Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
Any chance of the winner getting George Russell'd?
They've made a joke of a pool. It's not actually to regulations.
That's weird, my dad just said he thought the pool looked quite shallow. Have the French done this on the cheap?
The pool is 2.2 metres deep. Normally the pool would be 3 metres deep, but they are not doing the aqua ballet dancing synchronised swimming in this pool, so it doesn't need to be. The deeper the pool, the faster they swim (fewer waves bouncing back up off the bottom of the pool).
2.2 metres is really poor. I don't know much about swimming pools but it seems to me that in the UK the newer it is:
a) the shallower it is b) the colder it is (ignoring unheated lidos etc)
Am I imagining this?
I massively prefer a 3m deep pool for sure. And I am not an athlete. I've even forgotten how to do the backstroke right.
I prefer a 1.5 metre pool so I can stop swimming, stand up, and not drown.
Any chance of the winner getting George Russell'd?
They've made a joke of a pool. It's not actually to regulations.
That's weird, my dad just said he thought the pool looked quite shallow. Have the French done this on the cheap?
The pool is 2.2 metres deep. Normally the pool would be 3 metres deep, but they are not doing the aqua ballet dancing synchronised swimming in this pool, so it doesn't need to be. The deeper the pool, the faster they swim (fewer waves bouncing back up off the bottom of the pool).
2.2 metres is really poor. I don't know much about swimming pools but it seems to me that in the UK the newer it is:
a) the shallower it is b) the colder it is (ignoring unheated lidos etc)
Am I imagining this?
I massively prefer a 3m deep pool for sure. And I am not an athlete. I've even forgotten how to do the backstroke right.
I prefer a 1.5 metre pool so I can stop swimming, stand up, and not drown.
Eat more food / drink more booze so you can have a physique like mine that means you float. Fat is much less dense than muscle or bone!
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
It's not that straightforward. A given software feature can reliably be turned off that easily iff the software is written with that in mind. If not, unintended consequences are to be feared. So you're still asking multinationals to spend money to cater m for UK tastes.
@PippaCrerar But Suella Braverman announces she’ll withdraw from contest because there’s no point in her running to lead the Tory party “when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription”.
Finally it dawns - off to Reform if they will have her
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
Some asshat was ranting on Twix earlier that cans are still marked in ml, not pints.
Yes
So they can sell them in their largest markets.
Fuckwits...
Or, as Number Two put it at the end of the first Austin Powers movie,
But you, like an idiot, want to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore! It's only corporations!
The urge to Take Back Control is a very understandable one. That means starting by working out where the control is.
Fifty years ago the Left used to fantasise about storming 'the commanding heights' of the economy.
That would have been coal mining, steel making and ship building.
Coal is still mined, steel is still made, ships are still built. Just not here.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
It's not that straightforward. A given software feature can reliably be turned off that easily iff the software is written with that in mind. If not, unintended consequences are to be feared. So you're still asking multinationals to spend money to cater m for UK tastes.
They will be doing it to cater for various other tastes (certainly Arab countries - possibly African ones if they're even selling the software, etc etc) so this isn't an issue in practice.
Anywhere where there is a choice there will be at the *very least* a significant minority of drivers who won't want continual nagging.
(Also the country I drive the most in outside of Europe is Zambia and the idea of intelligent speed adaptation somewhere where half the speed limit signs have been stolen and in any case are totally inadequate is megaloz)
Who will still be leading the Cons come 2028 GE should they win this summer?
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes. Priti Patel - Probably. Robert Jenrick - Nope. Tom Tugendhat - Nope. Kemi Badenoch - Nope. Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
Why would any of them be crashy-burny? Assuming for the sake of argument they're all Liz Truss chracters (we'll agree to disagree) she only crashed and burned because she actually was in government! LOTO is a different thing.
Sadly despite being on team Kemi I could see her pissing off other MPs enough through straight talking. But it's a small possibility. It's hard to see with the others. Jenrick is an absolute bastard but slimy enough that he should be able to avoid it.
Who will still be leading the Cons come 2028 GE should they win this summer?
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes. Priti Patel - Probably. Robert Jenrick - Nope. Tom Tugendhat - Nope. Kemi Badenoch - Nope. Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
Crashing and burning is a lesser hazard for opposition politicians because very little hangs by their utterances. It was the 'markets' (i.e. the sum total of other people's money, freely invested) that did for Truss. LoE's can recycle contradictory, monosyllabic solutions to complex problems without a hint of resistance so long as they remain powerless. 'How many divisions has the Pope?' springs to mind.
"Donald Trump has told voters that Kamala Harris is being presented as a “Margaret Thatcher” figure as he attacked the “sick” new Democratic nominee in a fiery speech...“Three months ago she was thought of so badly, [the media] were just killing her,” he said of the vice-president.
“And now they’re trying to make her into a – let’s say – Margaret Thatcher. I don’t think so. It’s not going to happen.
Who will still be leading the Cons come 2028 GE should they win this summer?
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes. Priti Patel - Probably. Robert Jenrick - Nope. Tom Tugendhat - Nope. Kemi Badenoch - Nope. Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
Kemi will win the contest and still be leader in 2028 is my prediction.
If she gets to the members she will win. The "lay the favourite" heuristic is a tried and tested one though and I have a bad feeling it might be Cleverly V Jenrick or something.
I've no bets yet - other than a tiny one I put on Mel at 38 20 seconds ago cause that's value IMO.
My gut is Cleverly is value too at 7.2 but am not taking it cause beer.
Fuck it I took some, am I man or mouse? There's more there though.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
It's not that straightforward. A given software feature can reliably be turned off that easily iff the software is written with that in mind. If not, unintended consequences are to be feared. So you're still asking multinationals to spend money to cater m for UK tastes.
The whole concept of "fail safe" is that the machinery in question should be safe if for whatever reason the feature fails. What you're suggesting would mean these vehicles are fail dangerous, in which case they shouldn't be on the road at all.
And if they are safe to drive with the ai 'safety' features off, it should be a piece of piss to be able to switch them off and drive without them.
Again, my point is this - in a car that swerves automatically when it senses danger, incorrectly in the case of the article I linked to, or brakes automatically when it skittishly sees danger, as in the case of Solarflare's post below, are you liable for the accident for insurance purposes, or is the manufacturer? What if it beeps at you for doing 21 in a 20 zone and that distraction causes your reaction time to be slowed?
It's a shame Braverman withdrew. She was broadly right that Sunak and the centrists have been a massive pile of shit, but you must also make people feel good about being Tories again. That positivity was absent from her speeches and interventions since the result. She has seemed to want just to demand people acknowledge that she was right. But has not developed a USP as to how she can get the Tories elected again.
I'm not too wowed by Kemi's debut piece. In the Times (puke) and not terribly coherent - it felt a bit mealy mouthed as to why they lost. Not really willing to own the failures of her own Government.
Any chance of the winner getting George Russell'd?
They've made a joke of a pool. It's not actually to regulations.
That's weird, my dad just said he thought the pool looked quite shallow. Have the French done this on the cheap?
The pool is 2.2 metres deep. Normally the pool would be 3 metres deep, but they are not doing the aqua ballet dancing synchronised swimming in this pool, so it doesn't need to be. The deeper the pool, the faster they swim (fewer waves bouncing back up off the bottom of the pool).
2.2 metres is really poor. I don't know much about swimming pools but it seems to me that in the UK the newer it is:
a) the shallower it is b) the colder it is (ignoring unheated lidos etc)
Am I imagining this?
I massively prefer a 3m deep pool for sure. And I am not an athlete. I've even forgotten how to do the backstroke right.
I prefer a 1.5 metre pool so I can stop swimming, stand up, and not drown.
Eat more food / drink more booze so you can have a physique like mine that means you float. Fat is much less dense than muscle or bone!
Leisure centres really struggle financially, heating a 3 metre pool would see the end of a fair number of them. Count yourself in lucky, we went to a french indoor pool apres-ski and were on the verge of hypothermia.
Missed all the excitement. Don't agree with Leon and Blanche's take. As someone in education, I'd expect to be marched off the property and banned from all schools had I done similar. Regardless of how many colleagues have been hurt. And, believe me, I've seen some very dear mates hurt, and been hurt myself. We've been to A+E multiple times. However. I don't want them banned. I don't really want anyone banned. However annoying they are.
If the mods have rules they have to stick to them, though. Or have no rules at all.
It's always going to seem harsh/unfair to different people at different times, but I prefer it to the unmitigated shitshow of (eg) TwitterX moderation.
Who will still be leading the Cons come 2028 GE should they win this summer?
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes. Priti Patel - Probably. Robert Jenrick - Nope. Tom Tugendhat - Nope. Kemi Badenoch - Nope. Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
Why would any of them be crashy-burny? Assuming for the sake of argument they're all Liz Truss chracters (we'll agree to disagree) she only crashed and burned because she actually was in government! LOTO is a different thing.
Sadly despite being on team Kemi I could see her pissing off other MPs enough through straight talking. But it's a small possibility. It's hard to see with the others. Jenrick is an absolute bastard but slimy enough that he should be able to avoid it.
By crash and burn I mean - make no difference on polling compared to Sunak or even do worse. Make no headway with public as far as interest or recognition and so goes. Basically completely flat line.
At that point the party panics and throws them out with 'one more roll of the dice'.
It's a shame Braverman withdrew. She was broadly right that Sunak and the centrists have been a massive pile of shit, but you must also make people feel good about being Tories again. That positivity was absent from her speeches and interventions since the result. She has seemed to want just to demand people acknowledge that she was right. But has not developed a USP as to how she can get the Tories elected again.
I'm not too wowed by Kemi's debut piece. In the Times (puke) and not terribly coherent - it felt a bit mealy mouthed as to why they lost. Not really willing to own the failures of her own Government.
One word failure
Truss
She was the one who handed Labour the biggest gift ever in politics and they will live on it for years
Johnson, Truss, Braverman are all yesterday's stories for the conservative party if they ever want to see office again
Who will still be leading the Cons come 2028 GE should they win this summer?
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes. Priti Patel - Probably. Robert Jenrick - Nope. Tom Tugendhat - Nope. Kemi Badenoch - Nope. Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
Why would any of them be crashy-burny? Assuming for the sake of argument they're all Liz Truss chracters (we'll agree to disagree) she only crashed and burned because she actually was in government! LOTO is a different thing.
Sadly despite being on team Kemi I could see her pissing off other MPs enough through straight talking. But it's a small possibility. It's hard to see with the others. Jenrick is an absolute bastard but slimy enough that he should be able to avoid it.
By crash and burn I mean - make no difference on polling compared to Sunak or even do worse. Make no headway with public as far as interest or recognition and so goes. Basically completely flat line.
At that point the party panics and throws them out with 'one more roll of the dice'.
Probably involving Boris Johnson to be honest.
Come on kids - you just know this how it will go.
A lot of any polling movement will depend on the Starmer government. If taxes rise, inflation goes up again and they fail to stop the boats and there are frequent strikes the Tories will see a rise in the polls whoever leads them
Who will still be leading the Cons come 2028 GE should they win this summer?
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes. Priti Patel - Probably. Robert Jenrick - Nope. Tom Tugendhat - Nope. Kemi Badenoch - Nope. Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
Crashing and burning is a lesser hazard for opposition politicians because very little hangs by their utterances. It was the 'markets' (i.e. the sum total of other people's money, freely invested) that did for Truss. LoE's can recycle contradictory, monosyllabic solutions to complex problems without a hint of resistance so long as they remain powerless. 'How many divisions has the Pope?' springs to mind.
For a LotO to not make it to a General Election is pretty spectacular; was IDS the first example?
Braverman probably would have blown the party up had she become leader, so that's a bullet dodged. But if the Conservatives get to 2026 without making enough progress in the polls ( a pretty big if, to be sure) are they going to panic as they did in 2003?
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
That will be the “Livermore” who walks around Europe chatting away and loving the random people he meets on the walks from different countries and backgrounds.
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
The armed police are armed for a reason - that is, they are on high alert for terrorists. If we agree we have armed police, surely we agree there should be circumstances in whch they should shoot people dead? You might reasonably argue that this does not meet that threshold. But I don't think it unreasonable to consider that it might.
The police have no more legal right to use force than you or I. They have a dispensation to carry weapons.
Armed police are present in the airports, all the time, by the way. Not just for alerts.
But when they use their weapons (or other force), it must meet measures of proportionality and justification.
Kicking someone on the ground, in the head, might be justified. If say, they were about to stab someone.
In this case, the person on the ground wasn’t posing a further threat.
Yes, yes, but the conversation was about 'is it reasonable to suggest that the perp should have been shot'? My view is not that the perp should have been shot, for assaulting the police, but my point is that it is not unreasonable to hold such a view, given that we arm police and had it been America the perp would by now by lying in the morgue. My point is that Leon and Blanche's view wasn't so unreasonable as to warrant a banning.
America is the place where the armed police look like this
It's a shame Braverman withdrew. She was broadly right that Sunak and the centrists have been a massive pile of shit, but you must also make people feel good about being Tories again. That positivity was absent from her speeches and interventions since the result. She has seemed to want just to demand people acknowledge that she was right. But has not developed a USP as to how she can get the Tories elected again.
I'm not too wowed by Kemi's debut piece. In the Times (puke) and not terribly coherent - it felt a bit mealy mouthed as to why they lost. Not really willing to own the failures of her own Government.
One word failure
Truss
She was the one who handed Labour the biggest gift ever in politics and they will live on it for years
Johnson, Truss, Braverman are all yesterday's stories for the conservative party if they ever want to see office again
Yep.
Although I think they will try Johnson one more time.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
It's a shame Braverman withdrew. She was broadly right that Sunak and the centrists have been a massive pile of shit, but you must also make people feel good about being Tories again. That positivity was absent from her speeches and interventions since the result. She has seemed to want just to demand people acknowledge that she was right. But has not developed a USP as to how she can get the Tories elected again.
I'm not too wowed by Kemi's debut piece. In the Times (puke) and not terribly coherent - it felt a bit mealy mouthed as to why they lost. Not really willing to own the failures of her own Government.
One word failure
Truss
She was the one who handed Labour the biggest gift ever in politics and they will live on it for years
Johnson, Truss, Braverman are all yesterday's stories for the conservative party if they ever want to see office again
Don't think so. I was furious with my (con) MP for not opposing Johnson but he saw more clearly than I did that all possible successors were duds. Sunak included.
Who will still be leading the Cons come 2028 GE should they win this summer?
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes. Priti Patel - Probably. Robert Jenrick - Nope. Tom Tugendhat - Nope. Kemi Badenoch - Nope. Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
Why would any of them be crashy-burny? Assuming for the sake of argument they're all Liz Truss chracters (we'll agree to disagree) she only crashed and burned because she actually was in government! LOTO is a different thing.
Sadly despite being on team Kemi I could see her pissing off other MPs enough through straight talking. But it's a small possibility. It's hard to see with the others. Jenrick is an absolute bastard but slimy enough that he should be able to avoid it.
By crash and burn I mean - make no difference on polling compared to Sunak or even do worse. Make no headway with public as far as interest or recognition and so goes. Basically completely flat line.
At that point the party panics and throws them out with 'one more roll of the dice'.
Probably involving Boris Johnson to be honest.
Come on kids - you just know this how it will go.
I think they'd have to bleed in the polls atrociously rather than stay where they are to be replaced that quickly. You know you're possibly talking me into keeping my membership past this leader vote right?
Filled with some more Mel at 42. That's enough, he's a long shot to say the least. But 42 awesome value imo.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
That will be the “Livermore” who walks around Europe chatting away and loving the random people he meets on the walks from different countries and backgrounds.
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
OTOH he did introduce me through one of his posts to Marcel Marceau so he can't be all bad
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
It's not that straightforward. A given software feature can reliably be turned off that easily iff the software is written with that in mind. If not, unintended consequences are to be feared. So you're still asking multinationals to spend money to cater m for UK tastes.
The whole concept of "fail safe" is that the machinery in question should be safe if for whatever reason the feature fails. What you're suggesting would mean these vehicles are fail dangerous, in which case they shouldn't be on the road at all.
And if they are safe to drive with the ai 'safety' features off, it should be a piece of piss to be able to switch them off and drive without them.
Again, my point is this - in a car that swerves automatically when it senses danger, incorrectly in the case of the article I linked to, or brakes automatically when it skittishly sees danger, as in the case of Solarflare's post below, are you liable for the accident for insurance purposes, or is the manufacturer? What if it beeps at you for doing 21 in a 20 zone and that distraction causes your reaction time to be slowed?
Fewer distractions = safer driving.
I know what fail safe means. It's irrelevant here: the deliberate disablement of a feature is not a failure.
It's a shame Braverman withdrew. She was broadly right that Sunak and the centrists have been a massive pile of shit, but you must also make people feel good about being Tories again. That positivity was absent from her speeches and interventions since the result. She has seemed to want just to demand people acknowledge that she was right. But has not developed a USP as to how she can get the Tories elected again.
I'm not too wowed by Kemi's debut piece. In the Times (puke) and not terribly coherent - it felt a bit mealy mouthed as to why they lost. Not really willing to own the failures of her own Government.
One word failure
Truss
She was the one who handed Labour the biggest gift ever in politics and they will live on it for years
Johnson, Truss, Braverman are all yesterday's stories for the conservative party if they ever want to see office again
Don't think so. I was furious with my (con) MP for not opposing Johnson but he saw more clearly than I did that all possible successors were duds. Sunak included.
In the end they were all dud. Including Johnson. His achievement was to win an emphatic election in 2019. It was downhill from there on, and I don't think it was just the natural attrition of office.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
TBF we need to get rid of the national speed limit. There's not really much point in the current "nod and wink" approach. We need to be explicit that 200mph+ is absolutely fine on a motorway in the right conditions.
Otherwise may as well have these ridiculous restrictions. We either believe in the laws or we don't.
Sadly half of Westminster either doesn't have a driving licence or doesn't drive in practice, and the rest of it mostly is around the south east where those conditions barely ever arise. Nearest bit of motorway to London I can think of where they regularly arise is Huntingdon-Peterborough section of the A1.
They've no idea how much harm they're doing with this crazy 70mph thing.
Car drivers in my area can't cope with avoiding stationary objects in a 20mph zone, as a local lamp post would testify having been poleaxed by an '04 Lexus SUV which stuck it squarely on the driver's side - so completely on the pavement prior to the collision. Also earlier today had to turn back for another similar driver error this time at a pedestrian crossing, some poor unfortunate getting CPR on the pavement.
Even F1 drivers struggle to avoid other cars at a closing speed of 140mph
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
That will be the “Livermore” who walks around Europe chatting away and loving the random people he meets on the walks from different countries and backgrounds.
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
OTOH he did introduce me through one of his posts to Marcel Marceau so he can't be all bad
Marcel Marceau spoke more sense in his stage career than Roger has ever done. Bear in mind that Marceau was a mime artist so said nothing.
It's a shame Braverman withdrew. She was broadly right that Sunak and the centrists have been a massive pile of shit, but you must also make people feel good about being Tories again. That positivity was absent from her speeches and interventions since the result. She has seemed to want just to demand people acknowledge that she was right. But has not developed a USP as to how she can get the Tories elected again.
I'm not too wowed by Kemi's debut piece. In the Times (puke) and not terribly coherent - it felt a bit mealy mouthed as to why they lost. Not really willing to own the failures of her own Government.
One word failure
Truss
She was the one who handed Labour the biggest gift ever in politics and they will live on it for years
Johnson, Truss, Braverman are all yesterday's stories for the conservative party if they ever want to see office again
Yep.
Although I think they will try Johnson one more time.
They'll be tempted. But there are several hurdles.
He'd have to get back into the Commons, which wouldn't be easy. Even if the party dynamics can be made to work, the Conservatives are really short on sufficiently safe seats.
He has an awful lot of baggage, which won't have gone away.
Based on his appearance at the election rally, he's really let himself go since leaving office.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
That will be the “Livermore” who walks around Europe chatting away and loving the random people he meets on the walks from different countries and backgrounds.
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
OTOH he did introduce me through one of his posts to Marcel Marceau so he can't be all bad
Marcel Marceau spoke more sense in his stage career than Roger has ever done. Bear in mind that Marceau was a mime artist so said nothing.
He said Non in Silent Movie. It is the only word spoken in the entire film.
Who will still be leading the Cons come 2028 GE should they win this summer?
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes. Priti Patel - Probably. Robert Jenrick - Nope. Tom Tugendhat - Nope. Kemi Badenoch - Nope. Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
Why would any of them be crashy-burny? Assuming for the sake of argument they're all Liz Truss chracters (we'll agree to disagree) she only crashed and burned because she actually was in government! LOTO is a different thing.
Sadly despite being on team Kemi I could see her pissing off other MPs enough through straight talking. But it's a small possibility. It's hard to see with the others. Jenrick is an absolute bastard but slimy enough that he should be able to avoid it.
An argumentative LOTO might not be a bad thing if it gets you attention when you are basically irrelevant. Problem with Badenoch is the arguments never seem to be to any purpose. So far she's not been a serious politician. Patel would probably be a better bet, but it's the best of a dire bunch frankly.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
The armed police are armed for a reason - that is, they are on high alert for terrorists. If we agree we have armed police, surely we agree there should be circumstances in whch they should shoot people dead? You might reasonably argue that this does not meet that threshold. But I don't think it unreasonable to consider that it might.
The police have no more legal right to use force than you or I. They have a dispensation to carry weapons.
Armed police are present in the airports, all the time, by the way. Not just for alerts.
But when they use their weapons (or other force), it must meet measures of proportionality and justification.
Kicking someone on the ground, in the head, might be justified. If say, they were about to stab someone.
In this case, the person on the ground wasn’t posing a further threat.
Yes, yes, but the conversation was about 'is it reasonable to suggest that the perp should have been shot'? My view is not that the perp should have been shot, for assaulting the police, but my point is that it is not unreasonable to hold such a view, given that we arm police and had it been America the perp would by now by lying in the morgue. My point is that Leon and Blanche's view wasn't so unreasonable as to warrant a banning.
America is the place where the armed police look like this
Only some of them.
However, even the ones without super-sized armored personnel carrier are armed with sufficient fire power to un-make your day.
One thing the Tory Party needs to get over is the idea that the general public is endlessly fascinated by who its leader is. They put a stop on that importance on July 4th.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
That will be the “Livermore” who walks around Europe chatting away and loving the random people he meets on the walks from different countries and backgrounds.
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
OTOH he did introduce me through one of his posts to Marcel Marceau so he can't be all bad
Marcel Marceau spoke more sense in his stage career than Roger has ever done. Bear in mind that Marceau was a mime artist so said nothing.
He said Non in Silent Movie. It is the only word spoken in the entire film.
And he’s still up on Roger on the words to sense ratio in the public sphere.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
TBF we need to get rid of the national speed limit. There's not really much point in the current "nod and wink" approach. We need to be explicit that 200mph+ is absolutely fine on a motorway in the right conditions.
Otherwise may as well have these ridiculous restrictions. We either believe in the laws or we don't.
Sadly half of Westminster either doesn't have a driving licence or doesn't drive in practice, and the rest of it mostly is around the south east where those conditions barely ever arise. Nearest bit of motorway to London I can think of where they regularly arise is Huntingdon-Peterborough section of the A1.
They've no idea how much harm they're doing with this crazy 70mph thing.
I suspect that average journey times would increase if you increased the speed limit on motorways in - part of the reason they have 50mph or 40mph limits for some sections is to stop everyone bunching up and lots of random sudden braking, which tends to cause congestion.
Traffic flow is weird. I think 20mph in Edinburgh has helped to keep traffic flowing better simply due to the massive reduction of slight vehicle-on-vehicle collisions which would normally close a road or lane for a few hours. I'd love to see a proper study of that.
LTNs too - the reduction in the number of junctions can improve flow and average journey times, even while the number of vehicles on boundary roads increases. Lots of dead time between traffic phases, plus all the braking and accelerating.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
That will be the “Livermore” who walks around Europe chatting away and loving the random people he meets on the walks from different countries and backgrounds.
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
OTOH he did introduce me through one of his posts to Marcel Marceau so he can't be all bad
Marcel Marceau spoke more sense in his stage career than Roger has ever done. Bear in mind that Marceau was a mime artist so said nothing.
He said Non in Silent Movie. It is the only word spoken in the entire film.
And he’s still up on Roger on the words to sense ratio in the public sphere.
Also I just realised I meant Jérôme Murat. All these foreign words look the same to me.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
TBF we need to get rid of the national speed limit. There's not really much point in the current "nod and wink" approach. We need to be explicit that 200mph+ is absolutely fine on a motorway in the right conditions.
Otherwise may as well have these ridiculous restrictions. We either believe in the laws or we don't.
Sadly half of Westminster either doesn't have a driving licence or doesn't drive in practice, and the rest of it mostly is around the south east where those conditions barely ever arise. Nearest bit of motorway to London I can think of where they regularly arise is Huntingdon-Peterborough section of the A1.
They've no idea how much harm they're doing with this crazy 70mph thing.
I suspect that average journey times would increase if you increased the speed limit on motorways in - part of the reason they have 50mph or 40mph limits for some sections is to stop everyone bunching up and lots of random sudden braking, which tends to cause congestion.
Traffic flow is weird. I think 20mph in Edinburgh has helped to keep traffic flowing better simply due to the massive reduction of slight vehicle-on-vehicle collisions which would normally close a road or lane for a few hours. I'd love to see a proper study of that.
LTNs too - the reduction in the number of junctions can improve flow and average journey times, even while the number of vehicles on boundary roads increases. Lots of dead time between traffic phases, plus all the braking and accelerating.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have smart speed limits for congestion purposes. A limitless M25 would serve little purpose. As you say, congestion is weird.
I have in my mind rural roads (not just motorways - but the motorways are most important) instead.
One thing the Tory Party needs to get over is the idea that the general public is endlessly fascinated by who its leader is. They put a stop on that importance on July 4th.
Indeed but governments normally lose GEs rather than oppositions win them. Even Whitelaw would likely have won in 1979, John Prescott would probably have won in 1997 and David Davis won most seats in 2010 and Long Bailey won in 2024. Even Ken Clarke would have lost to Blair in 2001 and even David Miliband would probably not have won most seats against Cameron in 2015 either albeit both may have lost by smaller margins than Hague and Ed Miliband did.
Blair and Cameron probably added to their parties margin of victory, Starmer ensured Middle England were assured Corbynism had gone and Thatcher had a dynamic agenda of change but the Major, Brown and Callaghan and Sunak governments were going to lose anyway.
Had Burnham replaced Ed Miliband as Labour leader in 2017 not Corbyn then he may have beaten May but that is the only example I can think of in the last 50 years when a different party leader would have won a GE their party lost. Maybe Ken Clarke would have got a hung parliament in 2005 post Iraq but Blair would still have won most seats
In fact the only answer it hasn't provided for 6 x 9 is the answer 42...
I'm still somewhat surprised the LLM companies haven't hard-coded a response for "How many words will your response to this question have?". You'd imagine it just responding with "One." would be an easy hack.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
The armed police are armed for a reason - that is, they are on high alert for terrorists. If we agree we have armed police, surely we agree there should be circumstances in whch they should shoot people dead? You might reasonably argue that this does not meet that threshold. But I don't think it unreasonable to consider that it might.
The police have no more legal right to use force than you or I. They have a dispensation to carry weapons.
Armed police are present in the airports, all the time, by the way. Not just for alerts.
But when they use their weapons (or other force), it must meet measures of proportionality and justification.
Kicking someone on the ground, in the head, might be justified. If say, they were about to stab someone.
In this case, the person on the ground wasn’t posing a further threat.
Yes, yes, but the conversation was about 'is it reasonable to suggest that the perp should have been shot'? My view is not that the perp should have been shot, for assaulting the police, but my point is that it is not unreasonable to hold such a view, given that we arm police and had it been America the perp would by now by lying in the morgue. My point is that Leon and Blanche's view wasn't so unreasonable as to warrant a banning.
America is the place where the armed police look like this
Only some of them.
However, even the ones without super-sized armored personnel carrier are armed with sufficient fire power to un-make your day.
Pfft, we still have them tooled up in armoured landrovers and longarms in Belfast, though our ones tend to be less fat.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
TBF we need to get rid of the national speed limit. There's not really much point in the current "nod and wink" approach. We need to be explicit that 200mph+ is absolutely fine on a motorway in the right conditions.
Otherwise may as well have these ridiculous restrictions. We either believe in the laws or we don't.
Sadly half of Westminster either doesn't have a driving licence or doesn't drive in practice, and the rest of it mostly is around the south east where those conditions barely ever arise. Nearest bit of motorway to London I can think of where they regularly arise is Huntingdon-Peterborough section of the A1.
They've no idea how much harm they're doing with this crazy 70mph thing.
I suspect that average journey times would increase if you increased the speed limit on motorways in - part of the reason they have 50mph or 40mph limits for some sections is to stop everyone bunching up and lots of random sudden braking, which tends to cause congestion.
Traffic flow is weird. I think 20mph in Edinburgh has helped to keep traffic flowing better simply due to the massive reduction of slight vehicle-on-vehicle collisions which would normally close a road or lane for a few hours. I'd love to see a proper study of that.
LTNs too - the reduction in the number of junctions can improve flow and average journey times, even while the number of vehicles on boundary roads increases. Lots of dead time between traffic phases, plus all the braking and accelerating.
I once spent quite a lot of time setting up IT infrastructure to model this. Professor who was leading the project was very keen on actually figuring it all out based on tracking real-world data combined with simulations.
Then the government pulled the funding.
So.... we reused all the equipment as a file-share box for some office admins. Which was then replaced by SharePoint. And then the original kit was well out of support so was just sent for recycling.
Id not read much into that, the strikes have been in areas regularly targeted during the ongoing skirmishes.
More concerning is that airlines are reportedly cancelling flights and that the Biden admin is, apparently, giving extended stay to Lebanese people whos US visa time limits were due to run out. I dont know if that order has been given for sure but if its being considered it says something.
With the 'police brutality' story, I saw that Anderson and Tice are on the case backing the police officer involved. Even if you don't agree with them it is surely good that you can have politicians that say what a lot of people think. That is how democracy is supposed to be.
Of course it's good that you can have it, but having it is another thing altogether.
...
Backing the police officer is fine.
But both of them going in feet first, before we knew any more than the first video where the policemen kicked his head in, is very concerning.
It should have been "we need to know all the information before making any judgement, and the people attacking the police need to STFU."
We 'knew' that three police officers were injured, including a policewoman who suffered a broken nose. That indicates there was a story well before that first video, and that the first video did not show the full story. In fact, it might even have been trimmed to only show one side.
Of course, if you are an ex-'journalist' now MP, you say that the police 'say' that the police were injured, whilst talking the other side as gospel...
I'd say it probably was trimmed; all we had as far as I could see was a police officer kicking the head and stamping on a man who was under control.
It concerns me that two MPs engaged in heaping strong praise on that policeman at that point. At that point it was a dog whistle, imo.
And it also concerns me that other MPs seem to have jumped to the defence of the guy on the ground, when the facts were not fully known.
The assault on the guy on the ground was fairly clear - subdued and the assault continued.
The same imo would apply to MPs shit-stirring from the other side; the lawyer's comments were unjustifiable.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
That will be the “Livermore” who walks around Europe chatting away and loving the random people he meets on the walks from different countries and backgrounds.
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
OTOH he did introduce me through one of his posts to Marcel Marceau so he can't be all bad
Marcel Marceau spoke more sense in his stage career than Roger has ever done. Bear in mind that Marceau was a mime artist so said nothing.
He said Non in Silent Movie. It is the only word spoken in the entire film.
And he’s still up on Roger on the words to sense ratio in the public sphere.
Also I just realised I meant Jérôme Murat. All these foreign words look the same to me.
Jerome Murat is among the best. Was that recently? I've been a fan for a while I just can't imagine the circumstance I posted his work on here. It's not an obvious audience for him!
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
TBF we need to get rid of the national speed limit. There's not really much point in the current "nod and wink" approach. We need to be explicit that 200mph+ is absolutely fine on a motorway in the right conditions.
Otherwise may as well have these ridiculous restrictions. We either believe in the laws or we don't.
Sadly half of Westminster either doesn't have a driving licence or doesn't drive in practice, and the rest of it mostly is around the south east where those conditions barely ever arise. Nearest bit of motorway to London I can think of where they regularly arise is Huntingdon-Peterborough section of the A1.
They've no idea how much harm they're doing with this crazy 70mph thing.
I suspect that average journey times would increase if you increased the speed limit on motorways in - part of the reason they have 50mph or 40mph limits for some sections is to stop everyone bunching up and lots of random sudden braking, which tends to cause congestion.
Traffic flow is weird. I think 20mph in Edinburgh has helped to keep traffic flowing better simply due to the massive reduction of slight vehicle-on-vehicle collisions which would normally close a road or lane for a few hours. I'd love to see a proper study of that.
LTNs too - the reduction in the number of junctions can improve flow and average journey times, even while the number of vehicles on boundary roads increases. Lots of dead time between traffic phases, plus all the braking and accelerating.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have smart speed limits for congestion purposes. A limitless M25 would serve little purpose. As you say, congestion is weird.
I have in my mind rural roads (not just motorways - but the motorways are most important) instead.
Quite a lot of thought is put into the design of the road for speed too. For example, the A9 in Scotland was set up so it could be duelled in the future, hence all the long straights and sweeping corners (and consequently massive crashes) . I would guess that the roads in Germany and Italy are set up for much higher speeds than our motorways.
I'm trying to think of some that might work - Lincolnshire maybe?.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
That will be the “Livermore” who walks around Europe chatting away and loving the random people he meets on the walks from different countries and backgrounds.
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
OTOH he did introduce me through one of his posts to Marcel Marceau so he can't be all bad
Marcel Marceau spoke more sense in his stage career than Roger has ever done. Bear in mind that Marceau was a mime artist so said nothing.
He said Non in Silent Movie. It is the only word spoken in the entire film.
And he’s still up on Roger on the words to sense ratio in the public sphere.
Also I just realised I meant Jérôme Murat. All these foreign words look the same to me.
Jerome Murat is among the best. Was that recently? I've been a fan for a while I just can't imagine the circumstance I posted his work on here. It's not an obvious audience for him!
Was within the last few months, yes. I cannot remember the circumstances.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
TBF we need to get rid of the national speed limit. There's not really much point in the current "nod and wink" approach. We need to be explicit that 200mph+ is absolutely fine on a motorway in the right conditions.
Otherwise may as well have these ridiculous restrictions. We either believe in the laws or we don't.
Sadly half of Westminster either doesn't have a driving licence or doesn't drive in practice, and the rest of it mostly is around the south east where those conditions barely ever arise. Nearest bit of motorway to London I can think of where they regularly arise is Huntingdon-Peterborough section of the A1.
They've no idea how much harm they're doing with this crazy 70mph thing.
I suspect that average journey times would increase if you increased the speed limit on motorways in - part of the reason they have 50mph or 40mph limits for some sections is to stop everyone bunching up and lots of random sudden braking, which tends to cause congestion.
Traffic flow is weird. I think 20mph in Edinburgh has helped to keep traffic flowing better simply due to the massive reduction of slight vehicle-on-vehicle collisions which would normally close a road or lane for a few hours. I'd love to see a proper study of that.
LTNs too - the reduction in the number of junctions can improve flow and average journey times, even while the number of vehicles on boundary roads increases. Lots of dead time between traffic phases, plus all the braking and accelerating.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have smart speed limits for congestion purposes. A limitless M25 would serve little purpose. As you say, congestion is weird.
I have in my mind rural roads (not just motorways - but the motorways are most important) instead.
Quite a lot of thought is put into the design of the road for speed too. For example, the A9 in Scotland was set up so it could be duelled in the future, hence all the long straights and sweeping corners (and consequently massive crashes) . I would guess that the roads in Germany and Italy are set up for much higher speeds than our motorways.
I'm trying to think of some that might work - Lincolnshire maybe?.
I find autobahns less well engineered than most of our motorways. Same with the derestricted roads on the Isle of Man. If you remove the speed limit it's up to drivers to choose a sensible speed. Those poor at this will be self-culled quite quickly. The vast majority of the motorway network is perfectly safe at 150mph though (if it were the norm) in the right conditions. I am not suggesting cruising at this or 200mph (does a vehicle even exist that can do this with a sensible range?) though - I am just saying leave it up to the driver. On the autobahn you can't generally stick at 150 for any length of time, pretty quickly a slow coach will get in your way. It is what it is. No biggy.
Anyway - Most of the M74 is a good example. The motorway bits of the A1 north of the M18. The previously mentioned Alconbury stretch too. M6 north of Preston. ETC ETC.
It'll never happen though. At least not until most cars are driverless. I'll never be able to convince enough people. Far more likely, sadly, that IOM and Germany introduce overall limits.
BTW you are a keen cyclist iirc. What's your view on 20mph limits? I am a terrible-but-enjoy-it-a-lot cyclist with it being my favourite mode of transport on non hilly cities. And it's my experience that they cause me issues cause drivers pass too slowly - I want them past immediately (but with lots of room please).
"The insulting representation of Jesus Christ in Paris yesterday was completely offensive and crossed all red lines.
France, a country with a major history of Christianity, must be ashamed of itself, and I implore our Christian people all over the world to speak out against this act. We resolutely condemn this."
BTW you are a keen cyclist iirc. What's your view on 20mph limits? I am a terrible-but-enjoy-it-a-lot cyclist with it being my favourite mode of transport on non hilly cities. And it's my experience that they cause me issues cause drivers pass too slowly - I want them past immediately (but with lots of room please).
Experienced quite a lot of them today while driving through Wales (although I wasn't the driver).
"The insulting representation of Jesus Christ in Paris yesterday was completely offensive and crossed all red lines.
France, a country with a major history of Christianity, must be ashamed of itself, and I implore our Christian people all over the world to speak out against this act. We resolutely condemn this."
"The insulting representation of Jesus Christ in Paris yesterday was completely offensive and crossed all red lines.
France, a country with a major history of Christianity, must be ashamed of itself, and I implore our Christian people all over the world to speak out against this act. We resolutely condemn this."
It will be darkly amusing if something they'd never dare to do Muhammed out of fear bites them in exactly the same way.
A sad day for freedom of speech too ofc, but yeah bantz.
Banning Leon and Blanche for (I think?) sympathising with the policeman in this instance seems a bit harsh. I can well see you might disagree with their (and my) position on this, but I don't think they were saying the unsayable. It's not as if they went the full Rod Crosby.
See my post at 7.04pm.
Do you really think, bearing in mind the historical hyperbole, that was a call to shoot someone? Is it not just bollocks akin to the joy of banging stepmoms that accepted as fun and off the cuff repartee?
Neither of them said anything worse than me, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine calling for the Russian leaders kids to be killed, both are for various reasons good posters here. Sometimes you will agree, sometimes cringe, sometimes hate, sometimes laugh. But tonight was nothing super bad.
Livermore is a racist plain and simple. I don't care less whether or not hes banned but if Stuart was banned for using subsamples I can well understand why they felt the site was better without a recidivist racist
Why is Blanche a racist in your view?
He actually believes Palestinians want their children to be killed. He thinks it's part of their belief system. I thought at first it could be ignorance but I'm now convinced it goes beyond that and his issues are real. I know too many Palestinians and Arabs to find it comfortable reading this rubbish so banned or not now I don't.
Any followers of the aircraft tracking websites may notice two El Al airliners from Tel Aviv to the USA that are being indicated as tracking over Lebanon towards Beirut, both folloing the exact same route.
Either there is some heavy electronic spoofing, some weird GPS issue causing not one but two aircraft to be seen this way or something is about to happen around Beirut.
"The insulting representation of Jesus Christ in Paris yesterday was completely offensive and crossed all red lines.
France, a country with a major history of Christianity, must be ashamed of itself, and I implore our Christian people all over the world to speak out against this act. We resolutely condemn this."
It will be darkly amusing if something they'd never dare to do Muhammed out of fear bites them in exactly the same way.
A sad day for freedom of speech too ofc, but yeah bantz.
I've subsequently done about 1 minute of research to discover that the thing was nothing whatsoever to do with the last supper and instead was feast of dionysus (I didn't watch it so I'm not sure how obvious this was).
Suspect a lot won't though and this will be repeated for decades now...
"Donald Trump has told voters that Kamala Harris is being presented as a “Margaret Thatcher” figure as he attacked the “sick” new Democratic nominee in a fiery speech...“Three months ago she was thought of so badly, [the media] were just killing her,” he said of the vice-president.
“And now they’re trying to make her into a – let’s say – Margaret Thatcher. I don’t think so. It’s not going to happen.
"The insulting representation of Jesus Christ in Paris yesterday was completely offensive and crossed all red lines.
France, a country with a major history of Christianity, must be ashamed of itself, and I implore our Christian people all over the world to speak out against this act. We resolutely condemn this."
If the Mullahs are upset France must have done something right.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
It's not that straightforward. A given software feature can reliably be turned off that easily iff the software is written with that in mind. If not, unintended consequences are to be feared. So you're still asking multinationals to spend money to cater m for UK tastes.
The whole concept of "fail safe" is that the machinery in question should be safe if for whatever reason the feature fails. What you're suggesting would mean these vehicles are fail dangerous, in which case they shouldn't be on the road at all.
And if they are safe to drive with the ai 'safety' features off, it should be a piece of piss to be able to switch them off and drive without them.
Again, my point is this - in a car that swerves automatically when it senses danger, incorrectly in the case of the article I linked to, or brakes automatically when it skittishly sees danger, as in the case of Solarflare's post below, are you liable for the accident for insurance purposes, or is the manufacturer? What if it beeps at you for doing 21 in a 20 zone and that distraction causes your reaction time to be slowed?
Fewer distractions = safer driving.
My car has safety features like many of the above (automatic braking etc, not lane swerving) and I also have a button to disable them. Three buttons actually, one for each of the the three main features.
I've not pressed any of the buttons as I actually like having them.
Sometimes the car breaks when I wouldn't, eg a car in front in stationary in the road and indicating, I can see that it will move but the car gently breaks a while in advance when I'd continue cruising until much closer to it.
Only once so far I've had the car brake itself before I had the chance to respond and I appreciated it. Traffic was smooth flowing 30mph with no sign of delays, rounded the top of the hill and in front the traffic was stationery. The car started breaking immediately and I put my foot on the brake too, but I was already slowing by the time I had a chance to react.
Even without the automatic braking I'd have been fine in that instance without it, but I'm quite OK with it even if its typically redundant, it only takes 1 time not being redundant and I'll be glad to have had it.
Seriously, just checked back in and seen Leon and Blanche banned. I honestly couldn’t see anything super offensive. We are a robust intelligent bunch of people (excluding myself of course)who frankly need to be challenged and hear crap we don’t agree with.
My favourite don at school always made it clear that if you can’t listen to things you don’t agree with then your own view is worth nothing. He did however stand as Lib Dem Mp for Winchester many times and never got elected but, he was a fine man, wrong party at the time.
This site thrives on all the views. I didn’t see anything racist, overly nasty, and frankly we tolerate some pretty potentially sexist stuff here.
Let everyone counter arguments and not block people. We have no other travel writers, postmen. They are a loss for a bit of a Sunday pissy rant.
No, wishing death on people is not acceptable.
I've wished death on loads of people on here and skated on it. You've just got to do it in a witty and stylish manner. Not ranting away like an end-stage alcoholic; even if that's what you actually are.
I see the eurofanatics are using (frequently wrong) IMF projections to make a fresh push on rejoining the EU without a mandate.
Entirely ignoring the fact that the UK has OUTGROWN the EU since we left EU structures.
Why bother? We could beat the EU and G7 on GDP and GDP per capita and they'd never concede the point - they'd just do the puppydog eyes and start banging on about how the real tragedy is the cultural effects.
I rarely find the Daily Mail interesting, but there was an interesting article on their site today, about buying a new car that has EU mandated safety features in it.
1. The safety features are bonkers and clearly liable to failure, beeping randomly causing a hazard at best, rumbling steering wheels, 'ai' based auto swerving when it thinks youre out of your lane, slowing you down when sometimes you need to speed up to get out of trouble, etc.
2. Leaving the EU has made absolutely no difference to our ability to opt out of this pointless shit, manufacturers are still putting this unwelcome shit into cars sold in the UK as 'we only make them for one market' (well, how come the steering wheel is on the other side then?)
3. Pointless and nannying rules like the above on car 'safety' are precisely the sort of thing that annoyed me about the EU (see also the pointless DO YOU WANT TO ACCEPT COOKIES????!!! notice on every site now). But if even actually leaving the EU doesn't exempt you from them, then it does make you wonder what is the point. Perhaps the UK government could pass a law banning these dangerous 'safety' features from our cars.
What EU-mandated safety features? You mean the UNECE? That's the UN - those are GLOBAL standards.
As for UK-specific rules, we can try and set whatever rules we like. Manufacturers can either make their products compliant or not sell in our market. Whether they do or not depends on how much they can be bothered putting out with out petulant pointless shit differentials.
Remember UKCA? Already dead and replaced with CE. Why? Because it was petulant pointless shit differential which added nothing other than cost and complexity.
What the actual is wrong with Brexiteer Tories? They HATE red tape. Unless its red tape they want to tie Britain up in to make petulant pointless shit differentials from the hated EU.
I personally would never buy a car that a) beeps at me when I'm doing 21 in a 20 zone (massive distraction) b) swerves when it thinks i'm 'out of lane' (ai tech is far too fallible) or c) limits my speed (I avoided a serious and possibly life threatening accident once by speeding up to avoid the danger).
Serious question, are you actually liable in an accident if the accident is caused by your car's 'safety' features?
Again, what EU safety features? The EU does not set the rules. It could choose to copy Murica and disapply the UNECE global rules. But it does not. And neither do we.
And we can choose to opt out of them, and should.
On, what, the nine hand-carved Morgans we manufacture for the home market per year?
All of the features I've complained about are software. The ability to disable them permanently should be as easy as flicking a switch.
It's not that straightforward. A given software feature can reliably be turned off that easily iff the software is written with that in mind. If not, unintended consequences are to be feared. So you're still asking multinationals to spend money to cater m for UK tastes.
The whole concept of "fail safe" is that the machinery in question should be safe if for whatever reason the feature fails. What you're suggesting would mean these vehicles are fail dangerous, in which case they shouldn't be on the road at all.
And if they are safe to drive with the ai 'safety' features off, it should be a piece of piss to be able to switch them off and drive without them.
Again, my point is this - in a car that swerves automatically when it senses danger, incorrectly in the case of the article I linked to, or brakes automatically when it skittishly sees danger, as in the case of Solarflare's post below, are you liable for the accident for insurance purposes, or is the manufacturer? What if it beeps at you for doing 21 in a 20 zone and that distraction causes your reaction time to be slowed?
Fewer distractions = safer driving.
My car has safety features like many of the above (automatic braking etc, not lane swerving) and I also have a button to disable them. Three buttons actually, one for each of the the three main features.
I've not pressed any of the buttons as I actually like having them.
Sometimes the car breaks when I wouldn't, eg a car in front in stationary in the road and indicating, I can see that it will move but the car gently breaks a while in advance when I'd continue cruising until much closer to it.
Only once so far I've had the car brake itself before I had the chance to respond and I appreciated it. Traffic was smooth flowing 30mph with no sign of delays, rounded the top of the hill and in front the traffic was stationery. The car started breaking immediately and I put my foot on the brake too, but I was already slowing by the time I had a chance to react.
Even without the automatic braking I'd have been fine in that instance without it, but I'm quite OK with it even if its typically redundant, it only takes 1 time not being redundant and I'll be glad to have had it.
Watch where you're going man, I'm trying to get speed limits removed here - you're not helping!
"Donald Trump has told voters that Kamala Harris is being presented as a “Margaret Thatcher” figure as he attacked the “sick” new Democratic nominee in a fiery speech...“Three months ago she was thought of so badly, [the media] were just killing her,” he said of the vice-president.
“And now they’re trying to make her into a – let’s say – Margaret Thatcher. I don’t think so. It’s not going to happen.
Laughin' Kamala Harris has to be the lamest insult I've ever heard.
She'll be laughing all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if that's all he's got.
It's a particularly useless insult when you consider that most people probably want a bit more happy laughter in politics compared to the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of the last few years.
One thing the Tory Party needs to get over is the idea that the general public is endlessly fascinated by who its leader is. They put a stop on that importance on July 4th.
Indeed but governments normally lose GEs rather than oppositions win them. Even Whitelaw would likely have won in 1979, John Prescott would probably have won in 1997 and David Davis won most seats in 2010 and Long Bailey won in 2024. Even Ken Clarke would have lost to Blair in 2001 and even David Miliband would probably not have won most seats against Cameron in 2015 either albeit both may have lost by smaller margins than Hague and Ed Miliband did.
Blair and Cameron probably added to their parties margin of victory, Starmer ensured Middle England were assured Corbynism had gone and Thatcher had a dynamic agenda of change but the Major, Brown and Callaghan and Sunak governments were going to lose anyway.
Had Burnham replaced Ed Miliband as Labour leader in 2017 not Corbyn then he may have beaten May but that is the only example I can think of in the last 50 years when a different party leader would have won a GE their party lost. Maybe Ken Clarke would have got a hung parliament in 2005 post Iraq but Blair would still have won most seats
Fair points. It's the endless drama of Tory leadership spats that becomes so wearying. Lots of sturm und drang but little that is actually real. Everything seen through some prism of leadership pressure... in the end no one cares. It's not the leadership, or rather it's not just the leadership, that's the real problem now.
NYT (via Seattle Times) - JD Vance stumbles in his debut as Democrats go on offense
The choice of Sen. JD Vance as former President Donald Trump’s running mate reflected the confidence of a campaign so sure of victory in November that it could look beyond a second Trump term to the legacy of his movement.
But in less than two weeks, Vance has found himself on the defensive, and his struggles have dented the sense of invulnerability that only a week ago seemed to be the overriding image of the Trump campaign.
A stream of years-old quotes, videos and audio comments unearthed by Democrats and the news media in recent days has threatened to undermine the Trump campaign’s outreach to women, voters of color and the very blue-collar voters Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, was supposed to reach. . . .
His past comments deriding “childless cat ladies,” supporting a “federal response” to stop abortion in Democratic states and promoting a higher tax burden for childless Americans have yielded a chorus of criticism from Democrats. Vance’s fresh efforts to explain them have provided Democrats more material, with the Harris campaign promoting one short clip in which he seems to suggest that when he spoke of childless cat ladies, he meant no insult to cats — “I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said.
And his first handful of appearances on the stump have drawn unflattering attention. During an appearance in his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, he tried to explain how his critics would call his drinking Diet Mountain Dew racist, with an awkward aside assuring the audience that Diet Mountain Dew was good. . . .
Even among normally sympathetic quarters, Vance encountered pushback.
“You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” asked Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, who has become the personification of the male-dominated “bro culture” that populates much of the Trump movement. “We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron.” . . .
On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page savaged Vance’s early debut and, in particular, his 2021 comments to Tucker Carlson, who was then a Fox News host, that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”
“The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts,” the editorial board wrote. “But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”
The paper’s editorial board went on to compare Vance’s comments to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark in 2016, looking down on a broad swath of the country. . . .
Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Journal, had lobbied heavily against Vance’s selection behind the scenes, The New York Times has reported, while also using his outlets to lift up the running mate candidacy of Doug Burgum, the older, more staid governor of North Dakota.
Carlson was among Vance’s fiercest behind-the-scenes boosters in the vice presidential sweepstakes. In a twist, it was some of Vance’s old comments on Carlson’s show that have gotten him into the most trouble.
SSI - Fucker Carlson strikes again!
Hey, remember how when that Fucker was fired for cause by FOX News? And several PBers predicted that F(U)C was bound for even more fame and fortune as a now-independent media monger?
On the previous thread, some people were mocking the idea that Irwin Stelzer might have been making election predictions in 1948 when he was 16.
I'd say that's pretty old to be making your first election prediction. 😊
Not sure when I first predicted an election, but almost certainly that was really just wanting my preferred candidate to win - all heart & no head.
Was born during Eisenhower administration; first presidential election which I recall, was 1960 . Remember John Kennedy billboard, and hearing from my mom (a staunch though not very political Democrat) that JFK was gonna make a campaign appearance in our town. Told her I wanted to go, but for some reason we couldn't; we were both disappointed.
In 1964 yours truly was older if NOT wiser; my presidential pick that year was Goldwater. Why? Because I knew my dad was a Republican, so I was one too. Found out later that Daddy Dearest did NOT vote for Goldwater, along with many other otherwise regular GOP voters that year.
Remember buying both H2O and LBJ comic books, biographical in nature and aimed (back then) at kids. Also going to the small campaign offices that both parties had in our very small town, staffed by little old lady volunteers, who allowed kids to take bumper stickers, brochures, posters, matchbooks, emery boards, keychains, you name it; think we were the bulk of the demand for this stuff.
On Election Day 1964 went to the Republican HQ after school, were the lady's were discussing the "midnight returns" from Dixville Notch, New Hampshire where Goldwater defeated Johnson; they thought this was good news for Barry and I had to agree. So was a bit shocking to discover that night that LBJ was winning by a landslide . . . before my bedtime . . .
Trans ideology ! She really is delusional if she thinks people gave a fig about that when voting . Good riddance to her , when will she be joining Reform ?
See that Rupert Murdoch and PB's own Jim Miller were on the same page in their support for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, though Jim is (based on what he's said here) NOT as fond of Trump as is Rupe.
J.D. Vance’s Basket of Deplorables Trump’s running mate is on the defensive over his views about the childless.
Donald Trump’s choice of 39-year-old J.D. Vance as his running mate was supposed to present the GOP ticket as modern and looking to the future. Instead the campaign has found itself playing defense against Mr. Vance’s censorious views about women who don’t have children.
As it always does, the press has been digging up the VP choice’s comments over the years for political scrutiny, and the Ohio Senator turns out to be a target-rich environment. As a Senate candidate in 2021 he told Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, that the U.S. is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
That sounds like he was referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has two stepchildren but none of her own. The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts. But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race
The remark has gone viral on social media and is being portrayed as an example of chauvinist views. They’re mocking it on TMZ, a sure sign that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one. . . .
Comments
My prediction list:
James Cleverly - Yes.
Priti Patel - Probably.
Robert Jenrick - Nope.
Tom Tugendhat - Nope.
Kemi Badenoch - Nope.
Mel Stride - Nope.
The fastest crash and burns will be Kemi (I give it 18 months) and Jenrick (might get 2 years).
How things have changed since he was so unlucky with his dating matches on Match.com....
Anywhere where there is a choice there will be at the *very least* a significant minority of drivers who won't want continual nagging.
(Also the country I drive the most in outside of Europe is Zambia and the idea of intelligent speed adaptation somewhere where half the speed limit signs have been stolen and in any case are totally inadequate is megaloz)
Sadly despite being on team Kemi I could see her pissing off other MPs enough through straight talking. But it's a small possibility. It's hard to see with the others. Jenrick is an absolute bastard but slimy enough that he should be able to avoid it.
It's all getting a bit desperate.
I've no bets yet - other than a tiny one I put on Mel at 38 20 seconds ago cause that's value IMO.
My gut is Cleverly is value too at 7.2 but am not taking it cause beer.
Fuck it I took some, am I man or mouse? There's more there though.
"Laughing Kamala" hardly a crushing retort, me thinks.
Though mind, it didn't help Al Smith very much, when he was dubbed (by FDR) "the Happy Warrior".
And if they are safe to drive with the ai 'safety' features off, it should be a piece of piss to be able to switch them off and drive without them.
Again, my point is this - in a car that swerves automatically when it senses danger, incorrectly in the case of the article I linked to, or brakes automatically when it skittishly sees danger, as in the case of Solarflare's post below, are you liable for the accident for insurance purposes, or is the manufacturer? What if it beeps at you for doing 21 in a 20 zone and that distraction causes your reaction time to be slowed?
Fewer distractions = safer driving.
I'm not too wowed by Kemi's debut piece. In the Times (puke) and not terribly coherent - it felt a bit mealy mouthed as to why they lost. Not really willing to own the failures of her own Government.
It's always going to seem harsh/unfair to different people at different times, but I prefer it to the unmitigated shitshow of (eg) TwitterX moderation.
At that point the party panics and throws them out with 'one more roll of the dice'.
Probably involving Boris Johnson to be honest.
Come on kids - you just know this how it will go.
Truss
She was the one who handed Labour the biggest gift ever in politics and they will live on it for years
Johnson, Truss, Braverman are all yesterday's stories for the conservative party if they ever want to see office again
Braverman probably would have blown the party up had she become leader, so that's a bullet dodged. But if the Conservatives get to 2026 without making enough progress in the polls ( a pretty big if, to be sure) are they going to panic as they did in 2003?
You really are a simplistic idiot. You never see that your prejudices against say, the people of Hartlepool, are every bit as bad as other people’s prejudices against people from other places.
Yours are just based on an unwarranted snobbishness as you are, by all analysis, the perfectly normal intellectual vacuum of Millfield students who was good with a camera but otherwise lacking in any sort of grace or insight.
Although I think they will try Johnson one more time.
Filled with some more Mel at 42. That's enough, he's a long shot to say the least. But 42 awesome value imo.
"kama, kama, kama chameleon"
You read it here first.
Even F1 drivers struggle to avoid other cars at a closing speed of 140mph
He'd have to get back into the Commons, which wouldn't be easy. Even if the party dynamics can be made to work, the Conservatives are really short on sufficiently safe seats.
He has an awful lot of baggage, which won't have gone away.
Based on his appearance at the election rally, he's really let himself go since leaving office.
It's as hilariously bad as you would fear it to be.
https://calcgpt.io/
In fact the only answer it hasn't provided for 6 x 9 is the answer 42...
@RonFilipkowski
·
1h
I’m sure Trump will enjoy watching Fox today as they review their latest polls.
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1817660151303975098
"I say kamala kamala kamala kamala kameleon. Which is sensible. Obvs"
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4910869#Comment_4910869
However, even the ones without super-sized armored personnel carrier are armed with sufficient fire power to un-make your day.
They put a stop on that importance on July 4th.
Traffic flow is weird. I think 20mph in Edinburgh has helped to keep traffic flowing better simply due to the massive reduction of slight vehicle-on-vehicle collisions which would normally close a road or lane for a few hours. I'd love to see a proper study of that.
LTNs too - the reduction in the number of junctions can improve flow and average journey times, even while the number of vehicles on boundary roads increases. Lots of dead time between traffic phases, plus all the braking and accelerating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_de_Blasio#Early_life,_family_and_education
https://www.foxnews.com/official-polls/fox-news-poll-close-races-battleground-states-show-voters-locked
I have in my mind rural roads (not just motorways - but the motorways are most important) instead.
Blair and Cameron probably added to their parties margin of victory, Starmer ensured Middle England were assured Corbynism had gone and Thatcher had a dynamic agenda of change but the Major, Brown and Callaghan and Sunak governments were going to lose anyway.
Had Burnham replaced Ed Miliband as Labour leader in 2017 not Corbyn then he may have beaten May but that is the only example I can think of in the last 50 years when a different party leader would have won a GE their party lost. Maybe Ken Clarke would have got a hung parliament in 2005 post Iraq but Blair would still have won most seats
Gavin Barwell
@GavinBarwell
·
52m
If she genuinely has 10 people willing to nominate her, let's hear their names
Otherwise we are entitled to conclude that the real reason she's not running is that she doesn't have the numbers
Then the government pulled the funding.
So.... we reused all the equipment as a file-share box for some office admins. Which was then replaced by SharePoint. And then the original kit was well out of support so was just sent for recycling.
More concerning is that airlines are reportedly cancelling flights and that the Biden admin is, apparently, giving extended stay to Lebanese people whos US visa time limits were due to run out. I dont know if that order has been given for sure but if its being considered it says something.
The same imo would apply to MPs shit-stirring from the other side; the lawyer's comments were unjustifiable.
I'm trying to think of some that might work - Lincolnshire maybe?.
I find autobahns less well engineered than most of our motorways. Same with the derestricted roads on the Isle of Man. If you remove the speed limit it's up to drivers to choose a sensible speed. Those poor at this will be self-culled quite quickly. The vast majority of the motorway network is perfectly safe at 150mph though (if it were the norm) in the right conditions. I am not suggesting cruising at this or 200mph (does a vehicle even exist that can do this with a sensible range?) though - I am just saying leave it up to the driver. On the autobahn you can't generally stick at 150 for any length of time, pretty quickly a slow coach will get in your way. It is what it is. No biggy.
Anyway - Most of the M74 is a good example. The motorway bits of the A1 north of the M18. The previously mentioned Alconbury stretch too. M6 north of Preston. ETC ETC.
It'll never happen though. At least not until most cars are driverless. I'll never be able to convince enough people. Far more likely, sadly, that IOM and Germany introduce overall limits.
"The insulting representation of Jesus Christ in Paris yesterday was completely offensive and crossed all red lines.
France, a country with a major history of Christianity, must be ashamed of itself, and I implore our Christian people all over the world to speak out against this act. We resolutely condemn this."
A sad day for freedom of speech too ofc, but yeah bantz.
Either there is some heavy electronic spoofing, some weird GPS issue causing not one but two aircraft to be seen this way or something is about to happen around Beirut.
Suspect a lot won't though and this will be repeated for decades now...
She'll be laughing all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if that's all he's got.
Je Suis Paris.
I've not pressed any of the buttons as I actually like having them.
Sometimes the car breaks when I wouldn't, eg a car in front in stationary in the road and indicating, I can see that it will move but the car gently breaks a while in advance when I'd continue cruising until much closer to it.
Only once so far I've had the car brake itself before I had the chance to respond and I appreciated it. Traffic was smooth flowing 30mph with no sign of delays, rounded the top of the hill and in front the traffic was stationery. The car started breaking immediately and I put my foot on the brake too, but I was already slowing by the time I had a chance to react.
Even without the automatic braking I'd have been fine in that instance without it, but I'm quite OK with it even if its typically redundant, it only takes 1 time not being redundant and I'll be glad to have had it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13681809/Moment-huge-brawl-erupts-Dovedale-stepping-stones-beauty-spot.html
For one thing not even Labor Day yet, when historically Americans REALLY start paying attention to the upcoming Presidential election.
It's not the leadership, or rather it's not just the leadership, that's the real problem now.
The choice of Sen. JD Vance as former President Donald Trump’s running mate reflected the confidence of a campaign so sure of victory in November that it could look beyond a second Trump term to the legacy of his movement.
But in less than two weeks, Vance has found himself on the defensive, and his struggles have dented the sense of invulnerability that only a week ago seemed to be the overriding image of the Trump campaign.
A stream of years-old quotes, videos and audio comments unearthed by Democrats and the news media in recent days has threatened to undermine the Trump campaign’s outreach to women, voters of color and the very blue-collar voters Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, was supposed to reach. . . .
His past comments deriding “childless cat ladies,” supporting a “federal response” to stop abortion in Democratic states and promoting a higher tax burden for childless Americans have yielded a chorus of criticism from Democrats. Vance’s fresh efforts to explain them have provided Democrats more material, with the Harris campaign promoting one short clip in which he seems to suggest that when he spoke of childless cat ladies, he meant no insult to cats — “I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said.
And his first handful of appearances on the stump have drawn unflattering attention. During an appearance in his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, he tried to explain how his critics would call his drinking Diet Mountain Dew racist, with an awkward aside assuring the audience that Diet Mountain Dew was good. . . .
Even among normally sympathetic quarters, Vance encountered pushback.
“You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” asked Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, who has become the personification of the male-dominated “bro culture” that populates much of the Trump movement. “We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron.” . . .
On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page savaged Vance’s early debut and, in particular, his 2021 comments to Tucker Carlson, who was then a Fox News host, that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”
“The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts,” the editorial board wrote. “But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”
The paper’s editorial board went on to compare Vance’s comments to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark in 2016, looking down on a broad swath of the country. . . .
Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Journal, had lobbied heavily against Vance’s selection behind the scenes, The New York Times has reported, while also using his outlets to lift up the running mate candidacy of Doug Burgum, the older, more staid governor of North Dakota.
Carlson was among Vance’s fiercest behind-the-scenes boosters in the vice presidential sweepstakes. In a twist, it was some of Vance’s old comments on Carlson’s show that have gotten him into the most trouble.
SSI - Fucker Carlson strikes again!
Hey, remember how when that Fucker was fired for cause by FOX News? And several PBers predicted that F(U)C was bound for even more fame and fortune as a now-independent media monger?
SO hows's THAT turning out???
I'd say that's pretty old to be making your first election prediction. 😊
Was born during Eisenhower administration; first presidential election which I recall, was 1960 . Remember John Kennedy billboard, and hearing from my mom (a staunch though not very political Democrat) that JFK was gonna make a campaign appearance in our town. Told her I wanted to go, but for some reason we couldn't; we were both disappointed.
In 1964 yours truly was older if NOT wiser; my presidential pick that year was Goldwater. Why? Because I knew my dad was a Republican, so I was one too. Found out later that Daddy Dearest did NOT vote for Goldwater, along with many other otherwise regular GOP voters that year.
Remember buying both H2O and LBJ comic books, biographical in nature and aimed (back then) at kids. Also going to the small campaign offices that both parties had in our very small town, staffed by little old lady volunteers, who allowed kids to take bumper stickers, brochures, posters, matchbooks, emery boards, keychains, you name it; think we were the bulk of the demand for this stuff.
On Election Day 1964 went to the Republican HQ after school, were the lady's were discussing the "midnight returns" from Dixville Notch, New Hampshire where Goldwater defeated Johnson; they thought this was good news for Barry and I had to agree. So was a bit shocking to discover that night that LBJ was winning by a landslide . . . before my bedtime . . .
Think this speaks well of Murdoch.
J.D. Vance’s Basket of Deplorables
Trump’s running mate is on the defensive over his views about the childless.
Donald Trump’s choice of 39-year-old J.D. Vance as his running mate was supposed to present the GOP ticket as modern and looking to the future. Instead the campaign has found itself playing defense against Mr. Vance’s censorious views about women who don’t have children.
As it always does, the press has been digging up the VP choice’s comments over the years for political scrutiny, and the Ohio Senator turns out to be a target-rich environment. As a Senate candidate in 2021 he told Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, that the U.S. is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
That sounds like he was referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has two stepchildren but none of her own. The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts. But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race
The remark has gone viral on social media and is being portrayed as an example of chauvinist views. They’re mocking it on TMZ, a sure sign that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one. . . .