Meanwhile, the Sun is making a decent attempt at appearing, and it has a bit of warmth to it, and the neighbours' daffodils are all out and looking splendid. I might sound sometimes as if I think everything has gone to crap but that's not true, thank goodness.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Your continued apologism for Putin and the VVD, out of some weird desire to posture on here as the true expert of Russia on here, is deeply concerning.
I do not believe @Dura_Ace is defending VVP, at least not here
We are wondering whether Navalny really was murdered at the behest of Vlad, or whether there is another explanation. It is not shilling for Putin to ask this. Why did he need to kill Navalny now? The man was zero threat, stuck in the Arctic forever, and arguably the timing is BAD for Putin, when he apparently wants to appear reasonable (cf the Tucker interview)
Of course, it could be Vlad just said SLOT HIM and they did. But we do not know
You will be "wondering" if the Russians really were responsible for the Salisbury poisoning next.
Off any conceivable topic, but I've been in Australia for the last month or so, seeing old friends doing a bit of work in my spare time. And dodging the winter back home obviously. Here are some reflections for those interested:
- since I was last here 15 years ago, there have been some big changes. The Aboriginal flag (which no Aboriginal tribe ever used) is everywhere, including being flown alongside the Australian flag on government buildings, and when I landed on an internal flight this morning, the captain announced over the PA something like "Virgin Australia respects the true custodians of this land, the [whatever] people. We salute and honour you" or something very similar. You also see stickers with similar creeds on shopfronts. - another big change is the ethnic mix. Both Sydney and Melbourne are much more multiethnic - they would give London or Bradford a run for their money. So many of the entrepreneurs are Chinese, and I've even seen a few of African blacks for the first time in this country - reading the newspapers and talking to people there is much less of a backlash against liberal immigration laws than in the UK. It is definitely beginning however, mainly because of the sky high property prices anywhere people want to live. - the economy is not doing nearly as well as it has for the last thirty years, and those Aussies who think about these things realise that their business model of digging the country up and selling it to China will work much less well for the next generation as China slows down and closes itself off. Nobody seems to have any idea what to replace it with. - the defeat of the Voice referendum last year seems to have damaged the Labor [sic] government, but less than you might think - it turned a small Labor lead in the polls into a small Coalition lead. Labor is still ahead on the 2-party forced choice question though. The next election has to be held by September next year and it looks like being pretty close: there is no love for Labor, and it hasn't done much to address Australia's problems, but the Coalition don't seem to have much of an idea what to do either. - the society is not as viciously polarised as the US is, or the UK is becoming. No doubt this is partly because living standards have been rising strongly for the last 15 years instead of stagnating. - there is also much of the same easy-going friendliness and trust towards strangers that I remember from my previous visits here. The moment you look on a map or your phone for directions, people offer you help and they still nod at strangers and wish them "G'day". As I mentioned, it is under strain a bit from the tensions caused by mass immigration and high property prices, but nothing like in the UK or US yet.
Anyway I like this country very much and hopefully it won't be another 15 years before I'm back.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
The American gun policy analogy rather falls down when you realise we can’t legislate to ban Russia from carrying weapons.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
This site is like a great 18th century painting of antiquity. In the foreground, toga'ed sages debating great affairs of state, all stately poses and flowing robes; to the sides, an awed crowd, hidden behind columns listening intently, children and small creatures running around their feet; in the background plebians kicking the crap out of each other, entirely oblivious of the wider scene.
More Renaissance, I'd say. School of Athens?
Either way, this makes you the Velazquez or Michelangelo or Mantegna or Raphael painting us, then quietly putting a portrait yourself in the corner of the picture. Neat
Possibly the same problem is both cases. We all know roughly what is overwhelmingly likely to happen, but not when.
And unlike 1997, when the Conservatives mostly accepted they had been screwed since September 1992 and certainly since Blair took over, it feels like there's a much more assertive questioning of the fairness of that. At some level, the failure of 2019-now is hurting more.
I wonder if the mayfly hope of the first half of this week hitting the car windscreen of reality on Thursday has emphasised that, barring a miracle, it really is over.
Its because the Conservatives position has been caused so stupidly, so greedily, so lazily and so needlessly:
The lockdown parties The PPE contracts The general financial and sexual sleaze
Followed by the farce of Truss thinking she could cosplay the Thatcher tax cuts of 1987-8 without cosplaying Thatcher's hard work of 1979-87.
Plus the relentless bickering, the self-indulgent defenestrations and changes of leadership, and the weak attempts to imitate the US right’s culture wars. It’s been government by children.
Politicians and their rubbish parties continue to get progressively thicker. It's not just RefUK that can't work out where they are meant to be campaigning - we've had mailshots from bothe the Tories and Lib Dems over the last few days urging us to vote for their wonderful candidates for South Cambridgeshire.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
The American gun policy analogy rather falls down when you realise we can’t legislate to ban Russia from carrying weapons.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Or should we try to wait it out, Putin is old,
"Speak softly..." was Theodore Roosevelt, I think.
Short answer; we go all in to save Ukraine and push the Russians out while also arming ourselves to the teeth. There are other Putins behind Putin.
In the short term (though not long) rearmament helps economic growth, and breaking Putin and bringing Russia into the world trading system again would be a huge longer term boost to the European economy. Rearmament would also allow Europe to stand on its own two feet vis-a-vis the US. As to Rhetoric: you set red lines and punish the slightest trespass.
"Going all in to save Ukraine" means what? Putting NATO troops on the ground? That is never going to happen, it means all-out Russia/NATO war
As for weaponry, we can give them all the weapons they want but if they haven't got the men to use them (and it seems they haven't) they are somewhat screwed. Only nukes would make a difference, and that's not going to happen either
A grinding attritional war of defence seems Ukraine's best option, if they want to do it, and lose another 200,000 men. Perhaps they will actually exhaust Russia, perhaps they won't
Remember the "fearsome" Iraqi Republican guard? Larger than the attacking coalition forces in the Gulf war, yet useless (Russian) equipment and no control over the air.
Give the Ukrainian army as much air power as they ask for. Give them the maximum long range artillery kit. Give them covert support. Then it stops being a war of attrition and becomes a war where Russia get pushed back to the sea and the Don. It is still possible to beat Putin in Ukraine, and trigger overthrow his criminal regime.
No deterrence means no compromise and that means Putin will go for an all out NATO/Russia war whatever we do now anyway. The only question is on what ground the war is fought. The closer to Russia, the better. That is because we did not give the Ukrainians what they needed, when they needed it.
Putin is ready for a first use nuclear strike. Unless we stop him, it will eventually happen. So it really is time to understand that the unthinkable is being actively considered by Moscow and that we can not pretend it isn´t happening or that it will go away.
Too many appeasers, they will wring their hands and say let him have Ukraine , then they will be crying their eyes out when he keeps going. Lots of dupes waving bits of paper at present.
Politicians and their rubbish parties continue to get progressively thicker. It's not just RefUK that can't work out where they are meant to be campaigning - we've had mailshots from bothe the Tories and Lib Dems over the last few days urging us to vote for their wonderful candidates for South Cambridgeshire.
We don't live in South Cambridgeshire.
That’s unusual for the Lib Dems. One thing we’re generally excellent at is detailed constituency mapping and targeting. Lib Dem leafleting is a laser guided precision weapon. I suppose even precision weapons occasionally malfunction.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
The American gun policy analogy rather falls down when you realise we can’t legislate to ban Russia from carrying weapons.
There's a disturbing thread on TwiX today, by some American whose wife and kid were nearly killed in a virtual head-on with a truck. The guy concludes (surely rightly) that his family only survived because they were driving a massive SUV. His thread is followed by lots of other Americans saying Fuck yeah, this is why we have big cars, so we are safe, make them even bigger!!
And yet America suffers appalling lethal road traffic accident rates, especially pedestrians, way out of whack with the rest of the world. Why? Parly because so many people drive enormous cars, any collision with the soft human body is fatal
So it's a bit like their gun laws. A kind of tragedy of the commons
"A new study paints a grim picture of American roads: every day, 20 people walk outside and end up killed by a moving vehicle.
"There are more pedestrians being killed today than in decades," Russ Martin, the senior director of policy and government relations at the Governors Highway Safety Association, told NPR."
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
The American gun policy analogy rather falls down when you realise we can’t legislate to ban Russia from carrying weapons.
There's a disturbing thread on TwiX today, by some American whose wife and kid were nearly killed in a virtual head-on with a truck. The guy concludes (surely rightly) that his family only survived because they were driving a massive SUV. His thread is followed by lots of other Americans saying Fuck yeah, this is why we have big cars, so we are safe, make them even bigger!!
And yet America suffers appalling lethal road traffic accident rates, especially pedestrians, way out of whack with the rest of the world. Why? Parly because so many people drive enormous cars, any collision with the soft human body is fatal
So it's a bit like their gun laws. A kind of tragedy of the commons
That sentiment is not unheard of here too. People (particularly parents) insisting on driving tanks because they feel safer.
'“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.'
In The Red-Headed League (1891) Conan Doyle makes a passing reference to a vegetarian restaurant when describing the London street scene. They've been threatening our way of life for longer than anyone can remember.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
The American gun policy analogy rather falls down when you realise we can’t legislate to ban Russia from carrying weapons.
There's a disturbing thread on TwiX today, by some American whose wife and kid were nearly killed in a virtual head-on with a truck. The guy concludes (surely rightly) that his family only survived because they were driving a massive SUV. His thread is followed by lots of other Americans saying Fuck yeah, this is why we have big cars, so we are safe, make them even bigger!!
And yet America suffers appalling lethal road traffic accident rates, especially pedestrians, way out of whack with the rest of the world. Why? Parly because so many people drive enormous cars, any collision with the soft human body is fatal
So it's a bit like their gun laws. A kind of tragedy of the commons
That sentiment is not unheard of here too. People (particularly parents) insisting on driving tanks because they feel safer.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Your continued apologism for Putin and the VVD, out of some weird desire to posture on here as the true expert of Russia on here, is deeply concerning.
I do not believe @Dura_Ace is defending VVP, at least not here
We are wondering whether Navalny really was murdered at the behest of Vlad, or whether there is another explanation. It is not shilling for Putin to ask this. Why did he need to kill Navalny now? The man was zero threat, stuck in the Arctic forever, and arguably the timing is BAD for Putin, when he apparently wants to appear reasonable (cf the Tucker interview)
Of course, it could be Vlad just said SLOT HIM and they did. But we do not know
You will be "wondering" if the Russians really were responsible for the Salisbury poisoning next.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
If people die on you when you imprison them for political reasons, everyone always assumes you had them killed. See also Princes in the Tower and thousands of other similar cases in history. It doesn't really matter - you are responsible for their death whether you explicitly ordered them to be killed or just neglected them and will cop the reputational damage either way.
Nevertheless Putin enthusiastically does kill people to make a point, so why not Navalny?
My best guess is that if it was a direct, deliberate murder (rather than just death from deliberately lethal conditions) it was for internal consumption - keeping the boyars in line.
If you see Putin as a gangster, killing people to make a point is his Ways of Working to achieve his Objectives and Key Results (OKR).
Politicians and their rubbish parties continue to get progressively thicker. It's not just RefUK that can't work out where they are meant to be campaigning - we've had mailshots from bothe the Tories and Lib Dems over the last few days urging us to vote for their wonderful candidates for South Cambridgeshire.
We don't live in South Cambridgeshire.
That’s unusual for the Lib Dems. One thing we’re generally excellent at is detailed constituency mapping and targeting. Lib Dem leafleting is a laser guided precision weapon. I suppose even precision weapons occasionally malfunction.
Aren't there some fairly hefty boundary changes in those parts? That might mess with the project.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
There are some classics of the genre from the Never Trump Butters on the previous thread. All we need now is @MrEd / @TheKitchenCabinet to ride in with his expert analysis for the full house.
This site is like a great 18th century painting of antiquity. In the foreground, toga'ed sages debating great affairs of state, all stately poses and flowing robes; to the sides, an awed crowd, hidden behind columns listening intently, children and small creatures running around their feet; in the background plebians kicking the crap out of each other, entirely oblivious of the wider scene.
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Your continued apologism for Putin and the VVD, out of some weird desire to posture on here as the true expert of Russia on here, is deeply concerning.
I do not believe @Dura_Ace is defending VVP, at least not here
We are wondering whether Navalny really was murdered at the behest of Vlad, or whether there is another explanation. It is not shilling for Putin to ask this. Why did he need to kill Navalny now? The man was zero threat, stuck in the Arctic forever, and arguably the timing is BAD for Putin, when he apparently wants to appear reasonable (cf the Tucker interview)
Of course, it could be Vlad just said SLOT HIM and they did. But we do not know
I had similar thoughts. It didn't make sense. I assumed for once someone had just died (he wouldn't have been in the best of health) and not been bumped off because I couldn't see the upside for Putin for all the reasons you give. However is there some contorted logic in him doing this (I can't see it) because we do have in the past the use of certain poisons where Russia deny it was them when it really couldn't have been anyone else. Why do they use exotic poisons when simple ones are just ,if not more, effective? Clearly they want us to know it is them while denying it.
So he just died and wasn't bumped off or there is some reason for Putin bumping him off that is above our heads currently or a cockup in the assassination department.
The reason for Putin killing Navalny is to discourage other political opponents in the run-up to the Russian election in March (which might take Putin past Stalin's record as longest serving big cheese).
Possibly the same problem is both cases. We all know roughly what is overwhelmingly likely to happen, but not when.
And unlike 1997, when the Conservatives mostly accepted they had been screwed since September 1992 and certainly since Blair took over, it feels like there's a much more assertive questioning of the fairness of that. At some level, the failure of 2019-now is hurting more.
I wonder if the mayfly hope of the first half of this week hitting the car windscreen of reality on Thursday has emphasised that, barring a miracle, it really is over.
Its because the Conservatives position has been caused so stupidly, so greedily, so lazily and so needlessly:
The lockdown parties The PPE contracts The general financial and sexual sleaze
Followed by the farce of Truss thinking she could cosplay the Thatcher tax cuts of 1987-8 without cosplaying Thatcher's hard work of 1979-87.
It's amazing. What an implosion. The GE19 win presented a golden opportunity and they've used it for one thing - to destroy their own party. It's all flowed from the character defects of the man they elected as leader in the summer of that year. They knew he was their best chance for winning the election. They also knew he was unfit for high office. Ok, so the bargain was kept. He delivers the first, the second becomes too clear for him to carry on, and here (via the Truss farce) we are.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
Our pedestrian safety stats are worse comparatively than our driver fatalities. One reason for 20mph zones. We spent too much of the 20th century trying to segregate pedestrians from motorists rather than creating shared low speed spaces.
I’m half way up the French autoroutes currently. What’s always noticeable, especially on school holiday driving days like today, is how much more erratic and aggressive the Belgian drivers are compared with the other nationalities. Reflected in their stats, and quite stark compared with their Dutch neighbours who tend to pootle along in the slow lane.
The Germans and Luxembourgeois are fast but fairly predictable. The French drive pretty much the same as the Brits. The Belgians drive like they’re on the phone, reading the paper and dealing with kids on the back seat at the same time.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
Possibly the same problem is both cases. We all know roughly what is overwhelmingly likely to happen, but not when.
And unlike 1997, when the Conservatives mostly accepted they had been screwed since September 1992 and certainly since Blair took over, it feels like there's a much more assertive questioning of the fairness of that. At some level, the failure of 2019-now is hurting more.
I wonder if the mayfly hope of the first half of this week hitting the car windscreen of reality on Thursday has emphasised that, barring a miracle, it really is over.
Its because the Conservatives position has been caused so stupidly, so greedily, so lazily and so needlessly:
The lockdown parties The PPE contracts The general financial and sexual sleaze
Followed by the farce of Truss thinking she could cosplay the Thatcher tax cuts of 1987-8 without cosplaying Thatcher's hard work of 1979-87.
Plus the relentless bickering, the self-indulgent defenestrations and changes of leadership, and the weak attempts to imitate the US right’s culture wars. It’s been government by children.
I was tempted to say 'government by the immature'.
But when they've done the actual government part they've generally been okay - there's been mistakes but achievements as well.
What we've had is politics by the immature and personal conduct by the selfish.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
Not an expert on House procedure, but isn't the problem that Speaker Johnson just doesn't want a vote on aid to Ukraine? Don't think persuading a few more House Republicans helps. That's why Democrats were fecking arses for allowing the Trump to get a Putinist in as Speaker.
Apparently there's a thing called a Discharge Petition which allows a majority to get a vote on a bill even if the Speaker doesn't want to. So the Dems need some GOP defectors to vote on the Discharge Petition, and then they expect to have lots of GOP support for the actual bill. But this is hard firstly because the modern GOP is very intolerant of dissent, and secondly because there are a few left-wing Dems who would probably not vote for the Discharge Petition as the bill also provides weapons for Israel. Also it takes a really long time - something like 5 or 6 weeks after they file it.
On the Speaker, I'm not sure they'd be having any more luck if McCarthy was still there. He was the one who took the Ukraine aid out of the budget in the first place, and he was just as scared of the backbench Putinist fringe as Johnson is. He was also the person who was responsible for rehabilitating Trump in the eyes of the GOP mainstream, so if Trump was telling him not to put it up for a vote, he wouldn't be putting it up for a vote. In the alternate reality where the Dems had abstained to keep McCarthy in office the people who are blaming them now would instead be blaming them for helping the GOP keep him in place.
Possibly, although I don't remember anyone at the time saying removing McCarthy was good news for Ukraine eg
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
Electric cars won't help here. Most of them are huge in order to carry heavy batteries, accelerate better than Ferraris, and are almost silent.
But self driving WILL help
Before we reach fully autonomous cars I suspect manufacturers will install computer overrides that prevent accidents - eg hitting kids. You won't be able to drive over anyone as the car will refuse to do it. These will be mandatory, fitted in every new car, and they will save many thousands of lives
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
The judge addressed all this in his ruling. Have you read the ruling?
Yes. I am underwhelmed. There are numerous examples of blatant misinformation and lies. But fraud is a dishonest misrepresentation that triggers a practical result. I am really not sure about the second part.
Possibly the same problem is both cases. We all know roughly what is overwhelmingly likely to happen, but not when.
And unlike 1997, when the Conservatives mostly accepted they had been screwed since September 1992 and certainly since Blair took over, it feels like there's a much more assertive questioning of the fairness of that. At some level, the failure of 2019-now is hurting more.
I wonder if the mayfly hope of the first half of this week hitting the car windscreen of reality on Thursday has emphasised that, barring a miracle, it really is over.
Its because the Conservatives position has been caused so stupidly, so greedily, so lazily and so needlessly:
The lockdown parties The PPE contracts The general financial and sexual sleaze
Followed by the farce of Truss thinking she could cosplay the Thatcher tax cuts of 1987-8 without cosplaying Thatcher's hard work of 1979-87.
It's amazing. What an implosion. The GE19 win presented a golden opportunity and they've used it for one thing - to destroy their own party. It's all flowed from the character defects of the man they elected as leader in the summer of that year. They knew he was their best chance for winning the election. They also knew he was unfit for high office. Ok, so the bargain was kept. He delivers the first, the second becomes too clear for him to carry on, and here (via the Truss farce) we are.
I think the implosion started in 2015, with the restraining effects of the coalition removed and then Gove and Johnson kicking off the first big rebellion during the Brexit campaign. From then onwards it’s been party management first, country second.
'“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.'
Obviously opposed to any abuse and recognise all restaurants are suffering in the current economic environment. But I do think a lot of the food served at plant based restaurants is not very nice. If people are only dining there because of their dietary scruples, and not because they enjoy what they are eating, it's not surprising if they choose to eat at home because it's cheaper.
That was a quick 100 from Jaiswal, off only 122 balls. Gill picking up the pace too with a few boundaries as well, not looking like we’re going to have a score worth chasing.
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
The judge addressed all this in his ruling. Have you read the ruling?
Yes. I am underwhelmed. There are numerous examples of blatant misinformation and lies. But fraud is a dishonest misrepresentation that triggers a practical result. I am really not sure about the second part.
The practical result is that the loans were cheaper, shorely?
The Ukrainians have been killing Russians in Adviika at a ratio of up to 20:1. The town has served its purpose (it is in ruins anyway) so they will pull back to the next lines of defence where they can again disproportionately kill Russians.
They could have held the ruins of the town much longer if the Republican Representatives had not been shilling for Putin - and holding up supplies of weaponry. Reagan must be spinning in his grave.
You don't win wars by body count. That's the Vietnam mistake. For wars of occupation you win them by occupying land. Russia have just spent (depending on how you define it) two years or several months taking a piece of land approx five kilometres wide. Russia are winning but very, very slowly. If Ukraine can keep this up they've won, but as @Leon and others have pointed out they are in a bad way. Instead of attacking and trying to walk thru minefields, they need to start mining themselves to secure the new borders, before Russia works out how to break thru.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
The US is so bad because people still all drive home from the pub there, something which is now much better in the UK.
It is also all the SUVs
"Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars.."
'“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.'
Obviously opposed to any abuse and recognise all restaurants are suffering in the current economic environment. But I do think a lot of the food served at plant based restaurants is not very nice. If people are only dining there because of their dietary scruples, and not because they enjoy what they are eating, it's not surprising if they choose to eat at home because it's cheaper.
I am not offended by the concept of vegan food. But I do find the moral preaching that often comes along with it to be somewhat overwhelming at times.
Everyone is entitled to make their own lifestyle choices. But constantly seeking to show how superior you are because of it is never a good look.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
'“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.'
Obviously opposed to any abuse and recognise all restaurants are suffering in the current economic environment. But I do think a lot of the food served at plant based restaurants is not very nice. If people are only dining there because of their dietary scruples, and not because they enjoy what they are eating, it's not surprising if they choose to eat at home because it's cheaper.
I've only been to one vegan restaurant but the food was great. As a vegetarian I am generally pissed off at the growth of veganism because it often means what was once the one vegetarian menu option is a less tasty vegan option. But I couldn't fault the food in the place in Peckham we went to.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
Electric cars won't help here. Most of them are huge in order to carry heavy batteries, accelerate better than Ferraris, and are almost silent.
But self driving WILL help
Before we reach fully autonomous cars I suspect manufacturers will install computer overrides that prevent accidents - eg hitting kids. You won't be able to drive over anyone as the car will refuse to do it. These will be mandatory, fitted in every new car, and they will save many thousands of lives
This site is like a great 18th century painting of antiquity. In the foreground, toga'ed sages debating great affairs of state, all stately poses and flowing robes; to the sides, an awed crowd, hidden behind columns listening intently, children and small creatures running around their feet; in the background plebians kicking the crap out of each other, entirely oblivious of the wider scene.
In the HBO(?) series John Adams, a series to which I return when I need reminding that American politics used to at least pretend to be stately, the protagonist attends a dinner with French society and is disgusted by their wealth and casual cruelty.
I have just emailed a Phnom Penh print shop to give me a quote. I want a 360 page document printed up, one side per page, black and white, A4
They came back with a quote of 18,000 riel and I presumed it was a typo, and I said, "you mean 180,000 riel, right? That's a good price, thanks, I'll take it"
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
Electric cars won't help here. Most of them are huge in order to carry heavy batteries, accelerate better than Ferraris, and are almost silent.
But self driving WILL help
Before we reach fully autonomous cars I suspect manufacturers will install computer overrides that prevent accidents - eg hitting kids. You won't be able to drive over anyone as the car will refuse to do it. These will be mandatory, fitted in every new car, and they will save many thousands of lives
It will cause vast amounts of congestion if all JSO or XR protestors need to is stick a traffic cone in the road. It will become a new sport for every schoolchild in the land.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
The American gun policy analogy rather falls down when you realise we can’t legislate to ban Russia from carrying weapons.
There's a disturbing thread on TwiX today, by some American whose wife and kid were nearly killed in a virtual head-on with a truck. The guy concludes (surely rightly) that his family only survived because they were driving a massive SUV. His thread is followed by lots of other Americans saying Fuck yeah, this is why we have big cars, so we are safe, make them even bigger!!
And yet America suffers appalling lethal road traffic accident rates, especially pedestrians, way out of whack with the rest of the world. Why? Parly because so many people drive enormous cars, any collision with the soft human body is fatal
So it's a bit like their gun laws. A kind of tragedy of the commons
"A new study paints a grim picture of American roads: every day, 20 people walk outside and end up killed by a moving vehicle.
"There are more pedestrians being killed today than in decades," Russ Martin, the senior director of policy and government relations at the Governors Highway Safety Association, told NPR."
As it is a Saturday morning it's probably a good moment for me to say something as I haven't thus far. I was reading the thread whilst at work on Thursday and saw Mike's header about the dementia diagnosis. It felt very sad even for someone who has never met Mike and not had any interest in attending the pb get togethers. It is amazing that the site has been around for nearly 20 years and I have been using it for all but the first couple of years. That's the vast majority of my adult life! Really I owe Mike a debt of thanks for creating this platform that has given me the chance to air my opinions, frustrations, quips and learn from people with such a wide knowledge base. I wouldn't care to count the number of hours I've spent on the site but reading the comments has rarely felt like time wasted. And I say that as someone who has probably only placed a handful of bets in my entire life.
I don't know much about dementia but I hope this is the case of an early diagnosis and that Mike will have a good deal of time remaining in front of him. I guess it is the sort of thing that encourages you to appreciate every day that you have which you might not do without the diagnosis. All the best to you and your family.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
The US is so bad because people still all drive home from the pub there, something which is now much better in the UK.
It is also all the SUVs
"Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars.."
NPR
US crash tests are also a couple of generations behind European ones, especially for pedestrian safety. They also sell loads of pickup trucks, which are classed as commercial vehicles and subject to even lower standards. A lot of American cars don’t get sold in Europe for this reason.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
Electric cars won't help here. Most of them are huge in order to carry heavy batteries, accelerate better than Ferraris, and are almost silent.
If you But self driving WILL help
Before we reach fully autonomous cars I suspect manufacturers will install computer overrides that prevent accidents - eg hitting kids. You won't be able to drive over anyone as the car will refuse to do it. These will be mandatory, fitted in every new car, and they will save many thousands of lives
It will cause vast amounts of congestion if all JSO or XR protestors need to is stick a traffic cone in the road. It will become a new sport for every schoolchild in the land.
If you watch vids of self drive cars, they seem to distinguish between moving, human, vulnerable targets - pedestrians, cyclists - and safe solid inanimate objects, street furniture etc. They pay more attention to the former
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
The judge addressed all this in his ruling. Have you read the ruling?
Yes. I am underwhelmed. There are numerous examples of blatant misinformation and lies. But fraud is a dishonest misrepresentation that triggers a practical result. I am really not sure about the second part.
The practical result is that the loans were cheaper, shorely?
Crystal clear, he got money by pretending he had assets etc and so fraud for sure. Bit like earning 20K a year and giving bank a fake 80K pay slip to get a mortgage.
This site is like a great 18th century painting of antiquity. In the foreground, toga'ed sages debating great affairs of state, all stately poses and flowing robes; to the sides, an awed crowd, hidden behind columns listening intently, children and small creatures running around their feet; in the background plebians kicking the crap out of each other, entirely oblivious of the wider scene.
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Dürer painted himself bang in the middle of the 'lost' Frankfurt altarpiece after falling out with his client over money.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
The American gun policy analogy rather falls down when you realise we can’t legislate to ban Russia from carrying weapons.
There's a disturbing thread on TwiX today, by some American whose wife and kid were nearly killed in a virtual head-on with a truck. The guy concludes (surely rightly) that his family only survived because they were driving a massive SUV. His thread is followed by lots of other Americans saying Fuck yeah, this is why we have big cars, so we are safe, make them even bigger!!
And yet America suffers appalling lethal road traffic accident rates, especially pedestrians, way out of whack with the rest of the world. Why? Parly because so many people drive enormous cars, any collision with the soft human body is fatal
So it's a bit like their gun laws. A kind of tragedy of the commons
"A new study paints a grim picture of American roads: every day, 20 people walk outside and end up killed by a moving vehicle.
"There are more pedestrians being killed today than in decades," Russ Martin, the senior director of policy and government relations at the Governors Highway Safety Association, told NPR."
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
Electric cars won't help here. Most of them are huge in order to carry heavy batteries, accelerate better than Ferraris, and are almost silent.
But self driving WILL help
Before we reach fully autonomous cars I suspect manufacturers will install computer overrides that prevent accidents - eg hitting kids. You won't be able to drive over anyone as the car will refuse to do it. These will be mandatory, fitted in every new car, and they will save many thousands of lives
It will cause vast amounts of congestion if all JSO or XR protestors need to is stick a traffic cone in the road. It will become a new sport for every schoolchild in the land.
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
This isn't how banks manage credit risk. The risk of non payment is always "hypothetical and theoretical". You would never go into a deal expecting default. The fact Trump actually paid back the loan doesn't reduce the overall risk in any way. Most banks would be killed by a probability of default that is higher than low single digit percent. Several have been brought down by getting their loss given default calculations wrong, which is what we are talking about here.
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
The judge addressed all this in his ruling. Have you read the ruling?
Yes. I am underwhelmed. There are numerous examples of blatant misinformation and lies. But fraud is a dishonest misrepresentation that triggers a practical result. I am really not sure about the second part.
Who do you think has a better grasp of (a) New York law, and (b) the details of the case: you or Judge Engoron?
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
The judge addressed all this in his ruling. Have you read the ruling?
Yes. I am underwhelmed. There are numerous examples of blatant misinformation and lies. But fraud is a dishonest misrepresentation that triggers a practical result. I am really not sure about the second part.
The essence of the case is that he obtained pecuniary advantage by misrepresenting his circumstances in a way that could not reasonably be thought to be innocent. In short, he obtained big loans at a low vigorish by fibbing like a bastard. If you argued that the case may have been politically motivated I'd've agreed with you, but that's fraud.
There was a case many years ago when a gambler took money from his employers account, bet on the horses, won, and paid back the money before his boss noticed. He still went to jail. The "paying back" isn't a defence.
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
Just 3bn quid at current prices.
There would also be the logistics of 23,000 tons of freight that somebody would have to organise. and pay for. Probably 300 C-17 rotations at the best part of a hundred grand a time.
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
The vid is accelerated to make it look even more impressive, but it is nonetheless strikingly impressive. They are getting there
What’s wrong with dishwashers?
Nothing, except the robot will now stack them, rather than you
No robot will ever be able to fill a dishwasher to my exacting standards. I find emptying and filling the dishwasher quite a satisfying activity, a kind of ritual purification and worshiping of the hearth gods.
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
The vid is accelerated to make it look even more impressive, but it is nonetheless strikingly impressive. They are getting there
What’s wrong with dishwashers?
Nothing, except the robot will now stack them, rather than you
Emptying the dishwasher is the most time consuming task, so that’s where they should target the cutting edge of AI next.
Why not standing at the sink and doing the washing up? I don't have a dishwasher because I'd rather wash up than fill a dishwasher and later empty it - and every few months clean the dishwasher.
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
Just 3bn quid at current prices.
There would also be the logistics of 23,000 tons of freight that somebody would have to organise. and pay for. Probably 300 C-17 rotations at the best part of a hundred grand a time.
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
Just 3bn quid at current prices.
There would also be the logistics of 23,000 tons of freight that somebody would have to organise. and pay for. Probably 300 C-17 rotations at the best part of a hundred grand a time.
YOU ARE UNDERMINING MORALE
The beatings will continue until PB Morale improves
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
IANAL but @DavidL is, and he is no friend of Trump (actively loathes him, I believe) and this is his verdict on the NY case from the prior thread
"It’s possible that NY State were conned out of some taxes in which case they should sue. The current proceedings do seem to me to be partisan, politically motivated and ill judged. I can’t see this nonsense surviving appeal."
That summarises my feelings, the case reeks. There are better ways to squash Trump than really dodgy court cases which bring the whole NY legal system into disrepute. One of them is: beat him in an election. He's a terrible candidate. He's easily beatable, so beat him and see him gone
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
Just 3bn quid at current prices.
There would also be the logistics of 23,000 tons of freight that somebody would have to organise. and pay for. Probably 300 C-17 rotations at the best part of a hundred grand a time.
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
The vid is accelerated to make it look even more impressive, but it is nonetheless strikingly impressive. They are getting there
What’s wrong with dishwashers?
Nothing, except the robot will now stack them, rather than you
Emptying the dishwasher is the most time consuming task, so that’s where they should target the cutting edge of AI next.
Ironing, surely
I am rich enough to get all my shirts laundered and pressed but before I was affluent... my God. Ironing. The dullest task in human history???
If we’re moving beyond the washing of dishes then obviously a whole host of time consuming tasks opens up.
Pruning a vineyard, for example. Between 30 seconds to a minute per vine. About 5,000 vines per hectare.
“Doing the paperwork” and filing away correspondence.
Wrapping Christmas presents.
I threw out all my records just before Xmas. All my old bank statements, tax returns, how to work the fridge, old share certs, everything, half a ton of shit
I figured that everything I need is stored somewhere in the cloud, just Get Rid
It was superbly liberating and - so far, touch wood- I haven't noticed any issues. Decluttering is brillog
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
Just 3bn quid at current prices.
There would also be the logistics of 23,000 tons of freight that somebody would have to organise. and pay for. Probably 300 C-17 rotations at the best part of a hundred grand a time.
cheap at twice the price, that is chump change compared with what we will have to spend in future
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
You're trying to use a general stat to justify a particular interpretation, which doesn't work in basic logic. Unless you have some data to support the particular interpretation,
Specific data on SUVs in Europe is not that common yet; here is one example from a Belgian study showing the danger imposed on vulnerable road users by larger, heavier, more powerful vehicles - which is your "child-being-run-down-by-an-SUV" example. In the UK the crucible is the school run.
Making a road safety comparison Europe vs USA is making a 1st world vs 3rd comparison.
SUVs in the USA, in the Light Trucks category, have much poorer safety regulations than even cars there, and massively poorer than anything in Europe. Things like bumpers not being all at the same height to ensure that crumple zones become active in collisions. It lets the manufacturers pump out dangerous vehicles more cheaply for gullible Usonians to swallow; imo that's a problem of a Third World road culture in the USA.
Consider that the Tesla Cybertruck is not coming to Europe since it can't meet even basic safety standards without a redesign from frame level.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Looking at the massive grin on his face when he appeared in public yesterday, it's reasonably clear.
Despots rely on the despair of their opponents, not on posing as reasonable.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
I didn't realise he'd met an actual Russian in the flesh. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
When as FS he shook off his UK secret service minders to meet said Russian, incognito, a Russian who it is widely reported still works for the KGB/FSB you are bob-on. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
The vid is accelerated to make it look even more impressive, but it is nonetheless strikingly impressive. They are getting there
What’s wrong with dishwashers?
Nothing, except the robot will now stack them, rather than you
Emptying the dishwasher is the most time consuming task, so that’s where they should target the cutting edge of AI next.
Ironing, surely
I am rich enough to get all my shirts laundered and pressed but before I was affluent... my God. Ironing. The dullest task in human history???
Actually these days getting shirts dry-cleaned is really cheap: your (well, not yours) local dry cleaners will probably do three for a tenner. If you go to the chains like Timpson of Johnsons/Waitrose they'll be more expensive, but you can shop around.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
You're trying to use a general stat to justify a particular interpretation, which doesn't work in basic logic. Unless you have some data to support the particular interpretation,
Specific data on SUVs in Europe is not that common yet; here is one example from a Belgian study showing the danger imposed on vulnerable road users by larger, heavier, more powerful vehicles - which is your "child-being-run-down-by-an-SUV" example. In the UK the crucible is the school run.
Making a road safety comparison Europe vs USA is making a 1st world vs 3rd comparison.
SUVs in the USA, in the Light Trucks category, have much poorer safety regulations than even cars there, and massively poorer than anything in Europe. Things like bumpers not being all at the same height to ensure that crumple zones become active in collisions. It lets the manufacturers pump out dangerous vehicles more cheaply for gullible Usonians to swallow; imo that's a problem of a Third World road culture in the USA.
Consider that the Tesla Cybertruck is not coming to Europe since it can't meet even basic safety standards without a redesign from frame level.
Who are you arguing with? Not me, I don’t think
I’m saying UK roads are much safer than US roads - which they are. And one reason US roads are dangerous, especially for pedestrians, is the prevalence of SUVs. Which is also undisputed
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
I didn't realise he'd met an actual Russian in the flesh. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
When as FS he shook off his UK secret service minders to meet said Russian, incognito, a Russian who it is widely reported still works for the KGB/FSB you are bob-on. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
Did Osborne and Mandelson have minders on Deripaska's yacht?
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Frightening people tends to be a pretty high priority for dictators. That fear is the only thing protecting them from a very rapid end.
Incidentally, I remember when we were having one of our AI debates and a PBer, perhaps @Benpointer, expressed disinterest, and said "get back to me when a robot can do my dishes"
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
$4.5 to $5bn at current market rates.
But it wouldn't be a simple purchase as there isn't that much supply around.
'“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.'
Obviously opposed to any abuse and recognise all restaurants are suffering in the current economic environment. But I do think a lot of the food served at plant based restaurants is not very nice. If people are only dining there because of their dietary scruples, and not because they enjoy what they are eating, it's not surprising if they choose to eat at home because it's cheaper.
I am not offended by the concept of vegan food. But I do find the moral preaching that often comes along with it to be somewhat overwhelming at times.
Everyone is entitled to make their own lifestyle choices. But constantly seeking to show how superior you are because of it is never a good look.
Sure, but isn't that simply the mirror image of what's being reported in this story?
It's the people behind these attacks who are trying to force their views on other people, not the restaurateurs.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
You're trying to use a general stat to justify a particular interpretation, which doesn't work in basic logic. Unless you have some data to support the particular interpretation,
Specific data on SUVs in Europe is not that common yet; here is one example from a Belgian study showing the danger imposed on vulnerable road users by larger, heavier, more powerful vehicles - which is your "child-being-run-down-by-an-SUV" example. In the UK the crucible is the school run.
Making a road safety comparison Europe vs USA is making a 1st world vs 3rd comparison.
SUVs in the USA, in the Light Trucks category, have much poorer safety regulations than even cars there, and massively poorer than anything in Europe. Things like bumpers not being all at the same height to ensure that crumple zones become active in collisions. It lets the manufacturers pump out dangerous vehicles more cheaply for gullible Usonians to swallow; imo that's a problem of a Third World road culture in the USA.
Consider that the Tesla Cybertruck is not coming to Europe since it can't meet even basic safety standards without a redesign from frame level.
Who are you arguing with? Not me, I don’t think
I’m saying UK roads are much safer than US roads - which they are. And one reason US roads are dangerous, especially for pedestrians, is the prevalence of SUVs. Which is also undisputed
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
I didn't realise he'd met an actual Russian in the flesh. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
When as FS he shook off his UK secret service minders to meet said Russian, incognito, a Russian who it is widely reported still works for the KGB/FSB you are bob-on. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
Did Osborne and Mandelson have minders on Deripaska's yacht?
Remind me, were either if them serving Foreign Secretaries?
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Looking at the massive grin on his face when he appeared in public yesterday, it's reasonably clear.
Despots rely on the despair of their opponents, not on posing as reasonable.
It’s amazing how the west can instantly identify exactly what happened to one man locked away in an Arctic gulag somewhere in Russia, yet we can’t work out where, say, a weirdly dangerous novel bat coronavirus originated, which killed 20 million people after starting off in Wuhan China, despite us funding the research in the only lab in the world making novel bat coronaviruses more weirdly dangerous. In Wuhan, China
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
$4.5 to $5bn at current market rates.
But it wouldn't be a simple purchase as there isn't that much supply around.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
I didn't realise he'd met an actual Russian in the flesh. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
When as FS he shook off his UK secret service minders to meet said Russian, incognito, a Russian who it is widely reported still works for the KGB/FSB you are bob-on. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
You're trying to use a general stat to justify a particular interpretation, which doesn't work in basic logic. Unless you have some data to support the particular interpretation,
Specific data on SUVs in Europe is not that common yet; here is one example from a Belgian study showing the danger imposed on vulnerable road users by larger, heavier, more powerful vehicles - which is your "child-being-run-down-by-an-SUV" example. In the UK the crucible is the school run.
Making a road safety comparison Europe vs USA is making a 1st world vs 3rd comparison.
SUVs in the USA, in the Light Trucks category, have much poorer safety regulations than even cars there, and massively poorer than anything in Europe. Things like bumpers not being all at the same height to ensure that crumple zones become active in collisions. It lets the manufacturers pump out dangerous vehicles more cheaply for gullible Usonians to swallow; imo that's a problem of a Third World road culture in the USA.
Consider that the Tesla Cybertruck is not coming to Europe since it can't meet even basic safety standards without a redesign from frame level.
Who are you arguing with? Not me, I don’t think
I’m saying UK roads are much safer than US roads - which they are. And one reason US roads are dangerous, especially for pedestrians, is the prevalence of SUVs. Which is also undisputed
UK roads are not just safer than US roads.
I suspect Wales reduces the average UK figure, due to the fact that the national speed limit is 20 mph. All thanks to Mark Drakeford.
The Ukrainian have a desperate shortage of ammunition. There is apparently a decent amount available on the open market but inside the EU the French plus Greece and Cyprus are insisting on it being domestically produced. Why don't we just frigging buy it ourselves? How much does half a million rounds of ammunition actually cost?
Just 3bn quid at current prices.
There would also be the logistics of 23,000 tons of freight that somebody would have to organise. and pay for. Probably 300 C-17 rotations at the best part of a hundred grand a time.
Six grand, for one big bullet?
Well, it's precision forging (though only single axis) and machining and dangerous chemicals and stringent QA and security and dangerous goods handling.
The NATO ones also have a sophisticated (ie expensive) fusing system.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
I didn't realise he'd met an actual Russian in the flesh. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
When as FS he shook off his UK secret service minders to meet said Russian, incognito, a Russian who it is widely reported still works for the KGB/FSB you are bob-on. This changes everything. What was he thinking of?
Did Osborne and Mandelson have minders on Deripaska's yacht?
Remind me, were either if them serving Foreign Secretaries?
Mandelson was serving as EU trade commissioner and subesquently cut alumunium import duties and tried to abolish them altogether.
A serving foreign secretary has more valid reasons to want to speak off the record to a Russian oligarch.
This is actually something the UK can be proud of. We have some of the safest roads in the world. The chances of your British kid getting squashed by an idiot in a SUV tomorrow are lower than in almost any other nation
The US is so bad because people still all drive home from the pub there, something which is now much better in the UK.
On drink driving blood alcohol levels the UK (except Scotland) is in line with the USA, not Europe. Consider that someone driving at the UK blood-alcohol level limit in France could reasonably expect a 2 year jail term:
Drink driving limit France has very strict drink driving laws. The French drink-driving limit is 50mg of alcohol in 100ml of blood.
Sanctions and Penalties :
Drivers found with between 50mg and 80mg of alcohol in your blood can be fined € 135 (£ 112). The driver will not be permitted to continue with his journey until the alcohol level in his bloodstream falls below the legal limit.
If the breath-test reveals that a driver has more than 80mg of alcohol, it is considered as a major offense. The driver could be fined to € 4,500 (£ 3,744) with his driving licence confiscated immediately for three years and a possibility up to two years emprisonment. https://www.bison-fute.gouv.fr/imprimer,article10259.html
Drink-drive casualties in the UK are rising as a proportion of casualties (except in Scotland), and drug driving is an even larger issue. Drink drive data:
Comments
This is the PB Lack of Nuance, again. It is dull
- since I was last here 15 years ago, there have been some big changes. The Aboriginal flag (which no Aboriginal tribe ever used) is everywhere, including being flown alongside the Australian flag on government buildings, and when I landed on an internal flight this morning, the captain announced over the PA something like "Virgin Australia respects the true custodians of this land, the [whatever] people. We salute and honour you" or something very similar. You also see stickers with similar creeds on shopfronts.
- another big change is the ethnic mix. Both Sydney and Melbourne are much more multiethnic - they would give London or Bradford a run for their money. So many of the entrepreneurs are Chinese, and I've even seen a few of African blacks for the first time in this country
- reading the newspapers and talking to people there is much less of a backlash against liberal immigration laws than in the UK. It is definitely beginning however, mainly because of the sky high property prices anywhere people want to live.
- the economy is not doing nearly as well as it has for the last thirty years, and those Aussies who think about these things realise that their business model of digging the country up and selling it to China will work much less well for the next generation as China slows down and closes itself off. Nobody seems to have any idea what to replace it with.
- the defeat of the Voice referendum last year seems to have damaged the Labor [sic] government, but less than you might think - it turned a small Labor lead in the polls into a small Coalition lead. Labor is still ahead on the 2-party forced choice question though. The next election has to be held by September next year and it looks like being pretty close: there is no love for Labor, and it hasn't done much to address Australia's problems, but the Coalition don't seem to have much of an idea what to do either.
- the society is not as viciously polarised as the US is, or the UK is becoming. No doubt this is partly because living standards have been rising strongly for the last 15 years instead of stagnating.
- there is also much of the same easy-going friendliness and trust towards strangers that I remember from my previous visits here. The moment you look on a map or your phone for directions, people offer you help and they still nod at strangers and wish them "G'day". As I mentioned, it is under strain a bit from the tensions caused by mass immigration and high property prices, but nothing like in the UK or US yet.
Anyway I like this country very much and hopefully it won't be another 15 years before I'm back.
Either way, this makes you the Velazquez or Michelangelo or Mantegna or Raphael painting us, then quietly putting a portrait yourself in the corner of the picture. Neat
We don't live in South Cambridgeshire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_begin_bombing_in_five_minutes
And yet America suffers appalling lethal road traffic accident rates, especially pedestrians, way out of whack with the rest of the world. Why? Parly because so many people drive enormous cars, any collision with the soft human body is fatal
So it's a bit like their gun laws. A kind of tragedy of the commons
"A new study paints a grim picture of American roads: every day, 20 people walk outside and end up killed by a moving vehicle.
"There are more pedestrians being killed today than in decades," Russ Martin, the senior director of policy and government relations at the Governors Highway Safety Association, told NPR."
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deaths-high-traffic-car
Tuk tuks for all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
But be bloody careful in Africa. And Thailand
Great take down by @ydoethur BTW.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I’m half way up the French autoroutes currently. What’s always noticeable, especially on school holiday driving days like today, is how much more erratic and aggressive the Belgian drivers are compared with the other nationalities. Reflected in their stats, and quite stark compared with their Dutch neighbours who tend to pootle along in the slow lane.
The Germans and Luxembourgeois are fast but fairly predictable. The French drive pretty much the same as the Brits. The Belgians drive like they’re on the phone, reading the paper and dealing with kids on the back seat at the same time.
But when they've done the actual government part they've generally been okay - there's been mistakes but achievements as well.
What we've had is politics by the immature and personal conduct by the selfish.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/04/us-house-speaker-kevin-mccarthy-republican-ousting-aid-to-ukraine-joe-biden
Before we reach fully autonomous cars I suspect manufacturers will install computer overrides that prevent accidents - eg hitting kids. You won't be able to drive over anyone as the car will refuse to do it. These will be mandatory, fitted in every new car, and they will save many thousands of lives
"Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars.."
NPR
Everyone is entitled to make their own lifestyle choices. But constantly seeking to show how superior you are because of it is never a good look.
They came back with a quote of 18,000 riel and I presumed it was a typo, and I said, "you mean 180,000 riel, right? That's a good price, thanks, I'll take it"
They replied, no, 18,000 riel
That's $4.50
I don't know much about dementia but I hope this is the case of an early diagnosis and that Mike will have a good deal of time remaining in front of him. I guess it is the sort of thing that encourages you to appreciate every day that you have which you might not do without the diagnosis. All the best to you and your family.
Bit like earning 20K a year and giving bank a fake 80K pay slip to get a mortgage.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/22/in-search-of-the-rare-and-strange-durers-lost-masterpiece/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/26/san-francisco-stop-self-driving-cars-traffic-cone-safe-street-rebel
Well, here you go. A robot can now do the dishes
https://x.com/chichengcc/status/1758539728444629158?s=20
The vid is accelerated to make it look even more impressive, but it is nonetheless strikingly impressive. They are getting there
https://kitchinsider.com/two-dishwashers-in-kitchen/
Haven't George Osborne and SamCam's sister been Lebedev's eager lackeys ?
I am rich enough to get all my shirts laundered and pressed but before I was affluent... my God. Ironing. The dullest task in human history???
Pruning a vineyard, for example. Between 30 seconds to a minute per vine. About 5,000 vines per hectare.
“Doing the paperwork” and filing away correspondence.
Wrapping Christmas presents.
There was a case many years ago when a gambler took money from his employers account, bet on the horses, won, and paid back the money before his boss noticed. He still went to jail. The "paying back" isn't a defence.
There would also be the logistics of 23,000 tons of freight that somebody would have to organise. and pay for. Probably 300 C-17 rotations at the best part of a hundred grand a time.
I don't have a dishwasher because I'd rather wash up than fill a dishwasher and later empty it - and every few months clean the dishwasher.
The beatings will continue until PB Morale improves
Have you ?
The rainbow ball. 👍
https://x.com/efl/status/1758810246837903820?s=61
It's inexcusable.
I figured that everything I need is stored somewhere in the cloud, just Get Rid
It was superbly liberating and - so far, touch wood- I haven't noticed any issues. Decluttering is brillog
But it’s the hope that gets you, they’re going to get another 400 score to leave an impossible chase.
Specific data on SUVs in Europe is not that common yet; here is one example from a Belgian study showing the danger imposed on vulnerable road users by larger, heavier, more powerful vehicles - which is your "child-being-run-down-by-an-SUV" example. In the UK the crucible is the school run.
https://etsc.eu/suvs-and-pickups-make-the-roads-less-safe-for-car-occupants-pedestrians-and-cyclists-belgian-study/
Making a road safety comparison Europe vs USA is making a 1st world vs 3rd comparison.
SUVs in the USA, in the Light Trucks category, have much poorer safety regulations than even cars there, and massively poorer than anything in Europe. Things like bumpers not being all at the same height to ensure that crumple zones become active in collisions. It lets the manufacturers pump out dangerous vehicles more cheaply for gullible Usonians to swallow; imo that's a problem of a Third World road culture in the USA.
Consider that the Tesla Cybertruck is not coming to Europe since it can't meet even basic safety standards without a redesign from frame level.
Despots rely on the despair of their opponents, not on posing as reasonable.
I’m saying UK roads are much safer than US roads - which they are. And one reason US roads are dangerous, especially for pedestrians, is the prevalence of SUVs. Which is also undisputed
Hybrid working equates to much less ironing. Make dress down Friday one of your office days and it gets even better.
But it wouldn't be a simple purchase as there isn't that much supply around.
It's the people behind these attacks who are trying to force their views on other people, not the restaurateurs.
William Glenn celebrates a devolved Labour win!
The NATO ones also have a sophisticated (ie expensive) fusing system.
A serving foreign secretary has more valid reasons to want to speak off the record to a Russian oligarch.
I’m not being facetious. An actual mugging is much more upsetting than a stealthy robbery or a pocket picked
Sympathies if that is the case. Its happened to lots of people I know and can be really destabilising
Drink driving limit
France has very strict drink driving laws. The French drink-driving limit is 50mg of alcohol in 100ml of blood.
Sanctions and Penalties :
Drivers found with between 50mg and 80mg of alcohol in your blood can be fined € 135 (£ 112). The driver will not be permitted to continue with his journey until the alcohol level in his bloodstream falls below the legal limit.
If the breath-test reveals that a driver has more than 80mg of alcohol, it is considered as a major offense. The driver could be fined to € 4,500 (£ 3,744) with his driving licence confiscated immediately for three years and a possibility up to two years emprisonment.
https://www.bison-fute.gouv.fr/imprimer,article10259.html
Drink-drive casualties in the UK are rising as a proportion of casualties (except in Scotland), and drug driving is an even larger issue. Drink drive data:
Obviously drink drivers are disproportionately men
Link: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-involving-illegal-alcohol-levels-2021/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-involving-illegal-alcohol-levels-2021