has also been severely inbred - so these lunatic urges have gotten worse, like the Habsburg chin
Very few breeds are inherently dangerous. But this one is
Can you provide some of this research? I would be really interested to read it. I've put in this thread further down from Science their research on how dog breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and (whilst I accept that this source will be heavily biased in favour of dog ownership) the point they make that biting and fatalities have gone up since breed based bans, not down, does suggest that the policy is a failure:
My herding dog knows how to round up sheep and goats without any training and in the goats case before he'd even seen a goat. So clearly a dog bred for fighting comes hard wired with the knowledge and propensity for fighting
Are herding instincts and fighting instincts the same? I don't think that's how biology works. Again - the Science article suggests breed is not a good indicator of behaviour, and the selection bias of owners as described by the dogs magazine is as good a hypothesis as biological determinism; I am just asking for better data. Sans evidence that aggression in dogs is heritable - and with evidence backing the hypothesis it might not be - why should banning the breed lead to better outcomes?
Dogs have been bred for aggression and fighting skill for thousands of years. The Romans famously had terrifying soldier-dogs
Aggression and lethality are heritable traits just like intelligence, speed, smallness, herding skills, wiry coats for winter - and so on
For mad breeders in the USA looking to make money in dog fights it makes sense to select and breed the most horrifying dogs unimaginable. It makes no sense at all for these dogs to then be legal to own as pets
Loads of countries calmly and successfully ban these dogs. Their children are not torn to pieces. Why should Britain be uniquely stupid and NOT ban them?
Once again - this historical example does nothing to suggest aggression is heritable. Yes, the Romans may have bred for those things, but they also would have heavily trained them as well. So even with this example it is hard to know if it was breeding or training that made soldier dogs aggressive.
I don't think we have evidence that intelligence (in dogs or humans) is a heritable trait at all - again, would be interested in any evidence to the contrary (on dogs - I know the literature around humans and why it certainly isn't primarily a heritable trait).
Well, fighting dog owners in the USA have been breeding for aggression for many decades - and given that their money depends on it, I suggest they know what they’re doing, more than anyone else
Ditto horse breeders etc. Ask the people whose livelihood depends on this stuff
So I know people who breed and train horses - and speaking to them they talk about how sociable horses are and how their dominance hierarchy works; that horses are extremely sensitive to being liked or disliked and "know their place" in the herd by the behaviours that show that (the metaphor given to me was "like high school girls").
I think the difficulty here is that aggression is a social trait that is associated with biological trait. I do not argue that their are not heritable biological traits that would make a dog better at being aggressive / used to harm (size, bite strength, coat thickness, etc) but aggression is about how you interact with other animals.
We know how certain heritable traits are linked to biology - the famous russian experiments with red foxes springs to mind, showing that "friendliness" as a trait (although you could always call that something else, like courage or sociability, or even risk aversion) led to further generations of the foxes looking more "doggy", with floppy ears and changed body shape. No one here has shared anything that suggests aggression is such a trait - that is the level of evidence I would like to understand the appropriateness of banning by breed. Again, if the idea of banning breeds was to spend the time doing that research - I'd be up for that. But banning breeds when it could easily be the selection bias of people who are after dogs that look a specific manner and making them aggressive, rather than any inherent aggressiveness to begin with, is not evidence based policy. The increase in dog bites, for example, is that explainable by the breed hypothesis, or the social one? People seem to be pointing at getting dogs during lockdown not being socialised - that's a socialisation position.
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has never been a strong manufacturing economy. Italy is the Eurozone's second largest manufacturer. Up until the 1970s-80s deindustrialisation we had a much bigger industrial sector than France, like Germany, but since then we have been similar to France. Western European manufacturers outside Germany have struggled to compete with competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany is now facing similar pressures as its competitive advantage in high end manufacturing is eroded. The German economy faces big problems IMHO. Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
While Italy is still above the UK and France, it is also well down on 2008 levels.
Basically, if you look at Europe and ask "who's up in the last 15 years?", then the answer is:
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and - most of all - Eastern Europe.
While everyone else is down.
Though Germany is up in the last 15 years having done very poorly in the decade+ before then.
If you take when the EEC became the EU in 1993 as a starting point and ask who in the EU is up relative to a benchmark of comparable other developed nations . . . then the answer is nobody really. Europe and the EU has really struggled for the past thirty years.
Demographics is a big factor why, but not the only one.
Sure, but on that basis, the EEC would have been absolutely amazing, giving Europe's outperformance of the US between 1970 and about 1988.
Yes it was, and I have a theory why.
The EEC was about opening up Europe's markets and removing barriers. The fundamental guiding principle of the EEC was about equivalency, it wasn't regulating most markets but it was saying that even if the French had different standards to the Germans then they'd recognise each other's standards as equivalent and reciprocally accept them.
The EU though has been a far more sclerotic institution. Its far more unifying standards and coming up with one size fits all solutions, which doesn't work well with nimble economic growth or developing markets.
We ought to go back to the former. Hopefully with Brexit we can take a step in that direction, I don't want us tied to EU standards, but I don't want us to reject the EU's standards either. This is a debate I've had with @RochdalePioneers and @Carnyx a few times, I don't think we should ever implement unnecessary customs barriers, we should waive through Europe's products as equivalent to our own, even if we're able to make products they won't accept themselves.
People scorn that if we can't export to the EU all our products then that puts us at a disadvantage, but the opposite can be the case. It may mean products can come to market in the UK first, then the EU gets around to accepting them, at which point we're in a competitive advantage of having been first movers.
One of my favourite pieces of managementspeak bullshit is "we are where we are". Brexit is done and with respect to the ongoing row, has been done for a while. What isn't settle is where we go from here.
What is self-evident is that "tret us like Uzbekistan" - a 3rd country - was utterly stupid and destrictive behaviour by the Tories. That they were so shit at administration that we didn't even have the resources to implement that deal just makes it worse.
We have abandoned most inbound checks because we're too shut to do them. The French however are global masters at petty bastardry, and where we are is beholden to them and to them implementing rules we demanded they implement.
We don't even need to debate standards. Our standards are close enough to EU standards to make no real difference. Nor are they likely to diverge that far in practice now all the SOVEREIGNTY chect banging has stopped.
So do a realignment deal which gives us the right to have babies (diverged standards) even if we can't have babies (cos industry won't pay for it - see the UKCA bullshit). There are plenty of products that the EU won't accept. Not because of differing standards. Because they are so expensive thanks to Boris Johnson's Brexit Deal. Remove the barriers, make us competitive again and surprisingly enough all this will just fade off into background noise.
Seeing as we are talking about vicious dogs, this is mine. He is deadly. He has licked many into submission.
PS He seems to have fallen over.
In case you are wondering how I got him to sit so obediently I was eating an apple and he was waiting for the core. Second choice as a treat only to banana skins which people throw all over the place and he hoovers up.
You wouldn't believe it to look at him but he got expelled from training classes for quote 'being belligerent'. He caused havoc. He knows a huge number of commands and will even do them if he feels like it, but he is (and this is the consensus of everyone who has met him) the most excitable dog on the planet.
You shouldnt be feeding dogs apple cores tbh, as the seeds are toxic and the core a choke hazard
What we should be feeding him and what he eats are two completely different topics. We have spent a fortune on vets and the 'toxic helpline' (£45 a throw)
Banana skins and corn husks are other choke hazards, but you try getting them off him. He hunts for them and they are everywhere.
A couple of weeks ago he ate a cricket sized ball of tinfoil that had previously had a cake in it. He was pooing sparkling poo for several days.
He ate a bag of potatoes. We only found out because he was running around the garden with a sweet potato in his mouth. We got that off him and were relieved only to find an empty potato bag. That cost £45 (one of our cheaper bills).
He ate my wallet, money and all. Just a few chewed up credit cards left.
He is a skilled thief. He will steal something that matters (glasses, binoculars, etc) while you are eating. When you try and recover that he will have pinched your sandwich.
On his numerous visits to the vet, which he loves, they often have to sedate him. The vet said for most dogs this makes them a bit sleepy, for yours it will probably turn him into a normal dog for a bit.
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
France has never been a strong manufacturing economy. Italy is the Eurozone's second largest manufacturer. Up until the 1970s-80s deindustrialisation we had a much bigger industrial sector than France, like Germany, but since then we have been similar to France. Western European manufacturers outside Germany have struggled to compete with competition from Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany is now facing similar pressures as its competitive advantage in high end manufacturing is eroded. The German economy faces big problems IMHO. Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
While Italy is still above the UK and France, it is also well down on 2008 levels.
Basically, if you look at Europe and ask "who's up in the last 15 years?", then the answer is:
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and - most of all - Eastern Europe.
While everyone else is down.
Though Germany is up in the last 15 years having done very poorly in the decade+ before then.
If you take when the EEC became the EU in 1993 as a starting point and ask who in the EU is up relative to a benchmark of comparable other developed nations . . . then the answer is nobody really. Europe and the EU has really struggled for the past thirty years.
Demographics is a big factor why, but not the only one.
Sure, but on that basis, the EEC would have been absolutely amazing, giving Europe's outperformance of the US between 1970 and about 1988.
Yes it was, and I have a theory why.
The EEC was about opening up Europe's markets and removing barriers. The fundamental guiding principle of the EEC was about equivalency, it wasn't regulating most markets but it was saying that even if the French had different standards to the Germans then they'd recognise each other's standards as equivalent and reciprocally accept them.
The EU though has been a far more sclerotic institution. Its far more unifying standards and coming up with one size fits all solutions, which doesn't work well with nimble economic growth or developing markets.
We ought to go back to the former. Hopefully with Brexit we can take a step in that direction, I don't want us tied to EU standards, but I don't want us to reject the EU's standards either. This is a debate I've had with @RochdalePioneers and @Carnyx a few times, I don't think we should ever implement unnecessary customs barriers, we should waive through Europe's products as equivalent to our own, even if we're able to make products they won't accept themselves.
People scorn that if we can't export to the EU all our products then that puts us at a disadvantage, but the opposite can be the case. It may mean products can come to market in the UK first, then the EU gets around to accepting them, at which point we're in a competitive advantage of having been first movers.
One of my favourite pieces of managementspeak bullshit is "we are where we are". Brexit is done and with respect to the ongoing row, has been done for a while. What isn't settle is where we go from here.
What is self-evident is that "tret us like Uzbekistan" - a 3rd country - was utterly stupid and destrictive behaviour by the Tories. That they were so shit at administration that we didn't even have the resources to implement that deal just makes it worse.
We have abandoned most inbound checks because we're too shut to do them. The French however are global masters at petty bastardry, and where we are is beholden to them and to them implementing rules we demanded they implement.
We don't even need to debate standards. Our standards are close enough to EU standards to make no real difference. Nor are they likely to diverge that far in practice now all the SOVEREIGNTY chect banging has stopped.
So do a realignment deal which gives us the right to have babies (diverged standards) even if we can't have babies (cos industry won't pay for it - see the UKCA bullshit). There are plenty of products that the EU won't accept. Not because of differing standards. Because they are so expensive thanks to Boris Johnson's Brexit Deal. Remove the barriers, make us competitive again and surprisingly enough all this will just fade off into background noise.
If the French want to be petty bastards, all the more reason its a good thing we are out of the EU, and we should be looking elsewhere for progress.
No reason to have inbound checks, as I said they serve no purpose, just recognise equivalency and move on.
However when and where we want to diverge, we should simply do so. Democratically, without restrictions or preconditions or negotiations with Europe.
If industry wants to pay for CE Mark and we recognise that as equivalent, then great, do that and move on.
If industry wants to pay for UKCA where that has diverged, then that should be an available Plan B too.
The key is to be agile enough to do both. And we can, with our current Brexit arrangements.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kfcPZ7Wtri0
I love things like this. The reason why people in Afghanistan carried zip-ties was that in the event of traumatic amputations they provided a very quick way of tourniqueting. The increased incidence of female soldiers led to the discovery that tampons are a great way to stanch bullet wounds.
Seeing as we are talking about vicious dogs, this is mine. He is deadly. He has licked many into submission.
PS He seems to have fallen over.
But it turns out this position actually puts me right at one end of the bell curve, and the rest of the population is wildly pro-dog. I mean, 27% of the population apparently like dogs so much that they actually want one in their house and are willing to do all manner of - to non-dog lovers - unpleasant stuff like pick up their excrement in order to achieve this. I have ten friends from school I meet up with regularly - no fewer than six of them are now dog owners. British people are, it turns out, wildly pro-dog.
And I'd also thought I was somewhere in the middle as regards to cats. But it turns out I'm right at the other end - most people don't like cats nearly as much as me.
And I'm wildly inconsistent with my standards on saliva. I really would rather dogs did not lick me. I have in the past had to rig up little defensive fortifications when visiting houses with large dogs to ward this off. But the daft soggy catty who gets so delighted with being stroked that she has a little dribble out of sheer pleasure? Absolutely charming.
Anyway - that's all. As you were.
What is odd is that the only coverage is reportage, and the only reportage is two rather obscure outlets. That there is no actual report or press release about the report makes this even odder.
They are clearly a legitimate organisation but they are a members organisation too.
It can also be difficult to get two vets to agree on whether a cross bred dog is or is not predominantly a dangerous breed.
You wouldn't believe it to look at him but he got expelled from training classes for quote 'being belligerent'. He caused havoc. He knows a huge number of commands and will even do them if he feels like it, but he is (and this is the consensus of everyone who has met him) the most excitable dog on the planet.
There's a possible criticism of the Government that they didn't use powers in the legislation to ban the American XL Bully breed earlier (although as has been discussed here, it isn't a totally straightforward call). But the 1991 Act does actually empower them to do it without primary legislation.
Any retail experts have a view on what went wrong? Competition from the likes of B&M and the Range? The wrong estate? (My local Wilko is at the back end of a long dead end and has nowhere convenient to park near it). Too much debt?
ULEZ is defined on the sensible criterion of emissions. Not on an out of date list of car makes.
They need a lot of time and training when young. Two of his siblings nearly got handed back in their first year.
They're companionable.
They don't seem to run up massive medical bills (sample size 6, of which 2 are dogs, and 4 are cats).
You can go away on holiday and you don't need to spend a fortune on getting someone to look after them.
You don't need to follow them down the street picking up their faeces.
Having neighbours with cats is another good reason for getting a dog
CDU/CSU 27.1%
AfD 21.4%
SPD 16.8%
Greens 14.1%
FDP 6.8%
Left 4.8%
Others 9.3%
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahl_zum_21._Deutschen_Bundestag/Umfragen_und_Prognosen#Dynamische_Sonntagsfrage
Unfortunately, this comes with a rather big caveat: it's because France has gone backward faster than the UK. In both countries, manufacturing levels are well down on where they were in 2008, and France will have taken a second hit this year as industrial output will have been affected by protests and other industrial action.
Many many reasons. General Merchandise is a bugger of a category. Old-fashioned supply chain principles despite modern new-build DCs. A growing reluctance of the family to keep throwing money at it.
But what has killed them is where they are. Wilko are predominantly on high streets and shopping parades - a relic of it hoovering up former Woolworths stores. In so many towns the high street and the whole town centres are dying, with footfall is on average -30% vs pre-Covid.
You and a few others were trying to ramp the amazing economy earlier. Where? Go to any town and chances are its quiet and shuttered and visibly struggling. And these are the places where Wilko trade.
Don't get me wrong, I like my cat. But I accept it's all much more transactional than with dogs.
We got ours like that just in case anyone was considering maiming theirs.
compiled output data.
What we want is data produced by a neutral third party that has consistent methodology.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the World Bank.
And they show France and the UK exactly neck and neck in 2022, with both on $259bn: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD?locations=FR-GB
My guess is with Wilkos is that a lot of their trade has been lost to online - lock down got a lot of people shopping for small stuff online. And they are in a segment where price competition is very keen.
My local town centre is doing quite well. Certainly doing better than at any time since I moved here in 2007. But the most visible growth is in hospitality and other bits of discretionary spend. Places selling things we want are doing well. Places selling things we need are not.
Which gives us our answer: Wilko sells the sort of stuff we now buy online.
I met a woman in Colmar once who was taking her cat for a walk on a lead, but I've not met anyone who has taken their cat on holiday. What would be the point?
Either way it looks like the Union will return to government at the next election, most likely in another grand coalition with the SPD or with the Greens
Glad your town centre is thriving. Most aren't. And will continue not to thrive as long as the retail outlets continue to be owned by OffShoreCo who have minimal interest in actually letting out their asset. We need small local independent businesses so that people have a reason to actually shop in bricks and mortar.
On examination it looks like France and the UK regularly swap places as “8th largest manufacturing nation”
The interesting thing here, then is that Brexit has NOT affected our relative position in Europe and, also, WTF is up with France?!
I confess I presumed France was a much bigger manufacturer, given its larger domestic car industry, food industry, luxury goods, arms, Airbus, etc
Back in the early 2000s, they produced almost 4 million cars per year. Last year, it was less than 1.5 million.
Brexit hasn't changed the picture for the UK that much but has probably been harmful at the margin. Being in the EU wasn't why we were crap at exporting outside the EU, and being outside the EU won't help us export into the EU. Because we have an FTA covering goods the impact on services is probably bigger.
Brexit is done.
Brexit is a success.
You could equally argue that Brexit is done and a failure.
What's not correct to say is that Brexit isn't done, since Brexit was done the second we left the EU.
The revival of my local town centre has been interesting. It's been weak ever since the Trafford centre opened. Materially, there is a pedestrianised street with a variety of buildings ranging from moderately attractive Edwardiana to functional 60s, backing on to which there is a large, unattractive 60s development: a mix of pedestrianised dead-end, gloomy indoor bit which probably looked quite futuristic for the first ten minutes it was open, a ten-storey office block (which I think is now very low end resi) and a Tesco - all done in the same ugly grey/purple brick. Presumably the Tesco is owned by Tesco, but I think everything else has the same landlord, which turned out to be some holding company in Northern Ireland. I was slightly surprised that one company owned so much of the town - I wonder if it is a front for some aristocrat? And I wonder how typical this is? I certainly agree it would probably be better for towns if this sort of monopoly didn't exist.
That said, whoever the landlord is, they had clearly decided by 2019 that their asset was severely underperforming. This is one of Greater Manchester's more prosperous suburbs - there's a fair bit of spending power around with nothing much to spend on. Clearly it was decided that the strategy was less retail, more hospitality - which I think is the right strategy for towns in general. I don't want to see retail edged out completely, but its an undeniable fact that online has taken a huge chunk out of the spend which previously went on town centre retail, and its shops at the functional end of the spectrum (e.g. Wilko) - which we go to out of necessity rather than for fun - which has borne the brunt of this. They've also done quite a good job in de-uglifying much of it, though I have no idea what to do about the humdrum indoor bit and the ten-storey block and apparently neither does the landlord.
It certainly isn't unique in its improvement - I'd say every town centre I can think of in GM has been on an upward trajectory over the last ten years.
I would be in favour, for both, a necessity to be licensed and trained and have highly regulated the production (breeding for dogs) and selling of them for both.
See it all the time with pubs and restaurants closing, reopening, then closing again.
Or when Staples went bust, their local one was replaced with a new stationery store ... that went bust.
Failed business models are hard to turn around if the fundamental business model is broken.
As for the economy, its time to move with the times. Why the heck would you want to go to Wilko to buy a new washing line, or dustpan and brush, or whatever, when you can get it for the same price next day via Amazon dropped off at your door?
And if you do want to go to a store, then firms like The Range seem to have much more sensible estates, with much easier to access parking.
I realise that we have to restrict car use to protect the environment but there are all sorts of unintended consequences.
Like dogs
This is almost as bad as those American media which coyly refer to pets “needing the bathroom”
Out of town or other estates where cars are welcome don't seem to struggle anywhere near as much as High Streets do. Gee, I wonder why. 🤦♂️
I don't think we have evidence that intelligence (in dogs or humans) is a heritable trait at all - again, would be interested in any evidence to the contrary (on dogs - I know the literature around humans and why it certainly isn't primarily a heritable trait).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66745660?at_link_origin=BBC_Midlands&at_medium=social&at_ptr_name=facebook_page&at_bbc_team=editorial&at_campaign=Social_Flow&at_format=link&at_campaign_type=owned&at_link_id=EA914914-507C-11EE-B80F-33C6AD7C7D13&at_link_type=web_link
Basically, if you look at Europe and ask "who's up in the last 15 years?", then the answer is:
Denmark, Germany, Portugal and - most of all - Eastern Europe.
While everyone else is down.
Edit to add: Switzerland is also up. (Albeit Norway is down.)
If you take when the EEC became the EU in 1993 as a starting point and ask who in the EU is up relative to a benchmark of comparable other developed nations . . . then the answer is nobody really. Europe and the EU has really struggled for the past thirty years.
Demographics is a big factor why, but not the only one.
Really not sure what planet you live on but it is in a very different reality to the one most sane people live in. But then you spend most of your time on here anonymously and pointlessly debating matters that you have almost zero real life experience of. Keep taking the gullibility tablets Barty!
Ditto horse breeders etc. Ask the people whose livelihood depends on this stuff
Light bulbs, bin bags etc are exactly the kind of things that repeat online orders are good for.
My daughters generation are wired to order clothes online, try at home and return the unwanted.
Finding a reason for bricks and mortar is hard. One success I came across, pre COVID, was a toy store out in the sticks.
He pivoted away from the stuff that was being sold online, to what people needed *now* to complete projects on the weekend. So paint and painting gear and lots of remote control stuff - many remote control aircraft come without radio gear. That and all the spare blades for all the quadcopters….
* just to wind up Leon. Kind of surprised that Nancy is his favourite Mitford sister.
We had hoped, early on, once we started letting them out, they would move on to 'burying their shit in the flower bed' (neighbours are pretty safe here - we have the wettest cats on the street and they rarely leave the cutilage.) But no. We still get them hurrying in with a panicked expression on their face, shitting in the litter tray, then going straight back out to frolic afresh.
We COULD try taking the litter tray away, but you can immediately see why that is a risky gambit. They are not the brightest of cats.
The only place I have ever seen them shitting outside - disappointingly - was on the tarpaulin I had placed on top of the rooflights on the flat roof of the extension which I had placed there to hold back a leak. After which they'd half-heartedly try to cover it up with other bits of tarpaulin. What thought processes led to that being deemed the only other acceptable cat toilet is beyond me. (Happily the leak is now fixed and with the tarp removed they show no signs of now considering it a toilet.)
You see how useful the word 'toilet' is in a feline sense?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66743050
https://www.exmouthjournal.co.uk/news/20333042.book-exchange-opens-village-phone-box/
The EEC was about opening up Europe's markets and removing barriers. The fundamental guiding principle of the EEC was about equivalency, it wasn't regulating most markets but it was saying that even if the French had different standards to the Germans then they'd recognise each other's standards as equivalent and reciprocally accept them.
The EU though has been a far more sclerotic institution. Its far more unifying standards and coming up with one size fits all solutions, which doesn't work well with nimble economic growth or developing markets.
We ought to go back to the former. Hopefully with Brexit we can take a step in that direction, I don't want us tied to EU standards, but I don't want us to reject the EU's standards either. This is a debate I've had with @RochdalePioneers and @Carnyx a few times, I don't think we should ever implement unnecessary customs barriers, we should waive through Europe's products as equivalent to our own, even if we're able to make products they won't accept themselves.
People scorn that if we can't export to the EU all our products then that puts us at a disadvantage, but the opposite can be the case. It may mean products can come to market in the UK first, then the EU gets around to accepting them, at which point we're in a competitive advantage of having been first movers.
I was never sure with you whether 'Nigel Foremain' was your name or just an expression that you were 'For Remain'.
If the former, kudos for using your real name, though obviously I mean no censure for those who prefer not to.
Wiki:
“Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%,[6] with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.[7] IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults.”
One thing which boggled my mind when I read it. Wilko have this mad idea to distribute items across their estate. Which means sending heavy items to town centre and high street stores. This is the same stupid which Woolies were diseased with towards the end - in their case store managers would phone each other up and do stock swaps in their personal cars. Woolies wouldn't know as their computer had no visibility once dispatched to store...
Banana skins and corn husks are other choke hazards, but you try getting them off him. He hunts for them and they are everywhere.
A couple of weeks ago he ate a cricket sized ball of tinfoil that had previously had a cake in it. He was pooing sparkling poo for several days.
He ate a bag of potatoes. We only found out because he was running around the garden with a sweet potato in his mouth. We got that off him and were relieved only to find an empty potato bag. That cost £45 (one of our cheaper bills).
He ate my wallet, money and all. Just a few chewed up credit cards left.
He is a skilled thief. He will steal something that matters (glasses, binoculars, etc) while you are eating. When you try and recover that he will have pinched your sandwich.
On his numerous visits to the vet, which he loves, they often have to sedate him. The vet said for most dogs this makes them a bit sleepy, for yours it will probably turn him into a normal dog for a bit.
Whether any lessons were learned I couldn't say.
I think the difficulty here is that aggression is a social trait that is associated with biological trait. I do not argue that their are not heritable biological traits that would make a dog better at being aggressive / used to harm (size, bite strength, coat thickness, etc) but aggression is about how you interact with other animals.
We know how certain heritable traits are linked to biology - the famous russian experiments with red foxes springs to mind, showing that "friendliness" as a trait (although you could always call that something else, like courage or sociability, or even risk aversion) led to further generations of the foxes looking more "doggy", with floppy ears and changed body shape. No one here has shared anything that suggests aggression is such a trait - that is the level of evidence I would like to understand the appropriateness of banning by breed. Again, if the idea of banning breeds was to spend the time doing that research - I'd be up for that. But banning breeds when it could easily be the selection bias of people who are after dogs that look a specific manner and making them aggressive, rather than any inherent aggressiveness to begin with, is not evidence based policy. The increase in dog bites, for example, is that explainable by the breed hypothesis, or the social one? People seem to be pointing at getting dogs during lockdown not being socialised - that's a socialisation position.
What is self-evident is that "tret us like Uzbekistan" - a 3rd country - was utterly stupid and destrictive behaviour by the Tories. That they were so shit at administration that we didn't even have the resources to implement that deal just makes it worse.
We have abandoned most inbound checks because we're too shut to do them. The French however are global masters at petty bastardry, and where we are is beholden to them and to them implementing rules we demanded they implement.
We don't even need to debate standards. Our standards are close enough to EU standards to make no real difference. Nor are they likely to diverge that far in practice now all the SOVEREIGNTY chect banging has stopped.
So do a realignment deal which gives us the right to have babies (diverged standards) even if we can't have babies (cos industry won't pay for it - see the UKCA bullshit). There are plenty of products that the EU won't accept. Not because of differing standards. Because they are so expensive thanks to Boris Johnson's Brexit Deal. Remove the barriers, make us competitive again and surprisingly enough all this will just fade off into background noise.
https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/dogs-win-worst-pet-for-14th-year-in-row-2013091379444
No reason to have inbound checks, as I said they serve no purpose, just recognise equivalency and move on.
However when and where we want to diverge, we should simply do so. Democratically, without restrictions or preconditions or negotiations with Europe.
If industry wants to pay for CE Mark and we recognise that as equivalent, then great, do that and move on.
If industry wants to pay for UKCA where that has diverged, then that should be an available Plan B too.
The key is to be agile enough to do both. And we can, with our current Brexit arrangements.