I’ve been travelling the world doing this job for almost FORTY YEARS and I still get excited by road tunnels. There is something intrinsically sexy and glamorous about them. The exotic lights everywhere and the big whirring fans and the speeding cars and trucks making that ripply sound in the dark and you wait for the sign of daylight at the end and then wow the sun and it’s all futuristic
I hate road tunnels WITHOUT lights. They are just terrifying
Thanks. Had to get that off my chest
Great - I can now visit the Faroe islands and be safe from the Aperol Spritzers.
Are we at or passing peak Elmu? He can intimidate and oppress mortals with his wealth, social media reach and phalanx of clone lab grown lawyers but if he takes on the Republic of Brazil and/or the EU then he's going to come off second best.
He does seem to have abandoned any pretense that buying Twitter was a sound business move and fully embraced it as a personal propaganda machine
His argument now is that $44bn was “not the price of Twitter but the price of free speech”. Its quite a good line
I agree he does say some mad stuff on there. At the same time he also allows some pretty wild abuse of himself - which I find surprising for a guy with a thin skin
In the round I think Free Speech TwiX is a good thing, not least because it has revealed just how biased to the left Twitter was before. I do not expect PB to agree with this
It's not free speech though.
Posts which call Republicans "wingnuts" are deleted for violating the terms of service on abusive speech.
Posts which call for violence against refugees or brown people are just fine and aren't taken down.
It's selective speech. I find it rather telling that you're more comfortable with the current balance of the bias than the previous iteration.
Well yeah. I’m on the right
I find it rather telling that you’re more comfortable with the earlier left wing yawn blah fucksake you pompous tiny dicked wanker-of-maggots
But it isn't really free speech, is it? It's going from one flavor of not free to another.
It's the hypocrisy that grates with me.
Just on the pragmatics of this it's better that the right is silenced rather than the left because it's the right who tend to say deeply reprehensible things that make decent people shudder.
You’re saying this to provoke (and I approve of that, at least it adds spice) but the thing is: you actually believe this, too. You genuinely think a lot of right wing opinion should simply be silenced
I don't mind people arguing for a small state and saying things like "there's no such thing as a free lunch" (although it's irritating), it's all this other stuff, demonising muslims and migrants and refugees, deep misogyny, white supremacy dog-whistling, promotion of lies and conspiracy theories in the face of science and reason, we really could do without most of that. It's pollution. And the people adding to, fostering and enabling it are not in my view "free speech advocates" they're polluters. They're polluting the town square and making it hard to breath. That's my mental image of it.
So, you’re still a wanker. Also, quite dumb. You’d have censored the lab leak hypothesis and in your world we’d all be going round worrying about fucking bats in soup instead of properly worrying about the safety of biological research laboratories
You are literally too stupid to see the danger of your own stupidity
Mmm, sure I am. "Dumb as a rock" even like Kamala. Because all the real brainboxes just parrot what they read on Far Right Twitter and don't need to mess about with logic or probabilities or any of that nonsense.
What’s the *probability* of an especially dangerous novel bat coronavirus emerging in the only city in the world which has a lab taking novel bat coronaviruses and making them especially dangerous? As against it emerging from the market 300 yards from the lab which has never sold bats?
You didn’t trouble yourself with THAT probability because you’re an idiot
As I said you’re so stupid you don’t realise how stupid you are. Which is actually quite dangerous
I’ve been travelling the world doing this job for almost FORTY YEARS and I still get excited by road tunnels. There is something intrinsically sexy and glamorous about them. The exotic lights everywhere and the big whirring fans and the speeding cars and trucks making that ripply sound in the dark and you wait for the sign of daylight at the end and then wow the sun and it’s all futuristic
I hate road tunnels WITHOUT lights. They are just terrifying
Thanks. Had to get that off my chest
Great - I can now visit the Faroe islands and be safe from the Aperol Spritzers.
Although I'm not hugely interested, isn't it the case that Oasis and/or Ticketmaster are simply guilty of egregious greed, and nothing else much matters? Maybe I'm daft, but I don't understand why 'dynamic pricing' is anything other than a red herring for shows which were bound to be hugely over-subscribed. It's not as if you can choose which songs to attend for.
'Could' and 'may' are the important words here. Of course they can be sued, anyone can sue or be sued. The issue is who would win.
It would be scandalous if Oasis etc lost. They were selling tickets way below the price they could have got if they started high and went down if any were left unsold at £5,000 (or whatever) a go.
It's not Oasis being sued here, it's ticketmaster - and high time too. It'd be in everyone's interests if the courts came down on them like a tonne of bricks.
The whole thing is wonderfully British.
We're basically having an argument about queueing.
it's not though.
If you were in the queue at a bar and the person in front of you was charged less than you for the same pint you would be understandably upset
Exactly.
The events industry has come up with a solution to queueing in the context of a mismatch between supply/demand by using price as a dynamic variable - and the great British public ain't happy.
It's not clear to me what the variable should be to dictate who misses out on getting tickets.
Some people are going to miss out. Who should it be?
(I'm not defending Ticketmaster btw, I'm just pointing out there is no perfect solution to what is essentially a queueing problem)
Still no...
The answer to the queuing problem is first come, first served. Everybody pays the same price, and when they run out that's it
Ticketmaster have rationed access to the option to buy tickets by queue, and then rationed ability to purchase by price
So your problem isn't the absolute price you pay for your ticket, but the price relative to other people?
Would you be happier if you (and everyone) pays £300, or you pay £200 and everyone else pays £100?
Pricing behaviour is increasingly complex. I recently bought some shirts from a medium to high end high street gents' clothing store whose sticker price was £75 but which, with various multi buy and other promotions applied, cost me £26 each. If I had known they were also paying £5 for each old shirt I could have got them for £21. This kind of thing makes the job of the ONS very difficult.
I must tell that to my bro-in-law. He, seemingly, can go past a menswear shop without buying a shirt, most of which he never wears. Personally, I don't understand it. What's more, having been brought up over a pharmacy and later run one for several years I have no desire to go into a shop again.
My strategy with this particular shop is to not buy anything from them until they've sent me a discount card offering at least 25% off, which they do eventually if you spurn them for long enough. If you also buy in bulk then you get further discounts and that facilitates you ignoring them for a couple of years afterwards. Their profit margin on people who buy at sticker price must be off the scale as presumably they are not selling to me at a loss.
Well, there's the difference between whether they're making a profit on the marginal sale of an individual shirt (not including fixed overhead costs), and whether they're making a profit overall.
I expect that, if they only sold at the discount price, they might not make enough to cover their overheads, but they're not losing money by selling to you.
Yes I think that's right. I'm paying for the shirts and the sticker price guys are paying for the shop and the ads budget. Similar to business class seats on a plane. I feel suitably smug, anyway.
In random gaming news I think @Casino_Royale is right and we've passed peak woke. Sony unceremoniously shut down a $200m budget game yesterday because it was so poorly received by players due to poor design choices with the characters in the game and that all of the characters (including robots) had pronouns in their profiles.
I've heard from my old colleagues that management are furious and all games are being put into a review process to dump all of the shite that people are rejecting. You can't lose a big company $200m to push an agenda no one wants and escape consequences.
Very quietly companies are realising that customers have begun to vote with their wallets. Movies that push the woke agenda are failing, games that do it are failing and after the backlash against Bud Light consumer products companies are rowing it all back. Consumers had enough of being force fed an agenda with everything they watch, play or buy and have adjusted their purchasing habits accordingly, it's taken a few years to get there but we're now at the point where companies can't shove a bunch of nonsense into the products and expect people to just live with it.
This is silly. Concord didn’t fail because you could choose the pronouns of your character. It failed because a) it’s a bit shit, b) it tried to charge £40 when the competition is free to play & making their £zillions on charging for hats.
Sony management are 100% to blame for thinking that they could launch a £40 MOBA in a world where Overwatch and Valorant already exist, have captured the available player base and are free to play.
Here's the full list of internal blame from an ex-colleague:
1 - competing with overwatch was a stupid idea 2 - the cringy guardians of the galaxy setting was 5 years out of date 3 - the character designs were extremely ugly and in live service games it matters a lot for advertising and cosplaying etc... 4 - releasing at £40/$40 against established f2p games in the genre was suicidal
On top of all that, the actual gameplay apparently reached the dizzying heights of “it’s OK I guess” according to Steam reviews.
No-where to be found in that list is “wokeness” or “pronouns”. If it had been good & FtP then people would have given it a fair shake, pronouns or no pronouns & it might have had a chance to carve out an audience & earn some money via microtransactions as seems to be the way of the modern MOBA. As it was, it was doomed from the start.
In random gaming news I think @Casino_Royale is right and we've passed peak woke. Sony unceremoniously shut down a $200m budget game yesterday because it was so poorly received by players due to poor design choices with the characters in the game and that all of the characters (including robots) had pronouns in their profiles.
I've heard from my old colleagues that management are furious and all games are being put into a review process to dump all of the shite that people are rejecting. You can't lose a big company $200m to push an agenda no one wants and escape consequences.
Very quietly companies are realising that customers have begun to vote with their wallets. Movies that push the woke agenda are failing, games that do it are failing and after the backlash against Bud Light consumer products companies are rowing it all back. Consumers had enough of being force fed an agenda with everything they watch, play or buy and have adjusted their purchasing habits accordingly, it's taken a few years to get there but we're now at the point where companies can't shove a bunch of nonsense into the products and expect people to just live with it.
This is silly. Concord didn’t fail because you could choose the pronouns of your character. It failed because a) it’s a bit shit, b) it tried to charge £40 when the competition is free to play & making their £zillions on charging for hats.
Sony management are 100% to blame for thinking that they could launch a £40 MOBA in a world where Overwatch and Valorant already exist, have captured the available player base and are free to play.
Barbie was a success despite being very woke, because it was a good movie.
It's almost like people like to watch/play things that are good, and are quite sophisticated at just ignoring the bullshit from culture and woke warriors.
Barbie was a success because the brand is legendary. It really wasn't a good movie, it may have been about as good as a movie about a toy doll coming to life can be, but that doesn't make it good.
A verbatim transcript from Trump's latest speech in Michigan. I think it starts with a criticism of Harris, hard to tell, but then?
"She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s — and I own a big building there — it’s no — I shouldn’t talk about this but that’s OK I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world — sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson they say was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?"
What the hell is he talking about?
it’s gibberish, clearly, but is it any worse than his usual drivel?
He’s always done this stream of consciousness shtick, and sometimes he will suddenly be funny and sharp in the middle of it. Quite odd
However he is 78 and a bit panicked and he recently nearly died of a bullet to the head, so some cognitive decline might be expected
There was a different Leon who used to post on here a few months ago. He would go all in on dementia at the merest sign of gibberish from an elderly US politician.
Biden was very clearly demented two years ago. Which I noted and others scoffed - and here we are, he’s had to bow out because I was right
I am now noting signs of decline in Trump, even tho he has always talked bollocks. The bollocks has got worse and more chaotic, and he now has this desperate frightened look about him. He’s not got it in him, any more
tbf Biden did mention the fearless expose by Leon as a big factor in him quitting the race.
So who did fearless far-sighted Leon have down as Dem nominee in Andy’s 2024 prediction competition, then?
In random gaming news I think @Casino_Royale is right and we've passed peak woke. Sony unceremoniously shut down a $200m budget game yesterday because it was so poorly received by players due to poor design choices with the characters in the game and that all of the characters (including robots) had pronouns in their profiles.
I've heard from my old colleagues that management are furious and all games are being put into a review process to dump all of the shite that people are rejecting. You can't lose a big company $200m to push an agenda no one wants and escape consequences.
Very quietly companies are realising that customers have begun to vote with their wallets. Movies that push the woke agenda are failing, games that do it are failing and after the backlash against Bud Light consumer products companies are rowing it all back. Consumers had enough of being force fed an agenda with everything they watch, play or buy and have adjusted their purchasing habits accordingly, it's taken a few years to get there but we're now at the point where companies can't shove a bunch of nonsense into the products and expect people to just live with it.
This is silly. Concord didn’t fail because you could choose the pronouns of your character. It failed because a) it’s a bit shit, b) it tried to charge £40 when the competition is free to play & making their £zillions on charging for hats.
Sony management are 100% to blame for thinking that they could launch a £40 MOBA in a world where Overwatch and Valorant already exist, have captured the available player base and are free to play.
Here's the full list of internal blame from an ex-colleague:
1 - competing with overwatch was a stupid idea 2 - the cringy guardians of the galaxy setting was 5 years out of date 3 - the character designs were extremely ugly and in live service games it matters a lot for advertising and cosplaying etc... 4 - releasing at £40/$40 against established f2p games in the genre was suicidal
On top of all that, the actual gameplay apparently reached the dizzying heights of “it’s OK I guess” according to Steam reviews.
No-where to be found in that list is “wokeness” or “pronouns”. If it had been good & FtP then people would have given it a fair shake, pronouns or no pronouns & it might have had a chance to carve out an audience & earn some money via microtransactions as seems to be the way of the modern MOBA. As it was, it was doomed from the start.
We conclude that the fire at Grenfell Tower was the culmination of decades of failure by central government and other bodies in positions of responsibility in the construction industry to look carefully into the danger of incorporating combustible materials into the external walls of high-rise residential buildings and to act on the information available to them.
Are we at or passing peak Elmu? He can intimidate and oppress mortals with his wealth, social media reach and phalanx of clone lab grown lawyers but if he takes on the Republic of Brazil and/or the EU then he's going to come off second best.
He does seem to have abandoned any pretense that buying Twitter was a sound business move and fully embraced it as a personal propaganda machine
His argument now is that $44bn was “not the price of Twitter but the price of free speech”. Its quite a good line
I agree he does say some mad stuff on there. At the same time he also allows some pretty wild abuse of himself - which I find surprising for a guy with a thin skin
In the round I think Free Speech TwiX is a good thing, not least because it has revealed just how biased to the left Twitter was before. I do not expect PB to agree with this
It's not free speech though.
Posts which call Republicans "wingnuts" are deleted for violating the terms of service on abusive speech.
Posts which call for violence against refugees or brown people are just fine and aren't taken down.
It's selective speech. I find it rather telling that you're more comfortable with the current balance of the bias than the previous iteration.
Well yeah. I’m on the right
I find it rather telling that you’re more comfortable with the earlier left wing yawn blah fucksake you pompous tiny dicked wanker-of-maggots
But it isn't really free speech, is it? It's going from one flavor of not free to another.
It's the hypocrisy that grates with me.
Just on the pragmatics of this it's better that the right is silenced rather than the left because it's the right who tend to say deeply reprehensible things that make decent people shudder.
You’re saying this to provoke (and I approve of that, at least it adds spice) but the thing is: you actually believe this, too. You genuinely think a lot of right wing opinion should simply be silenced
I don't mind people arguing for a small state and saying things like "there's no such thing as a free lunch" (although it's irritating), it's all this other stuff, demonising muslims and migrants and refugees, deep misogyny, white supremacy dog-whistling, promotion of lies and conspiracy theories in the face of science and reason, we really could do without most of that. It's pollution. And the people adding to, fostering and enabling it are not in my view "free speech advocates" they're polluters. They're polluting the town square and making it hard to breath. That's my mental image of it.
So, you’re still a wanker. Also, quite dumb. You’d have censored the lab leak hypothesis and in your world we’d all be going round worrying about fucking bats in soup instead of properly worrying about the safety of biological research laboratories
You are literally too stupid to see the danger of your own stupidity
He's a remarkably limited individual.
A retired accountant who thinks going to Bruges is daring
His horizons are some of the narrowest I’ve ever encountered. Like meeting someone who can only see nine inches in front of his face - and has no curiosity as to what lies ten inches further on, especially if it might upset him
Not sure if you're insulting accountants (retired or not) or 5,000 Scottish football fans.
In random gaming news I think @Casino_Royale is right and we've passed peak woke. Sony unceremoniously shut down a $200m budget game yesterday because it was so poorly received by players due to poor design choices with the characters in the game and that all of the characters (including robots) had pronouns in their profiles.
I've heard from my old colleagues that management are furious and all games are being put into a review process to dump all of the shite that people are rejecting. You can't lose a big company $200m to push an agenda no one wants and escape consequences.
Very quietly companies are realising that customers have begun to vote with their wallets. Movies that push the woke agenda are failing, games that do it are failing and after the backlash against Bud Light consumer products companies are rowing it all back. Consumers had enough of being force fed an agenda with everything they watch, play or buy and have adjusted their purchasing habits accordingly, it's taken a few years to get there but we're now at the point where companies can't shove a bunch of nonsense into the products and expect people to just live with it.
This is silly. Concord didn’t fail because you could choose the pronouns of your character. It failed because a) it’s a bit shit, b) it tried to charge £40 when the competition is free to play & making their £zillions on charging for hats.
Sony management are 100% to blame for thinking that they could launch a £40 MOBA in a world where Overwatch and Valorant already exist, have captured the available player base and are free to play.
Barbie was a success despite being very woke, because it was a good movie.
It's almost like people like to watch/play things that are good, and are quite sophisticated at just ignoring the bullshit from culture and woke warriors.
Barbie was a success because the brand is legendary. It really wasn't a good movie, it may have been about as good as a movie about a toy doll coming to life can be, but that doesn't make it good.
Billion $ brands have made shit movies that have utterly failed at the box office. The Barbie movie was perfectly fine & had some great moments.
If you want to talk about a really good toy/product movie, then I think the Lego movie wins that battle hands-down though.
Are we at or passing peak Elmu? He can intimidate and oppress mortals with his wealth, social media reach and phalanx of clone lab grown lawyers but if he takes on the Republic of Brazil and/or the EU then he's going to come off second best.
He does seem to have abandoned any pretense that buying Twitter was a sound business move and fully embraced it as a personal propaganda machine
His argument now is that $44bn was “not the price of Twitter but the price of free speech”. Its quite a good line
I agree he does say some mad stuff on there. At the same time he also allows some pretty wild abuse of himself - which I find surprising for a guy with a thin skin
In the round I think Free Speech TwiX is a good thing, not least because it has revealed just how biased to the left Twitter was before. I do not expect PB to agree with this
It's not free speech though.
Posts which call Republicans "wingnuts" are deleted for violating the terms of service on abusive speech.
Posts which call for violence against refugees or brown people are just fine and aren't taken down.
It's selective speech. I find it rather telling that you're more comfortable with the current balance of the bias than the previous iteration.
Well yeah. I’m on the right
I find it rather telling that you’re more comfortable with the earlier left wing yawn blah fucksake you pompous tiny dicked wanker-of-maggots
But it isn't really free speech, is it? It's going from one flavor of not free to another.
It's the hypocrisy that grates with me.
Just on the pragmatics of this it's better that the right is silenced rather than the left because it's the right who tend to say deeply reprehensible things that make decent people shudder.
You’re saying this to provoke (and I approve of that, at least it adds spice) but the thing is: you actually believe this, too. You genuinely think a lot of right wing opinion should simply be silenced
I don't mind people arguing for a small state and saying things like "there's no such thing as a free lunch" (although it's irritating), it's all this other stuff, demonising muslims and migrants and refugees, deep misogyny, white supremacy dog-whistling, promotion of lies and conspiracy theories in the face of science and reason, we really could do without most of that. It's pollution. And the people adding to, fostering and enabling it are not in my view "free speech advocates" they're polluters. They're polluting the town square and making it hard to breath. That's my mental image of it.
So, you’re still a wanker. Also, quite dumb. You’d have censored the lab leak hypothesis and in your world we’d all be going round worrying about fucking bats in soup instead of properly worrying about the safety of biological research laboratories
You are literally too stupid to see the danger of your own stupidity
It feels like a whole lifetime has gone by and you and Casino are still posting the same stuff If you've been to interesting places and done interesting things why are you posting on a loop?
More importantly both being offensive while posting. Both doing character assassinations of people they have never met and jumping to conclusions about them and usually to people who are very polite on the forum. @kinabalu today and yesterday, @LostPassword I think it was earlier. These are decent posters who don't deserve abuse and don't give it out. I don't get why people have to get so angry and offensive.
'Could' and 'may' are the important words here. Of course they can be sued, anyone can sue or be sued. The issue is who would win.
It would be scandalous if Oasis etc lost. They were selling tickets way below the price they could have got if they started high and went down if any were left unsold at £5,000 (or whatever) a go.
It's not Oasis being sued here, it's ticketmaster - and high time too. It'd be in everyone's interests if the courts came down on them like a tonne of bricks.
The whole thing is wonderfully British.
We're basically having an argument about queueing.
it's not though.
If you were in the queue at a bar and the person in front of you was charged less than you for the same pint you would be understandably upset
Exactly.
The events industry has come up with a solution to queueing in the context of a mismatch between supply/demand by using price as a dynamic variable - and the great British public ain't happy.
It's not clear to me what the variable should be to dictate who misses out on getting tickets.
Some people are going to miss out. Who should it be?
(I'm not defending Ticketmaster btw, I'm just pointing out there is no perfect solution to what is essentially a queueing problem)
Still no...
The answer to the queuing problem is first come, first served. Everybody pays the same price, and when they run out that's it
Ticketmaster have rationed access to the option to buy tickets by queue, and then rationed ability to purchase by price
So your problem isn't the absolute price you pay for your ticket, but the price relative to other people?
Would you be happier if you (and everyone) pays £300, or you pay £200 and everyone else pays £100?
Pricing behaviour is increasingly complex. I recently bought some shirts from a medium to high end high street gents' clothing store whose sticker price was £75 but which, with various multi buy and other promotions applied, cost me £26 each. If I had known they were also paying £5 for each old shirt I could have got them for £21. This kind of thing makes the job of the ONS very difficult.
I must tell that to my bro-in-law. He, seemingly, can go past a menswear shop without buying a shirt, most of which he never wears. Personally, I don't understand it. What's more, having been brought up over a pharmacy and later run one for several years I have no desire to go into a shop again.
My strategy with this particular shop is to not buy anything from them until they've sent me a discount card offering at least 25% off, which they do eventually if you spurn them for long enough. If you also buy in bulk then you get further discounts and that facilitates you ignoring them for a couple of years afterwards. Their profit margin on people who buy at sticker price must be off the scale as presumably they are not selling to me at a loss.
Well, there's the difference between whether they're making a profit on the marginal sale of an individual shirt (not including fixed overhead costs), and whether they're making a profit overall.
I expect that, if they only sold at the discount price, they might not make enough to cover their overheads, but they're not losing money by selling to you.
Yes I think that's right. I'm paying for the shirts and the sticker price guys are paying for the shop and the ads budget. Similar to business class seats on a plane. I feel suitably smug, anyway.
Are we at or passing peak Elmu? He can intimidate and oppress mortals with his wealth, social media reach and phalanx of clone lab grown lawyers but if he takes on the Republic of Brazil and/or the EU then he's going to come off second best.
He does seem to have abandoned any pretense that buying Twitter was a sound business move and fully embraced it as a personal propaganda machine
His argument now is that $44bn was “not the price of Twitter but the price of free speech”. Its quite a good line
I agree he does say some mad stuff on there. At the same time he also allows some pretty wild abuse of himself - which I find surprising for a guy with a thin skin
In the round I think Free Speech TwiX is a good thing, not least because it has revealed just how biased to the left Twitter was before. I do not expect PB to agree with this
It's not free speech though.
Posts which call Republicans "wingnuts" are deleted for violating the terms of service on abusive speech.
Posts which call for violence against refugees or brown people are just fine and aren't taken down.
It's selective speech. I find it rather telling that you're more comfortable with the current balance of the bias than the previous iteration.
Well yeah. I’m on the right
I find it rather telling that you’re more comfortable with the earlier left wing yawn blah fucksake you pompous tiny dicked wanker-of-maggots
But it isn't really free speech, is it? It's going from one flavor of not free to another.
It's the hypocrisy that grates with me.
Just on the pragmatics of this it's better that the right is silenced rather than the left because it's the right who tend to say deeply reprehensible things that make decent people shudder.
You’re saying this to provoke (and I approve of that, at least it adds spice) but the thing is: you actually believe this, too. You genuinely think a lot of right wing opinion should simply be silenced
I don't mind people arguing for a small state and saying things like "there's no such thing as a free lunch" (although it's irritating), it's all this other stuff, demonising muslims and migrants and refugees, deep misogyny, white supremacy dog-whistling, promotion of lies and conspiracy theories in the face of science and reason, we really could do without most of that. It's pollution. And the people adding to, fostering and enabling it are not in my view "free speech advocates" they're polluters. They're polluting the town square and making it hard to breath. That's my mental image of it.
So, you’re still a wanker. Also, quite dumb. You’d have censored the lab leak hypothesis and in your world we’d all be going round worrying about fucking bats in soup instead of properly worrying about the safety of biological research laboratories
You are literally too stupid to see the danger of your own stupidity
It feels like a whole lifetime has gone by and you and Casino are still posting the same stuff If you've been to interesting places and done interesting things why are you posting on a loop?
More importantly both being offensive while posting. Both doing character assassinations of people they have never met and jumping to conclusions about them and usually to people who are very polite on the forum. @kinabalu today and yesterday, @LostPassword I think it was earlier. These are decent posters who don't deserve abuse and don't give it out. I don't get why people have to get so angry and offensive.
Probably because they're bored and they don't see why others should be having a good time
@ydoethur, I'm listening to a 10-minute lecture by Loki Dunn on "School Inspections in England: a large language analysis of trends in OFSTED reports" in rapid-fire session 3 of the RSS Conference. You might like it.
How long till Blur re-form just do they can play a series of gigs at £20 a ticket?
Gorillaz Marketing?
Many yonks ago, an old friend of mine was into 2000AD. I found it a bit meh, but there was one serialised story that really got to me: Hewligan's Haircut.
V good first round for Jenrick, good for Cleverly, Stride outperforming expectations I think.
Slightly poor for Tugendhat maybe and not great for Badenoch.
Right pool (Jenrick, Patel, Badenoch) 64 votes Centre pool 54.
Betting reaction - Jen and Bad tight at the top, Clev treading water, Tug out with the washing. Stride is massive at 60 if we think he can squeak past Tug next time.
Are we at or passing peak Elmu? He can intimidate and oppress mortals with his wealth, social media reach and phalanx of clone lab grown lawyers but if he takes on the Republic of Brazil and/or the EU then he's going to come off second best.
He does seem to have abandoned any pretense that buying Twitter was a sound business move and fully embraced it as a personal propaganda machine
His argument now is that $44bn was “not the price of Twitter but the price of free speech”. Its quite a good line
I agree he does say some mad stuff on there. At the same time he also allows some pretty wild abuse of himself - which I find surprising for a guy with a thin skin
In the round I think Free Speech TwiX is a good thing, not least because it has revealed just how biased to the left Twitter was before. I do not expect PB to agree with this
It's not free speech though.
Posts which call Republicans "wingnuts" are deleted for violating the terms of service on abusive speech.
Posts which call for violence against refugees or brown people are just fine and aren't taken down.
It's selective speech. I find it rather telling that you're more comfortable with the current balance of the bias than the previous iteration.
Well yeah. I’m on the right
I find it rather telling that you’re more comfortable with the earlier left wing yawn blah fucksake you pompous tiny dicked wanker-of-maggots
But it isn't really free speech, is it? It's going from one flavor of not free to another.
It's the hypocrisy that grates with me.
Just on the pragmatics of this it's better that the right is silenced rather than the left because it's the right who tend to say deeply reprehensible things that make decent people shudder.
You’re saying this to provoke (and I approve of that, at least it adds spice) but the thing is: you actually believe this, too. You genuinely think a lot of right wing opinion should simply be silenced
I don't mind people arguing for a small state and saying things like "there's no such thing as a free lunch" (although it's irritating), it's all this other stuff, demonising muslims and migrants and refugees, deep misogyny, white supremacy dog-whistling, promotion of lies and conspiracy theories in the face of science and reason, we really could do without most of that. It's pollution. And the people adding to, fostering and enabling it are not in my view "free speech advocates" they're polluters. They're polluting the town square and making it hard to breath. That's my mental image of it.
So, you’re still a wanker. Also, quite dumb. You’d have censored the lab leak hypothesis and in your world we’d all be going round worrying about fucking bats in soup instead of properly worrying about the safety of biological research laboratories
You are literally too stupid to see the danger of your own stupidity
It feels like a whole lifetime has gone by and you and Casino are still posting the same stuff If you've been to interesting places and done interesting things why are you posting on a loop?
More importantly both being offensive while posting. Both doing character assassinations of people they have never met and jumping to conclusions about them and usually to people who are very polite on the forum. @kinabalu today and yesterday, @LostPassword I think it was earlier. These are decent posters who don't deserve abuse and don't give it out. I don't get why people have to get so angry and offensive.
I have posted in anger a few times on here, so it's not fair to say I don't give it out occasionally.
Badenoch is backed by Gove and was introduced by Francis Maude at her launch and also allegedly by Dougie Smith if you believe Nadine Dorries in her book who was also behind Sunak and part of Portillo's old team which switched to Cameron and Osborne.
The winter fuel story might hit her a bit with members, if she fails to make the top two with Tory MPs today it will have hit her with them too
Badenoch will, I fear, be a weak leader. She’s basically Davos woman but with an anti-woke agenda
I like her but she is insubstantial and globalist, she is also too young. Perhaps with another decade she will be more interesting
Out of a poor selection, probably Jenrick is the best, but I’m not overly hopeful
Meanwhile Reform is mainly gammons and Farage is the only star, and he’s over 60
It’s a damn shame as this Labour govt is risibly poor, already, and a good right wing opposition could mince them
What about Cleverly? My other half who doesnt take much interest in politics (though a party member) likes him, she says he has a kind face.
He’s OK but he’s very *continuity Sunak* and he’s rich and complacent
The Tories need someone with FIRE. someone that hates the Left and the Wokeness, but also exudes charm and plausibility. There are such people elsewhere in the world, Britain seems unusually bereft. I imagine one will emerge in time, but it may be too late by then
Nigel?....I'll get my coat...
Nigel isn't the only star in Reform - Zia Yusuf is a big name to watch.
He recently demolished the token lefty 'Former Labour advisor' on GBNews regarding the riots and it was brutal. I felt very sorry for her - the presenter didn't help her either, but she had come on half-baked and didn't get away with it. She still got her appearance fee so that's nice.
@rcs1000, oh publisher of fine articles, I'm in a lecture given by Dr Erica Thompson. She's speaking on her book "Escape From Model Land". Given your data background it strikes me as the kind of book you'd like: one for your Xmas list perhaps.
Comments
"Lab lab lab, leak leak leak, lab lab lab, leak leak leak ..."
Is the dial stuck again?
https://visitfaroeislands.com/en/about1/history-governance-economy/economy
Maybe I'm daft, but I don't understand why 'dynamic pricing' is anything other than a red herring for shows which were bound to be hugely over-subscribed. It's not as if you can choose which songs to attend for.
No-where to be found in that list is “wokeness” or “pronouns”. If it had been good & FtP then people would have given it a fair shake, pronouns or no pronouns & it might have had a chance to carve out an audience & earn some money via microtransactions as seems to be the way of the modern MOBA. As it was, it was doomed from the start.
(You can take a look at the Steam reviews from “actual gamers™” here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2443720/reviews/ )
Jenrick 28
Badenoch 22
Cleverly 21
Tugendhat 17
Stride 16
Patel 14
If you want to talk about a really good toy/product movie, then I think the Lego movie wins that battle hands-down though.
Anyone’s game, but it feels like if the right coalesces around Jenrick then it will be him and possibly Cleverly in the final 2.
NEW THREAD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewligan's_Haircut
The artist in that was Jamie Hewlett, and I was amused when his name popped up again in the Gorillaz.
(Mrs J got me Hewligan's Haircut in book form as a birthday present. I still love it, but can't quite explain why...)
Slightly poor for Tugendhat maybe and not great for Badenoch.
Right pool (Jenrick, Patel, Badenoch) 64 votes
Centre pool 54.
He recently demolished the token lefty 'Former Labour advisor' on GBNews regarding the riots and it was brutal. I felt very sorry for her - the presenter didn't help her either, but she had come on half-baked and didn't get away with it. She still got her appearance fee so that's nice.
https://youtu.be/lrh1KcM2QWo?si=sgqRQZ_QccXecKyw
@Leon