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You’ve never had it so good – politicalbetting.com

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  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 50,169
    DavidL said:

    I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.

    I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.

    But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.

    I think Sandpit is troubled by his extreme cognitive dissonance. He loves the MAGA agenda, but they despise Ukraine and it's government. It's obviously uncomfortable, no matter how he tries to contort the two into something approaching coherence. Betrayal isn't easy to accept even when it was advertised well in advance.

    It reminds me of the Northern Soul standard "The Snake"

    "I saved you, " cried that woman
    "And you've bitten me, even why?
    And you know your bite is poisonous and now I'm gonna die"
    "Oh, shut up, silly woman, " said that reptile with a grin
    "Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in"

    https://youtu.be/fHIcVuqQgVo?feature=shared

  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 8,955

    I see Kiev was once the capital of Russia

    Putin has compromised by not requiring its return!

    Perhaps it was the threat of SKS boots

    Correction: Muscovy was a colony founded by Kyivian Rus.

    Kyiv was never the capital of Russia.
  • kamski said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    Must be terrible if you actually drive one of those nazimobiles these days.
    The thinking person's term is "Swasticar"

    I do confess to having offered a mild excuse to a party colleague on Saturday when they saw I drove a Tesla. I find Musk's politics to be embarrassingly absurd. And when I say embarrassed I mean for him - he's making an absolute tit of himself.

    But that doesn't impact onto his companies. I love my Tesla. Starlink has transformed my ability to do business. And I'm agog every time SpaceX smash another impossible mission goal. I think the hand-wringer types think that I should sell the Tesla and bin Starlink with the £££ and business costs being a suitable price for their morality. No thanks.

    And as its confessional time I love Michael Jackson music, think Kevin Spacey is a brilliant actor and enjoy Harry Potter. I know, I know...
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 38,066

    https://x.com/warmonitor3/status/1892195241387594127

    I don't think this war ends this year judging by how it's going and the massive arms shipments domestically and internationally being sent to either side.

    It would depend whether the USA enters the war on Russia’s side.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 19,103

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 21,914
    edited February 19
    Sandpit flouncd because his weird balancing act between Ukranian sympathy on one hand, and Trumpian rabbit holer on the other was becoming impossible to maintain.

    The “attacks” on him merely sought to explain the incoherency in his position.

    Our resident Putinistas may end up going the same way.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 23,434

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 61,861

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/19/the-rise-of-the-cane-corso-should-this-popular-status-dog-be-banned-in-the-uk

    Ban all dogs, except for working dogs.

    At the very least, require all dog owners to have a license, pass a competency test, complete compulsory training and have insurance.

    Those dogs sound horrible.

    Why should we have to put up with 6,000 attacks on people a year?
  • nico67nico67 Posts: 4,599
    edited February 19

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    Zelenskyy said he wouldn’t release the document as it could affect US relations .

    I expect European leaders have seen it and behind the scenes the horror must grow day by day.

    I feel sorry for Starmer having to go to Washington and pretend that the US administration is still an ally .
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 61,861
    viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    Tesla is a difficult one for the culture wars.

    5 years ago it would have marked you out as a progressive and, now, it's a proto-Nazi.

    Both quite ridiculous, of course.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,825
    Eabhal said:

    Nothing to do with age - Boomers have had it good cradle to grave.
    Get out and work hard like boomers did instead of whining and begging to steal their hard earned cash. Young now are a bunch of greedy losers.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 21,914
    Foxy said:

    DavidL said:

    I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.

    I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.

    But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.

    I think Sandpit is troubled by his extreme cognitive dissonance. He loves the MAGA agenda, but they despise Ukraine and it's government. It's obviously uncomfortable, no matter how he tries to contort the two into something approaching coherence. Betrayal isn't easy to accept even when it was advertised well in advance.

    It reminds me of the Northern Soul standard "The Snake"

    "I saved you, " cried that woman
    "And you've bitten me, even why?
    And you know your bite is poisonous and now I'm gonna die"
    "Oh, shut up, silly woman, " said that reptile with a grin
    "Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in"

    https://youtu.be/fHIcVuqQgVo?feature=shared

    One of Trump’s geniuses is that he adopted that song in his rallies. It always fascinates me how often regimes semiotically flag their ill intent.

    Like the adoption of the Totenkopf on SS uniform.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 44,398
    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    Aren't you talking about the huge circular roller or bearing races which support the rotating mass of the turret? Those were usual in 20th century big gun turrets.

    Mind, Victoria might however have had a centre pivot support on the mount. One would need to check.
  • Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
  • WinchyWinchy Posts: 110
    edited February 19
    kamski said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    Must be terrible if you actually drive one of those nazimobiles these days.
    Tesla will soon go the way of Woolworths.
    Cf. how Liberace, who would have personified the Tesla brand, nowadays has few fans.
    Cf. also the image in Britain etc. of Zelensky and Ukraine generally.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,825
    More like constantly G. Recent generations want everything for nothing, they don't have the principles and work ethics that we have.
  • nico67nico67 Posts: 4,599

    Sandpit flouncd because his weird balancing act between Ukranian sympathy on one hand, and Trumpian rabbit holer on the other was becoming impossible to maintain.

    The “attacks” on him merely sought to explain the incoherency in his position.

    Our resident Putinistas may end up going the same way.

    It will be a bit like those Trump supporters who are on Medicaid and have to work out how they can still support the Dear Leader whilst he throws them under a bus .

  • viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    It isn't his company though. He is the CEO and figurehead, he doesn't own it. Shareholders could vote him away if they wanted to and the board absolutely could fire him.
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,901

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Have been checking in on the NYT recently and surprised how relatively unmoved they are, a few opinion pieces about how Europe are feeling etc but not the absolute explosion of apoplexy I expected.

    The UK media was infinitely more excitable about Brexit which just really damaged us compared to the US potentially damaging the whole world.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 125,613
    edited February 19

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    That depends, if big landowning US farms see more US consumers buying their produce and food due to tariffs making imports more expensive that would be a net benefit for them. The average farmer in the Plains states or the Midwest and deep South won't export much abroad and most of their workers will be US born.

    Though that would also reduce choice and increase prices for US consumers.

    Indeed Starmer's family farms tax is probably more damaging to UK family farms than Trump's tariffs are to US family owned farms or agricorps
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 29,793
    Eabhal said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Stereodog said:

    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
    Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
    @Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war

    You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?

    This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights

    If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.

    But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
    Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
    It's proven quite a durable and evocative pejorative so there must be something in it. It fairly accurately bespeaks a certain stripe of hideously white middle class Englishman who never strays too far from the Monty Python - Pratchett - Blackadder axis of cultural references and listens to fucking podcasts.
    Oh it's definitely a thing. Add a bit of cycling, IPAs, flat whites. A guilty love of old Top Gear.

    The problem is that the Millennial centrist dad is about to become the most important part of the electorate.
    Centrist Dads are moving from being the holders of the keys to power to a general all-purpose anachronistic embarrassment, with Keir Starmer as their patron saint and lodestar.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 43,825

    Dura_Ace said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1892175665212145977

    NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine

    “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.

    Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.

    Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.

    Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.

    In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.

    Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?

    The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”


    Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.

    Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
    I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?

    Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
    Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
    The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine
    That's literally what they tried to do (checks notes) less than 3 years ago.
    They would struggle to beat a carpet
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 44,398
    Carnyx said:

    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    Aren't you talking about the huge circular roller or bearing races which support the rotating mass of the turret? Those were usual in 20th century big gun turrets.

    Mind, Victoria might however have had a centre pivot support on the mount. One would need to check.
    PS See here. On top of the inner cylindrical structure,

    https://maritime.org/doc/cagun/part1.php
  • eekeek Posts: 29,138

    viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    Tesla is a difficult one for the culture wars.

    5 years ago it would have marked you out as a progressive and, now, it's a proto-Nazi.

    Both quite ridiculous, of course.
    My problem with Tesla is that they are cars for a different world than Europe - where are cars are smaller and have door handles that open and close the door.

    Then again my preferred car for the last 15 years has been BMW Minis so I’m as biased just in a different way
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 53,569
    Foxy said:

    DavidL said:

    I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.

    I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.

    But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.

    I think Sandpit is troubled by his extreme cognitive dissonance. He loves the MAGA agenda, but they despise Ukraine and it's government. It's obviously uncomfortable, no matter how he tries to contort the two into something approaching coherence. Betrayal isn't easy to accept even when it was advertised well in advance.

    It reminds me of the Northern Soul standard "The Snake"

    "I saved you, " cried that woman
    "And you've bitten me, even why?
    And you know your bite is poisonous and now I'm gonna die"
    "Oh, shut up, silly woman, " said that reptile with a grin
    "Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in"

    https://youtu.be/fHIcVuqQgVo?feature=shared

    As quoted by Trump: he knows what he is.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSrOXvoNLwg
  • eekeek Posts: 29,138

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    The issue a lot of Farmers likely have is that even though they heard the plan they probably thought it didn’t impact them directly - only to discover that it did
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 53,569
    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    I am loving this sub-thread!
  • numbertwelvenumbertwelve Posts: 7,135
    boulay said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Have been checking in on the NYT recently and surprised how relatively unmoved they are, a few opinion pieces about how Europe are feeling etc but not the absolute explosion of apoplexy I expected.

    The UK media was infinitely more excitable about Brexit which just really damaged us compared to the US potentially damaging the whole world.
    The mood in the US seems to be one of shocked acceptance now.
  • WinchyWinchy Posts: 110
    edited February 19
    Carnyx said:

    Winchy said:

    Carnyx said:

    eek said:

    It is self evident that the Business Secretary has committed a criminal offence by describing himself as a "Solicitor" when non-articled trainee clerk would have been the correct designation. That is straight forward.

    However, as a member of the legal profession surely there is also a duty on Starmer to ensure those who work with him are properly described, in the same way as a doctor has a duty to report fellow "doctors" if it transpires they might not have elementary competence. Particularly now it has come to light is Starmer not in real jepardy if he does not remove the whip from Reynolds with all convenient haste ?

    FPT

    In true PB tradition this isn’t technically correct. A trainee solicitor can legitimately call themselves a “trainee solicitor”. I don’t know what this chap referred to himself as but “an articled clerk” hasn’t been a thing in England and Wales for over 30 years.

    Section 21 of the Solicitors Act 1974 states:

    “Any unqualified person who wilfully pretends to be, or takes or uses any name, title, addition or description implying that he is, qualified or recognised by law as qualified to act as a solicitor shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding the fourth
    level on the standard scale.”

    He told the Commons that he worked as a solicitor in Manchester before changing career.

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/labour-jonathan-reynolds-cv-business-secretary-b1211954.html

    Apparently there are also misleading linked in snaps on Guido but I haven’t checked that website.
    Surely the offence is to practise as a solicitor when you are not qualified to be one, not to leave out the word "trainee" on a CV for a non-legal job.

    It would be interesting to get a
    representative sample of CVs from a range of senior people and see how many have been embellished in some way, I would suspect all of them.
    I assumed though but @Gallowgate ’s quote from the act suggests not.

    In my view he’s broken the law (strict liability) and the punishment should be a conditional discharge.
    I wish these lazy websites/journalists would actually quote or screenshot the website referenced rather than just “alleged” or “reported”.

    https://www.jonathanreynolds.org.uk/about-me/ This bit seems acceptable - he did accept a training contract to be a solicitor and that isn’t in contravention of any laws as far as I understand them.

    Looking at the same website on archive.org that quote hasn’t changed in 5 years.

    Unless I am missing something, or it’s a different website or part of the website, this may be fake news.
    To clarify, if the alleged issue is with the following, then he has done nothing wrong in my view.

    “In 2007 I was finally able to enrol in law school, now as a mature student, and went on to achieve my Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and Legal Practice Course (LPC) at BPP Law School in Manchester. I was delighted to be offered a training contract to become a solicitor with Addleshaw Goddard LLP in Manchester. Addleshaw was a
    fantastic place to work.”

    This is all very normal terminology within the legal industry. I guess he doesn’t make it entirely clear he didn’t complete his training contract but I doubt it is that deep. To suggest this is some sort of fraudulent “gotcha”? Talk about focusing on the big issues.
    I’ve provided a link where he says he “worked as a solicitor” at AG.

    It’s not big stuff, of course. Guido’s a muck-raker and scandal-monkey. But it is an offence with strict liability. I guess lawyers don’t like people pretending to be lawyers. Competition or something.
    Aye @Foss already provided that link. My bad for missing it.
    I’m at a loss as to the issue that pay says “ training contract to become a solicitor” which to me is very, very clear cut - your complaint appears to be if I ignore the “training contract to become” bit he’s claiming to be a solicitor
    https://x.com/exRAF_Al/status/1891906162196418637

    https://x.com/jreynoldsMP/status/29517557834

    https://x.com/jreynoldsMP/status/21877577878601729

    Linkedin, his own website - it's just weird, a fantasist that seems to have started to believe it himself.
    Angels dancing on the head of a pin. My last solicitor was a trainee (under supervision). Was she "acting as a solicitor"? Probably. Would she have described herself as a solicitor? I don't know but have just noticed I already did.

    Embarrassing perhaps but only fatal if Starmer is already looking to move Reynolds out, or unless there is a link to an actual scandal like ballsing up a contract.
    If she's doing the work of a solicitor, charging for oine, and being responsible (together with her employer) for the results, then ...

    A lot of jobs have a lengthy training period and one doesn't get full professional qualifications for several years. Often with various grades thereof. One thinks of doctors.
    Medical doctors get to call themselves that after medical school despite the fact they have considerable further training ahead of them. Foundation year doctors can only work under supervision. I am not familiar with solicitors, but this seems to be a difference. Doctors can call themselves doctors sooner than solicitors can call themselves solicitors.
    What are you referring to?

    Anybody can call themselves a doctor. Unfortunately it's not a protected term. There are many thousands of wallies who have never come anywhere near getting a doctorate [*] who call themselves "doctors". Unfortunately far from causing them to be held in contempt (or thrown in jail), their pretensions win them fawning respect among the uneducated herd.

    * A qualification that is not based on "training" but requires a person to have made a substantial contribution to knowledge.
    'Anyone' can famously include a dead cat. At least the one owned by Ben Goldacre the anti-woowoo campaigner. The ex-moggy has a PhD in the sort of nutrition one sees on the telly. Signed diploma and all.

    TBF getting a PhD does imply training on the job - that's what the supervisor and the student do - but the actual qualification does demand the contribution to knowledge. However, that's UK specific. (Some Usonian PhDs do include a course work element, effectively therefore partly a MSc (etc) by study.)
    You're putting "job" together with "training", and "contribution to knowledge" together with "qualification". Sure there is training in how to do research, if one wishes to call it such, but the qualification is for the research and its write-up, which must make a contribution to knowledge. Medics don't contribute shit to knowledge. They just get taught stuff, and presumably whatever exams they do are to test whether they've learnt it. Whereas doing a PhD mostly isn't about training for a job in anything.

    Dunno about US PhDs.
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 17,619
    edited February 19

    viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    Tesla is a difficult one for the culture wars.

    5 years ago it would have marked you out as a progressive and, now, it's a proto-Nazi.

    Both quite ridiculous, of course.
    Makes more sense as an EV brand when it's progressive rather than Nazi. And to be fair to Musk at the time he leant heavily into the idea of solving difficult environmental problems through technology.

    I get the impression Musk is a net negative on Tesla now despite his astronomical reward package.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 61,861
    eek said:

    viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    Tesla is a difficult one for the culture wars.

    5 years ago it would have marked you out as a progressive and, now, it's a proto-Nazi.

    Both quite ridiculous, of course.
    My problem with Tesla is that they are cars for a different world than Europe - where are cars are smaller and have door handles that open and close the door.

    Then again my preferred car for the last 15 years has been BMW Minis so I’m as biased just in a different way
    Thoughts and prayers for this Jaguar owner.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 44,398
    HYUFD said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    That depends, if big landowning US farms see more US consumers buying their produce and food due to tariffs making imports more expensive that would be a net benefit for them. The average farmer in the Plains states or the Midwest and deep South won't export much abroad and most of their workers will be US born.

    Though that would also reduce choice and increase prices for US consumers.

    Indeed Starmer's family farms tax is probably more damaging to UK family farms than Trump's tariffs are to US family owned farms or agricorps
    You know you are fibbing through your teeth when you try to inflict that childish name on us. We're not the people you're trying to get to vote for you in Epping.

    Call it what it is - the partial alleviation of IHT for landowners of farmland - and tell us what you would do for *ALL FARMERS* instead of simply screwing them over like the |Tories did for 14 years - for instance, the delayed farm payments scheme down to the glorious Conservative "administrationm".
  • LeonLeon Posts: 58,436
    Nigelb said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    It does, however, present the possibility of Europe (if it can get its act together) presenting Ukraine with a better deal.
    Which might benefit both them and us.
    Au contraire, we are about to see the total, total uselesness and pointlessness of the EU, the Tethered Bottle Cap Empire, to the extent even some Remoaners might squirm
  • nico67nico67 Posts: 4,599
    eek said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    The issue a lot of Farmers likely have is that even though they heard the plan they probably thought it didn’t impact them directly - only to discover that it did
    A bit like the Latinos who now will see friends and family deported . And the morons who thought cost cutting wouldn’t affect their benefits .
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 23,434

    ... I think the hand-wringer types think that I should sell the Tesla and bin Starlink with the £££ and business costs being a suitable price for their morality..

    In all seriousness: why are you in the LibDems? Plainly your position on Musk and the party are totally opposed. It's like Konstantin Kisin joining Antifa.

  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 44,398
    Winchy said:

    Carnyx said:

    Winchy said:

    Carnyx said:

    eek said:

    It is self evident that the Business Secretary has committed a criminal offence by describing himself as a "Solicitor" when non-articled trainee clerk would have been the correct designation. That is straight forward.

    However, as a member of the legal profession surely there is also a duty on Starmer to ensure those who work with him are properly described, in the same way as a doctor has a duty to report fellow "doctors" if it transpires they might not have elementary competence. Particularly now it has come to light is Starmer not in real jepardy if he does not remove the whip from Reynolds with all convenient haste ?

    FPT

    In true PB tradition this isn’t technically correct. A trainee solicitor can legitimately call themselves a “trainee solicitor”. I don’t know what this chap referred to himself as but “an articled clerk” hasn’t been a thing in England and Wales for over 30 years.

    Section 21 of the Solicitors Act 1974 states:

    “Any unqualified person who wilfully pretends to be, or takes or uses any name, title, addition or description implying that he is, qualified or recognised by law as qualified to act as a solicitor shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding the fourth
    level on the standard scale.”

    He told the Commons that he worked as a solicitor in Manchester before changing career.

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/labour-jonathan-reynolds-cv-business-secretary-b1211954.html

    Apparently there are also misleading linked in snaps on Guido but I haven’t checked that website.
    Surely the offence is to practise as a solicitor when you are not qualified to be one, not to leave out the word "trainee" on a CV for a non-legal job.

    It would be interesting to get a
    representative sample of CVs from a range of senior people and see how many have been embellished in some way, I would suspect all of them.
    I assumed though but @Gallowgate ’s quote from the act suggests not.

    In my view he’s broken the law (strict liability) and the punishment should be a conditional discharge.
    I wish these lazy websites/journalists would actually quote or screenshot the website referenced rather than just “alleged” or “reported”.

    https://www.jonathanreynolds.org.uk/about-me/ This bit seems acceptable - he did accept a training contract to be a solicitor and that isn’t in contravention of any laws as far as I understand them.

    Looking at the same website on archive.org that quote hasn’t changed in 5 years.

    Unless I am missing something, or it’s a different website or part of the website, this may be fake news.
    To clarify, if the alleged issue is with the following, then he has done nothing wrong in my view.

    “In 2007 I was finally able to enrol in law school, now as a mature student, and went on to achieve my Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and Legal Practice Course (LPC) at BPP Law School in Manchester. I was delighted to be offered a training contract to become a solicitor with Addleshaw Goddard LLP in Manchester. Addleshaw was a
    fantastic place to work.”

    This is all very normal terminology within the legal industry. I guess he doesn’t make it entirely clear he didn’t complete his training contract but I doubt it is that deep. To suggest this is some sort of fraudulent “gotcha”? Talk about focusing on the big issues.
    I’ve provided a link where he says he “worked as a solicitor” at AG.

    It’s not big stuff, of course. Guido’s a muck-raker and scandal-monkey. But it is an offence with strict liability. I guess lawyers don’t like people pretending to be lawyers. Competition or something.
    Aye @Foss already provided that link. My bad for missing it.
    I’m at a loss as to the issue that pay says “ training contract to become a solicitor” which to me is very, very clear cut - your complaint appears to be if I ignore the “training contract to become” bit he’s claiming to be a solicitor
    https://x.com/exRAF_Al/status/1891906162196418637

    https://x.com/jreynoldsMP/status/29517557834

    https://x.com/jreynoldsMP/status/21877577878601729

    Linkedin, his own website - it's just weird, a fantasist that seems to have started to believe it himself.
    Angels dancing on the head of a pin. My last solicitor was a trainee (under supervision). Was she "acting as a solicitor"? Probably. Would she have described herself as a solicitor? I don't know but have just noticed I already did.

    Embarrassing perhaps but only fatal if Starmer is already looking to move Reynolds out, or unless there is a link to an actual scandal like ballsing up a contract.
    If she's doing the work of a solicitor, charging for oine, and being responsible (together with her employer) for the results, then ...

    A lot of jobs have a lengthy training period and one doesn't get full professional qualifications for several years. Often with various grades thereof. One thinks of doctors.
    Medical doctors get to call themselves that after medical school despite the fact they have considerable further training ahead of them. Foundation year doctors can only work under supervision. I am not familiar with solicitors, but this seems to be a difference. Doctors can call themselves doctors sooner than solicitors can call themselves solicitors.
    What are you referring to?

    Anybody can call themselves a doctor. Unfortunately it's not a protected term. There are many thousands of wallies who have never come anywhere near getting a doctorate [*] who call themselves "doctors". Unfortunately far from causing them to be held in contempt (or thrown in jail), their pretensions win them fawning respect among the uneducated herd.

    * A qualification that is not based on "training" but requires a person to have made a substantial contribution to knowledge.
    'Anyone' can famously include a dead cat. At least the one owned by Ben Goldacre the anti-woowoo campaigner. The ex-moggy has a PhD in the sort of nutrition one sees on the telly. Signed diploma and all.

    TBF getting a PhD does imply training on the job - that's what the supervisor and the student do - but the actual qualification does demand the contribution to knowledge. However, that's UK specific. (Some Usonian PhDs do include a course work element, effectively therefore partly a MSc (etc) by study.)
    You're putting "job" together with "training", and "contribution to knowledge" together with "qualification". Sure there is training in how to do research, if one wishes to call it such, but the qualification is for the research and its write-up, which must make a contribution to knowledge. Medics don't contribute shit to knowledge. They just get taught stuff.

    Dunno about US PhDs.
    Whoa! We're in agreement. You can't get a PhD without knowing *how* to do the research and present it, and that has to be learnt. But as I said, and as you say, it's only the contribution to knowledge aka thesis that counts for the qualification.

    Medical MDs are different, of course.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 12,732

    viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    It isn't his company though. He is the CEO and figurehead, he doesn't own it. Shareholders could vote him away if they wanted to and the board absolutely could fire him.
    They should fire him for not working sufficient hours, given how much time he spends on DOGE and shitposting. Also, he worked to get someone elected who hates electric vehicles!
  • MattWMattW Posts: 25,220
    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    I've asked Drach, so we'll get an answer in about 6 months.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 44,398
    edited February 19

    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    I am loving this sub-thread!
    There's a whole book on this stuff just out:* boughht it for myself for Chrismas. Shame my late Dad did't get to see it - he'd have loved seeing his old workplaces.

    https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/British-Naval-Gun-Mountings-Hardback/p/50650

    *Post 1890 though so won't cover Victoria.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 12,732
    nico67 said:

    eek said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    The issue a lot of Farmers likely have is that even though they heard the plan they probably thought it didn’t impact them directly - only to discover that it did
    A bit like the Latinos who now will see friends and family deported . And the morons who thought cost cutting wouldn’t affect their benefits .
    Or Arab Americans in Michigan: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michigan-some-arab-american-voters-revisit-trump-support-after-gaza-take-over-comments/
  • HYUFD said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    That depends, if big landowning US farms see more US consumers buying their produce and food due to tariffs making imports more expensive that would be a net benefit for them. The average farmer in the Plains states or the Midwest and deep South won't export much abroad and most of their workers will be US born.

    Though that would also reduce choice and increase prices for US consumers.

    Indeed Starmer's family farms tax is probably more damaging to UK family farms than Trump's tariffs are to US family owned farms or agricorps
    You can say that. But *the farmers* are saying the opposite. You do have this tendency to tell people their business and that they have their business all wrong
  • Hmmm... with regard to @Sandpit.

    Sad to see him go, but looks like a case of Trump fanboi's gonna flounce.

    With regard to Dodgy Donald, and his unfounded claim that Ukraine started the war, I wonder if he thinks in that dangerously misinformed mind of his that the US "caused" Pearl Harbor.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 125,613
    Andy_JS said:

    MoreInCommon poll

    Ref 26% (+1)
    Lab 25% (nc)
    Con 23% (nc)
    LD 12% (nc)
    Grn 7% (-1)

    seats:
    Ref 187
    Lab 162
    Con 145
    LD 72
    SNP 44
    Grn 4
    PC 4
    Oth 32

    https://x.com/LeftieStats/status/1892134233361031628

    LDs winning the same share of the vote and number of seats as last time.

    So Kemi again Kingmaker in another poll between Starmer and Farage becoming PM
  • kamski said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    Must be terrible if you actually drive one of those nazimobiles these days.
    The thinking person's term is "Swasticar"

    I do confess to having offered a mild excuse to a party colleague on Saturday when they saw I drove a Tesla. I find Musk's politics to be embarrassingly absurd. And when I say embarrassed I mean for him - he's making an absolute tit of himself.

    But that doesn't impact onto his companies. I love my Tesla. Starlink has transformed my ability to do business. And I'm agog every time SpaceX smash another impossible mission goal. I think the hand-wringer types think that I should sell the Tesla and bin Starlink with the £££ and business costs being a suitable price for their morality. No thanks.

    And as its confessional time I love Michael Jackson music, think Kevin Spacey is a brilliant actor and enjoy Harry Potter. I know, I know...
    Imagine comparing JK Rowling to MJ, Elon Musk and Kevin Spacey. Vile.
  • viewcode said:

    ... I think the hand-wringer types think that I should sell the Tesla and bin Starlink with the £££ and business costs being a suitable price for their morality..

    In all seriousness: why are you in the LibDems? Plainly your position on Musk and the party are totally opposed. It's like Konstantin Kisin joining Antifa.

    I think Musk is a dick who should stay put of politics.

    How is that me being totally opposed to the LibDems? "Elon is a dick who should stay out of politics" is what Davey said.
  • BattlebusBattlebus Posts: 386
    Dura_Ace said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1892175665212145977

    NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine

    “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.

    Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.

    Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.

    Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.

    In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.

    Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?

    The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”


    Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.

    Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
    I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?

    Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
    Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
    A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
    So then it's a "Save Big Putin" campaign by the US so Donald can claim a Nobel Peace Prize and Putin rebuilds and waits.

    Oh to be a fly on the wall when the summit happens.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 53,587

    viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    It isn't his company though. He is the CEO and figurehead, he doesn't own it. Shareholders could vote him away if they wanted to and the board absolutely could fire him.
    They should fire him for not working sufficient hours, given how much time he spends on DOGE and shitposting. Also, he worked to get someone elected who hates electric vehicles!
    FACT CHECK: Trump said he would prefer to be electrocuted rather than eaten by a shark.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 29,793

    Hmmm... with regard to @Sandpit.

    Sad to see him go, but looks like a case of Trump fanboi's gonna flounce.

    With regard to Dodgy Donald, and his unfounded claim that Ukraine started the war, I wonder if he thinks in that dangerously misinformed mind of his that the US "caused" Pearl Harbor.

    Why are we calling it 'Harbor'?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 44,398

    Hmmm... with regard to @Sandpit.

    Sad to see him go, but looks like a case of Trump fanboi's gonna flounce.

    With regard to Dodgy Donald, and his unfounded claim that Ukraine started the war, I wonder if he thinks in that dangerously misinformed mind of his that the US "caused" Pearl Harbor.

    Why are we calling it 'Harbor'?
    Because it's called Harbor. Er, even Wittgenstein could get that right.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 14,081
    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    MoreInCommon poll

    Ref 26% (+1)
    Lab 25% (nc)
    Con 23% (nc)
    LD 12% (nc)
    Grn 7% (-1)

    seats:
    Ref 187
    Lab 162
    Con 145
    LD 72
    SNP 44
    Grn 4
    PC 4
    Oth 32

    https://x.com/LeftieStats/status/1892134233361031628

    LDs winning the same share of the vote and number of seats as last time.

    So Kemi again Kingmaker in another poll between Starmer and Farage becoming PM
    Broken sleazy Greens on the slide?

    Interesting to see that so far Trump and Musk’s antics don’t seem to be making a dent in Reform. I suspect the “at least he’s actually doing something” sentiment is sustaining them.
  • WinchyWinchy Posts: 110
    Stereodog said:

    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
    Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
    @Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war

    You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?

    This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights

    If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.

    But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
    Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
    "I don't feel comfortable with you calling me that and promoting those kinds of stereotypes."

    I found that response in connection with "Karen", not as a pisstake but meant as serious advice.

    Anyone for whom "centrist dad" is their least favourite slang term is one. When they age a bit more, they may become a gammon.
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 17,619
    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    It does, however, present the possibility of Europe (if it can get its act together) presenting Ukraine with a better deal.
    Which might benefit both them and us.
    Au contraire, we are about to see the total, total uselesness and pointlessness of the EU, the Tethered Bottle Cap Empire, to the extent even some Remoaners might squirm
    It is actually impossible to be as useless as Trump's America. Given that's the point of comparison, the EU will do better by default.
  • TazTaz Posts: 16,604

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    I do hope we have one of those pro-Putin LDs on here. Would be fascinating to examine in more detail. Maybe one of our Saturday visitors?
    Zelenskyy is illegitimate due to his poor record on potholes and insufficient PR?
    He's done little for active travel and his approach to cycle paths leaves a lot to be desired.
    His approach to psychopaths is first-rate, however.
    That's very good :smiley:
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 53,587
    TimS said:

    Centrist dad was for many years a term used by the Corbynites against people they perceived as too right wing (when they weren’t calling them Tories). I suppose the staying power of the term is that it’s now being used by the right against much the same people.

    It seems to be a British invention. In America the equivalent term is Normie. Belongs to the same stable as sheeple or MSM, and is used to distinguish those with normal mainstream views from the oh so cool edgelords of the internet.

    I don't think they're equivalent terms at all. Centrist Dad is a much narrower category that would exclude most decidedly Normie Tories for example.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 9,106
    Dura_Ace said:

    Stereodog said:

    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
    Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
    @Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war

    You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?

    This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights

    If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.

    But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
    Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
    It's proven quite a durable and evocative pejorative so there must be something in it. It fairly accurately bespeaks a certain stripe of hideously white middle class Englishman who never strays too far from the Monty Python - Pratchett - Blackadder axis of cultural references and listens to fucking podcasts.
    You're not the messiah, Dura, you're a very naughty boy and, frankly, thought you've set out your stall, I don't think you can be buggered at all. You've certainly no cunning plan.

  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 23,434

    viewcode said:

    ... I think the hand-wringer types think that I should sell the Tesla and bin Starlink with the £££ and business costs being a suitable price for their morality..

    In all seriousness: why are you in the LibDems? Plainly your position on Musk and the party are totally opposed. It's like Konstantin Kisin joining Antifa.

    I think Musk is a dick who should stay put of politics.

    How is that me being totally opposed to the LibDems? "Elon is a dick who should stay out of politics" is what Davey said.
    Because Davey is deprecating Musk, and you are encouraging purchase of Musk's products. As a private citizen you are entitled to buy any car and hold any view you see fit within the law. But you are also a member of the LibDems, you were a LibDem candidate, and presumably will be one in the future. Your ability to do both is compromised.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 25,220
    edited February 19
    Carnyx said:

    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    Aren't you talking about the huge circular roller or bearing races which support the rotating mass of the turret? Those were usual in 20th century big gun turrets.

    Mind, Victoria might however have had a centre pivot support on the mount. One would need to check.
    For Jodrell Bank, we're with HMS Revenge and HMS Royal Sovereign from WW1.

    And at Jodrell Bank they are the bearings that let the the dish tilt over the top, not the ones that spin the whole thing - which are based on railway bogies and tracks aiui.

    https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/infrastructure-projects/jodrell-bank-telescope-the-lovell-telescope#:~:text=How the work was done,of the dish in 2003.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 9,106
    Foxy said:

    DavidL said:

    I for one will be seriously disappointed if @Sandpit has left the site. I generally find him interesting and well informed, particularly about aviation and other technical matters. Like others, I have been perplexed by his position on Trump, particularly in relation to Ukraine where he has very close interests.

    I think it entirely reasonable to challenge him on this apparent inconsistency but I found the nature of some of the comments directed at him excessively personal and aggressive. We should remember that this is a chat room. None of us are actually responsible for US foreign policy (whatever it might be in any given hour), UK government policy or even for the psychopath Putin. I think that the discussion goes better when people make their points firmly and clearly but not personally.

    But then, I am a boring old fart at heart.

    I think Sandpit is troubled by his extreme cognitive dissonance. He loves the MAGA agenda, but they despise Ukraine and it's government. It's obviously uncomfortable, no matter how he tries to contort the two into something approaching coherence. Betrayal isn't easy to accept even when it was advertised well in advance.

    It reminds me of the Northern Soul standard "The Snake"

    "I saved you, " cried that woman
    "And you've bitten me, even why?
    And you know your bite is poisonous and now I'm gonna die"
    "Oh, shut up, silly woman, " said that reptile with a grin
    "Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in"

    https://youtu.be/fHIcVuqQgVo?feature=shared

    Didn't Trump quote that at some point, too? At one of the rallies maybe?

    I thought it showed tremendous self-awareness at the time!
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 12,732
    Battlebus said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1892175665212145977

    NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine

    “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.

    Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.

    Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.

    Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.

    In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.

    Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?

    The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”


    Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.

    Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
    I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?

    Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
    Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
    A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
    So then it's a "Save Big Putin" campaign by the US so Donald can claim a Nobel Peace Prize and Putin rebuilds and waits.

    Oh to be a fly on the wall when the summit happens.
    I was intrigued by James Ker-Lindsay's suggestion that Trump is aggrieved over Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize (for not much) and he thinks delivering peace in Ukraine will get him one.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 52,941
    kamski said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Stereodog said:

    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
    Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
    @Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war

    You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?

    This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights

    If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.

    But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
    Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
    It's proven quite a durable and evocative pejorative so there must be something in it. It fairly accurately bespeaks a certain stripe of hideously white middle class Englishman who never strays too far from the Monty Python - Pratchett - Blackadder axis of cultural references and listens to fucking podcasts.
    how is it pejorative? and what about "centrist mum?"

    it's surely less embarrassing to be a centrist parent/guardian than a parent/guardian who tries to be edgy by swearing on the internet?
    The “hideously white” shite is a fairly good tell for another kind of performative idicocy.

    All the coolness of King Charles dancing in a pin stripe suit.
  • Winchy said:

    Stereodog said:

    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
    Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
    @Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war

    You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?

    This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights

    If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.

    But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
    Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
    "I don't feel comfortable with you calling me that and promoting those kinds of stereotypes."

    I found that response in connection with "Karen", not as a pisstake but meant as serious advice.

    Anyone for whom "centrist dad" is their least favourite slang term is one. When they age a bit more, they may become a gammon.
    Time for me to point out "Karen" is racist towards the Karen People of Burma:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_people
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,901
    Battlebus said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1892175665212145977

    NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine

    “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.

    Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.

    Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.

    Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.

    In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.

    Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?

    The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”


    Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.

    Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
    I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?

    Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
    Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
    A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
    So then it's a "Save Big Putin" campaign by the US so Donald can claim a Nobel Peace Prize and Putin rebuilds and waits.

    Oh to be a fly on the wall when the summit happens.
    Does Donald have any clue that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is Norwegian, on the Front line against a reinvigorated Russia and might not totally appreciate what he is doing?

    Also peace bought by the injured party for $500b of minerals isn’t quite the noble act Trump thinks it is.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 125,613
    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    That depends, if big landowning US farms see more US consumers buying their produce and food due to tariffs making imports more expensive that would be a net benefit for them. The average farmer in the Plains states or the Midwest and deep South won't export much abroad and most of their workers will be US born.

    Though that would also reduce choice and increase prices for US consumers.

    Indeed Starmer's family farms tax is probably more damaging to UK family farms than Trump's tariffs are to US family owned farms or agricorps
    You know you are fibbing through your teeth when you try to inflict that childish name on us. We're not the people you're trying to get to vote for you in Epping.

    Call it what it is - the partial alleviation of IHT for landowners of farmland - and tell us what you would do for *ALL FARMERS* instead of simply screwing them over like the |Tories did for 14 years - for instance, the delayed farm payments scheme down to the glorious Conservative "administrationm".
    No, I correctly called it what it is 'a family farms tax' making it far more difficult for farmers to pass on their farms to their children due to this vindictive Labour government.

    A few minor delays in farm payments subsidies is not remotely comparable
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 34,108
    edited February 19
    Foxy said:

    Winchy said:

    Carnyx said:

    eek said:

    It is self evident that the Business Secretary has committed a criminal offence by describing himself as a "Solicitor" when non-articled trainee clerk would have been the correct designation. That is straight forward.

    However, as a member of the legal profession surely there is also a duty on Starmer to ensure those who work with him are properly described, in the same way as a doctor has a duty to report fellow "doctors" if it transpires they might not have elementary competence. Particularly now it has come to light is Starmer not in real jepardy if he does not remove the whip from Reynolds with all convenient haste ?

    FPT

    In true PB tradition this isn’t technically correct. A trainee solicitor can legitimately call themselves a “trainee solicitor”. I don’t know what this chap referred to himself as but “an articled clerk” hasn’t been a thing in England and Wales for over 30 years.

    Section 21 of the Solicitors Act 1974 states:

    “Any unqualified person who wilfully pretends to be, or takes or uses any name, title, addition or description implying that he is, qualified or recognised by law as qualified to act as a solicitor shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding the fourth
    level on the standard scale.”

    He told the Commons that he worked as a solicitor in Manchester before changing career.

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/labour-jonathan-reynolds-cv-business-secretary-b1211954.html

    Apparently there are also misleading linked in snaps on Guido but I haven’t checked that website.
    Surely the offence is to practise as a solicitor when you are not qualified to be one, not to leave out the word "trainee" on a CV for a non-legal job.

    It would be interesting to get a
    representative sample of CVs from a range of senior people and see how many have been embellished in some way, I would suspect all of them.
    I assumed though but @Gallowgate ’s quote from the act suggests not.

    In my view he’s broken the law (strict liability) and the punishment should be a conditional discharge.
    I wish these lazy websites/journalists would actually quote or screenshot the website referenced rather than just “alleged” or “reported”.

    https://www.jonathanreynolds.org.uk/about-me/ This bit seems acceptable - he did accept a training contract to be a solicitor and that isn’t in contravention of any laws as far as I understand them.

    Looking at the same website on archive.org that quote hasn’t changed in 5 years.

    Unless I am missing something, or it’s a different website or part of the website, this may be fake news.
    To clarify, if the alleged issue is with the following, then he has done nothing wrong in my view.

    “In 2007 I was finally able to enrol in law school, now as a mature student, and went on to achieve my Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) and Legal Practice Course (LPC) at BPP Law School in Manchester. I was delighted to be offered a training contract to become a solicitor with Addleshaw Goddard LLP in Manchester. Addleshaw was a
    fantastic place to work.”

    This is all very normal terminology within the legal industry. I guess he doesn’t make it entirely clear he didn’t complete his training contract but I doubt it is that deep. To suggest this is some sort of fraudulent “gotcha”? Talk about focusing on the big issues.
    I’ve provided a link where he says he “worked as a solicitor” at AG.

    It’s not big stuff, of course. Guido’s a muck-raker and scandal-monkey. But it is an offence with strict liability. I guess lawyers don’t like people pretending to be lawyers. Competition or something.
    Aye @Foss already provided that link. My bad for missing it.
    I’m at a loss as to the issue that pay says “ training contract to become a solicitor” which to me is very, very clear cut - your complaint appears to be if I ignore the “training contract to become” bit he’s claiming to be a solicitor
    https://x.com/exRAF_Al/status/1891906162196418637

    https://x.com/jreynoldsMP/status/29517557834

    https://x.com/jreynoldsMP/status/21877577878601729

    Linkedin, his own website - it's just weird, a fantasist that seems to have started to believe it himself.
    Angels dancing on the head of a pin. My last solicitor was a trainee (under supervision). Was she "acting as a solicitor"? Probably. Would she have described herself as a solicitor? I don't know but have just noticed I already did.

    Embarrassing perhaps but only fatal if Starmer is already looking to move Reynolds out, or unless there is a link to an actual scandal like ballsing up a contract.
    If she's doing the work of a solicitor, charging for oine, and being responsible (together with her employer) for the results, then ...

    A lot of jobs have a lengthy training period and one doesn't get full professional qualifications for several years. Often with various grades thereof. One thinks of doctors.
    Medical doctors get to call themselves that after medical school despite the fact they have considerable further training ahead of them. Foundation year doctors can only work under supervision. I am not familiar with solicitors, but this seems to be a difference. Doctors can call themselves doctors sooner than solicitors can call themselves solicitors.
    What are you referring to?

    Anybody can call themselves a doctor. Unfortunately it's not a protected term. There are many thousands of wallies who have never come anywhere near getting a doctorate [*] who call themselves "doctors". Unfortunately far from causing them to be held in contempt (or thrown in jail), their pretensions win them fawning respect among the uneducated herd.

    * A qualification that is not based on "training" but requires a person to have made a substantial contribution to knowledge.
    Most doctors aren't doctors of course. The standard qualification is a Bachelor of Medicine and a Bachelor of Surgery. Higher qualifications are normally members of professional bodies. If you look at the staff list at your GP surgery you will find that very few, if any of them, are doctors. Dr Foxy quite likely doesn't have a doctorate. It is purely a courtesy term.
    Yes, I am MBBS. No PhD.

    It is an offense though to falsely pretend to be on the Medical Register.

    There used to be 3 ways to Medical registration: pass MBBS, via the conjoint boards (LRCP MRCS) or be a licencing of the Society of Apothocaries (LMSSA). When I qualified in the Eighties it wasn't unusual to do one or both of these as an alternative to taking med school finals, particularly if re-sitting. One friend of mine never resat, and worked via the conjoined boards until recently. His only problem was that he couldn't work in Australia as they didn't recognise his qualification.
    A pharmacist who has a PhD is not allowed, professionally, to have a pharmacy with 'Dr' .....eg O.K.Cole .... over the door. (I hasten to mention that I don't have a PhD.)

    I have a ancestor who qualified as a 'doctor' by the Society of Apothecaries route, by apprenticeship, then 'topped' up with degrees from both London and St Andrews. In the mid 19th C such degrees could be obtained by simply taking and passing the relevant exams, although there is evidence of him attending lectures at Barts.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 58,436
    malcolmg said:

    kinabalu said:

    eek said:

    kinabalu said:

    eek said:

    Leon said:

    So @felix has been banned, @BlancheLivermore has been banned, and now @Sandpit has been chased away

    You wankers are going to turn PB into fucking Bluesky

    Having looked at this mornings posts I can see why @Sandpit left - @JosiasJessop was being an annoying prat on a topic Sandpit cares about
    A nonsense take. Sorry.
    The question was why Sandpit left - how does saying what I think happened is a nonsense take.

    People don’t need to post here - we do it for fun and if it doesn’t become fun people can easily disappear.

    Because I think your take on the exchange in question ("caring Sandpit chased away by annoying prat JosiasJessop") is absurd.

    I'd be interested to see you try and justify it. Perhaps you saw something there that I missed.
    @JosiasJessop did push it when @Sandpit didn't wanted to engage. But he wasn’t impolite or unreasonable. I suspect @Sandpit is feeling bad about it but isn’t ready to admit it yet


    He is a big cry baby, Josias is allowed to post as often as he wants, and could just have just dropped it instead of flouncing off with his tail between his legs. Needs to act his age and not his shoe size.
    Josias has had plenty of garbage spouted at him but has taken it and replied , if you have such an inferiority complex then you should stay away from posting on social media where you are guaranteed brickbats regardless of opinion.
    But you are a pathetic, decrepit wet Scottish fart of a man, hurling incontinent abuse at everyone like some tartan gibbon in a 3rd world zoo, who cries like a German whenever dear old Scotland is even slightly maligned

    You are a figure of fun. You mean nothing, otherwise. You are a human nullity. You are nil. You are nought. You exist to entertain us but other than that you are a pointless, faintly noisome vacuity. Learn your place
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 21,914
    From the NYT:

    Last week, Michelle King, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, sought to reassure Democrats on Capitol Hill about the presence of two of Elon Musk’s allies at her agency.

    The Social Security Administration keeps medical information, bank account numbers and other sensitive personal data about the roughly 70 million Americans it provides with more than $1 trillion in benefits annually. In the Feb. 11 letter to Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, Ms. King said that the two representatives, from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, had not yet seen personal information — and said any disclosures would follow established procedures.

    “I share your commitment to protecting sensitive personal and financial information from improper disclosure and misuse,” she wrote in the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times. “We follow all relevant laws and regulations when granting access to S.S.A. systems.”

    Days later, Mr. Musk's team sought access to the agency’s data. Ms. King resisted the request, and by Monday night she and her chief of staff, Tiffany Flick, were out of their jobs, according to three people familiar with their departures.
  • viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    It isn't his company though. He is the CEO and figurehead, he doesn't own it. Shareholders could vote him away if they wanted to and the board absolutely could fire him.
    They should fire him for not working sufficient hours, given how much time he spends on DOGE and shitposting. Also, he worked to get someone elected who hates electric vehicles!
    FACT CHECK: Trump said he would prefer to be electrocuted rather than eaten by a shark.
    Shocking!
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 74,117
    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    It does, however, present the possibility of Europe (if it can get its act together) presenting Ukraine with a better deal.
    Which might benefit both them and us.
    Au contraire, we are about to see the total, total uselesness and pointlessness of the EU, the Tethered Bottle Cap Empire, to the extent even some Remoaners might squirm
    That's also possible, as my comment clearly suggests.
    I just haven't given up on the more positive outcome - at least until the result of the German election are out.

    Also, Europe is not the EU.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 58,436
    FF43 said:

    Leon said:

    Nigelb said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    It does, however, present the possibility of Europe (if it can get its act together) presenting Ukraine with a better deal.
    Which might benefit both them and us.
    Au contraire, we are about to see the total, total uselesness and pointlessness of the EU, the Tethered Bottle Cap Empire, to the extent even some Remoaners might squirm
    It is actually impossible to be as useless as Trump's America. Given that's the point of comparison, the EU will do better by default.
    lol. Just you wait
  • MattWMattW Posts: 25,220
    edited February 19

    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    I am loving this sub-thread!
    Battleships, not subs !

    Though a la Ukrainian navy and the Russian Battlecruiser Admiral Tryon upgraded the HMS Victoria to submarine.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 125,613
    edited February 19

    HYUFD said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    That depends, if big landowning US farms see more US consumers buying their produce and food due to tariffs making imports more expensive that would be a net benefit for them. The average farmer in the Plains states or the Midwest and deep South won't export much abroad and most of their workers will be US born.

    Though that would also reduce choice and increase prices for US consumers.

    Indeed Starmer's family farms tax is probably more damaging to UK family farms than Trump's tariffs are to US family owned farms or agricorps
    You can say that. But *the farmers* are saying the opposite. You do have this tendency to tell people their business and that they have their business all wrong
    I read the article, one of those complaining most was a likely Democrat voting economist at a university not actually a farmer.

    The Corn Laws for example were welcomed by big landowners and landed gentry who owned lots of farmland as it increased prices and demand for their produce. It was consumers who resented them as they were the ones who had to pay the extra prices for bread and food.

    If you are a farmer who exports a lot from the US then obviously Trump's tariffs are bad news, if you mainly farm for the home market though you could well be a beneficiary
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 23,434

    Winchy said:

    Stereodog said:

    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
    Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
    @Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war

    You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?

    This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights

    If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.

    But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
    Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
    "I don't feel comfortable with you calling me that and promoting those kinds of stereotypes."

    I found that response in connection with "Karen", not as a pisstake but meant as serious advice.

    Anyone for whom "centrist dad" is their least favourite slang term is one. When they age a bit more, they may become a gammon.
    Time for me to point out "Karen" is racist towards the Karen People of Burma:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_people
    Different "Karen"

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)

    However it was an awesome haircut:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Karen_haircut
    https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21079162/karen-name-insult-meme-manager
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 74,117
    edited February 19

    Hmmm... with regard to @Sandpit.

    Sad to see him go, but looks like a case of Trump fanboi's gonna flounce.

    With regard to Dodgy Donald, and his unfounded claim that Ukraine started the war, I wonder if he thinks in that dangerously misinformed mind of his that the US "caused" Pearl Harbor.

    Why are we calling it 'Harbor'?
    Because it's a US possession, and it's always been called that.
    And we don't share your idiosyncratic brand of anti-Americanism.

    Unless you prefer Wai Momi ?
  • TimSTimS Posts: 14,081
    boulay said:

    Battlebus said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1892175665212145977

    NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine

    “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.

    Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.

    Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.

    Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.

    In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.

    Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?

    The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”


    Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.

    Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
    I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?

    Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
    Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
    A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
    So then it's a "Save Big Putin" campaign by the US so Donald can claim a Nobel Peace Prize and Putin rebuilds and waits.

    Oh to be a fly on the wall when the summit happens.
    Does Donald have any clue that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is Norwegian, on the Front line against a reinvigorated Russia and might not totally appreciate what he is doing?

    Also peace bought by the injured party for $500b of minerals isn’t quite the noble act Trump thinks it is.
    There are a few UK or Canadian listed mining groups that might be interested in a deal on mineral rights. Zelenskyy announcing a favourable licence deal with say Teck Resources would certainly score some troll points.
  • sladeslade Posts: 2,114
    We have 5 local by-elections tomorrow. There is a double Lab defence in Hammersmith and Fulham, Lab defences in East Ayrshire and Barking and Dagenham, and a Con defence in Colchester.
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,901
    TimS said:

    boulay said:

    Battlebus said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1892175665212145977

    NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine

    “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.

    Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.

    Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.

    Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.

    In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.

    Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?

    The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”


    Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.

    Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
    I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?

    Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
    Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
    A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
    So then it's a "Save Big Putin" campaign by the US so Donald can claim a Nobel Peace Prize and Putin rebuilds and waits.

    Oh to be a fly on the wall when the summit happens.
    Does Donald have any clue that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is Norwegian, on the Front line against a reinvigorated Russia and might not totally appreciate what he is doing?

    Also peace bought by the injured party for $500b of minerals isn’t quite the noble act Trump thinks it is.
    There are a few UK or Canadian listed mining groups that might be interested in a deal on mineral rights. Zelenskyy announcing a favourable licence deal with say Teck Resources would certainly score some troll points.
    Funnier if he gives the rights to the Chinese in return for security guarantee screwing Donald and Russia in one easy move.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 33,641
    slade said:

    We have 5 local by-elections tomorrow. There is a double Lab defence in Hammersmith and Fulham, Lab defences in East Ayrshire and Barking and Dagenham, and a Con defence in Colchester.

    Reform are standing everywhere except Barking & Dagenham which you'd have thought would be their best area of the lot. Shows they still aren't organising properly.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 34,108
    Leon said:

    malcolmg said:

    kinabalu said:

    eek said:

    kinabalu said:

    eek said:

    Leon said:

    So @felix has been banned, @BlancheLivermore has been banned, and now @Sandpit has been chased away

    You wankers are going to turn PB into fucking Bluesky

    Having looked at this mornings posts I can see why @Sandpit left - @JosiasJessop was being an annoying prat on a topic Sandpit cares about
    A nonsense take. Sorry.
    The question was why Sandpit left - how does saying what I think happened is a nonsense take.

    People don’t need to post here - we do it for fun and if it doesn’t become fun people can easily disappear.

    Because I think your take on the exchange in question ("caring Sandpit chased away by annoying prat JosiasJessop") is absurd.

    I'd be interested to see you try and justify it. Perhaps you saw something there that I missed.
    @JosiasJessop did push it when @Sandpit didn't wanted to engage. But he wasn’t impolite or unreasonable. I suspect @Sandpit is feeling bad about it but isn’t ready to admit it yet


    He is a big cry baby, Josias is allowed to post as often as he wants, and could just have just dropped it instead of flouncing off with his tail between his legs. Needs to act his age and not his shoe size.
    Josias has had plenty of garbage spouted at him but has taken it and replied , if you have such an inferiority complex then you should stay away from posting on social media where you are guaranteed brickbats regardless of opinion.
    But you are a pathetic, decrepit wet Scottish fart of a man, hurling incontinent abuse at everyone like some tartan gibbon in a 3rd world zoo, who cries like a German whenever dear old Scotland is even slightly maligned

    You are a figure of fun. You mean nothing, otherwise. You are a human nullity. You are nil. You are nought. You exist to entertain us but other than that you are a pointless, faintly noisome vacuity. Learn your place
    Do I take it you, Leon, don't like our friend malc?
  • viewcode said:

    Winchy said:

    Stereodog said:

    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
    Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
    @Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war

    You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?

    This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights

    If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.

    But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
    Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
    "I don't feel comfortable with you calling me that and promoting those kinds of stereotypes."

    I found that response in connection with "Karen", not as a pisstake but meant as serious advice.

    Anyone for whom "centrist dad" is their least favourite slang term is one. When they age a bit more, they may become a gammon.
    Time for me to point out "Karen" is racist towards the Karen People of Burma:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_people
    Different "Karen"

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)

    However it was an awesome haircut:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Karen_haircut
    https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21079162/karen-name-insult-meme-manager
    But it's racist against the Karens!
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 36,648
    edited February 19
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    Aren't you talking about the huge circular roller or bearing races which support the rotating mass of the turret? Those were usual in 20th century big gun turrets.

    Mind, Victoria might however have had a centre pivot support on the mount. One would need to check.
    PS See here. On top of the inner cylindrical structure,

    https://maritime.org/doc/cagun/part1.php
    MattW said:

    Carnyx said:

    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    Aren't you talking about the huge circular roller or bearing races which support the rotating mass of the turret? Those were usual in 20th century big gun turrets.

    Mind, Victoria might however have had a centre pivot support on the mount. One would need to check.
    For Jodrell Bank, we're with HMS Revenge and HMS Royal Sovereign from WW1.

    And at Jodrell Bank they are the bearings that let the the dish tilt over the top, not the ones that spin the whole thing - which are based on railway bogies and tracks aiui.

    https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/infrastructure-projects/jodrell-bank-telescope-the-lovell-telescope#:~:text=How the work was done,of the dish in 2003.
    This is the problem

    I don't think there is any dispute that components from ships were used in the construction, but we are trying to understand exactly which components.

    There is a set of bearings that support the weight of the gun turrets, and allow them to rotate. Because of the physical orientation, it seems unlikely those are the components used.

    It was suggested upthread that is was the training gears, which is a plausible answer, but other sources specifically say bearings.

    The exploded diagram shows the guns themselves use trunnion bearings, so i guess the question is, does the dish weigh more or less the same as a couple of 15" gun barrels, in which case they might be likely candidates
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 53,569
    edited February 19
    boulay said:

    Battlebus said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1892175665212145977

    NEW: Boris Johnson says Donald Trump’s comments overnight are wrong, calls for Russian assets to be seized to arm Ukraine

    “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.

    Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the UK from 1935 to 1945.

    Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4%. They are actually about the same as Trump’s.

    Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.

    In particular the US can see $300bn of frozen Russian assets - mainly in Belgium. That is cash that could and should be used to pay Ukraine and compensate the US for its support.

    Why is Europe preventing the unfreezing of Putin’s cash?

    The US believes Belgium, France and other countries are blocking. It’s absurd. We need to get serious and fast.”


    Epic levels of cope from a man who cannot bear to admit he was wrong.

    Johnson, for all his faults, was 100% in supporting Ukraine and is consistent today
    I don't follow Farage or Reform minute by minute, but do I get the impression that they are being a bit quiet so far about the Trump/Putin/Ukraine events and comments over the last 24 hours or so?

    Reform have quite a lot to lose; I can't see how they can credibly not take sides over some tricky things at the moment.
    Reform have taken an isolationist view on how to deal with the Ukraine, which is fine until Russia decides to take over Poland or similar at which point we would probably have preferred to have done something sooner
    A reminder that Russia can't take over Kursk which is a place inside Russia. The idea that they are going to roll across all of Ukraine and invade Poland is farcical.
    So then it's a "Save Big Putin" campaign by the US so Donald can claim a Nobel Peace Prize and Putin rebuilds and waits.

    Oh to be a fly on the wall when the summit happens.
    Does Donald have any clue that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is Norwegian, on the Front line against a reinvigorated Russia and might not totally appreciate what he is doing?

    Also peace bought by the injured party for $500b of minerals isn’t quite the noble act Trump thinks it is.
    Putin might have told him he has the Nobel Committee in his pocket...
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 12,732
    slade said:

    We have 5 local by-elections tomorrow. There is a double Lab defence in Hammersmith and Fulham, Lab defences in East Ayrshire and Barking and Dagenham, and a Con defence in Colchester.

    Don't forget the by-election held last night! A LibDem hold in Brent: https://www.markpack.org.uk/174328/alperton-ward-brent-council-by-election/
  • MattWMattW Posts: 25,220
    Nigelb said:

    Hmmm... with regard to @Sandpit.

    Sad to see him go, but looks like a case of Trump fanboi's gonna flounce.

    With regard to Dodgy Donald, and his unfounded claim that Ukraine started the war, I wonder if he thinks in that dangerously misinformed mind of his that the US "caused" Pearl Harbor.

    Why are we calling it 'Harbor'?
    Because it's a US possession, and it's always been called that.
    And we don't share your idiosyncratic brand of anti-Americanism.

    Unless you prefer Wai Momi ?
    We should be tolerant on this one, since Hawaii has a Union Flag in its State Flag.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 74,117
    Bonus video of hi-tec testing setup, debunking the rumour we won't be able to use our own kit on the F35.

    https://x.com/AirPowerNEW1/status/1892189456637071825
    Not only is the US integrating additional/new foreign weapons on the F35, but it has gotten ahead and even budgeted for the 🇳🇴 Joint Strike Missile to be purchased by the US Air Force for its #F35A. 🇳🇴, 🇬🇧, and 🇮🇱 are presently integrating domestic weapons on F35.
  • BattlebusBattlebus Posts: 386

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    I bet you never thought you'd end up the front line of the culture war for reviewing electric cars.
    The fog of the Culture War ... you're in it but you are bewildered how you got there. Nothing to do but tell them all to f-off or take out a subscription to the Daily Telegraph.

    Since newspapers lack a lot of original content and only curate stuff the find on Twix, I have to say PB does it better.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 23,434

    viewcode said:

    Winchy said:

    Stereodog said:

    Eabhal said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Eabhal said:

    Selebian said:

    Eabhal said:

    Sandpit left because he didn't like getting called out for his absurd position on Trump and Ukraine, not his support for Trump per se. It's weird because on other issues like energy, we come from entire different angles but can usually find a pragmatic accord on the virtues of battery storage or something.

    bigjohnowls has similarly bonkers positions on Ukraine/Gaza, gets called out on it in vitriolic terms, but hasn't flounced.

    Shame though. He has an apparent suspension of sense on Trump re Ukraine, but interesting on many other issues. Hopefully will return soon.
    It's also worth having people like bjo and Sandpit on PB, because their bizarre positions are held by large chunks of the electorate. In this case, anti-Israel pro-Putin socialists, and anti-Putin pro-Trump Reform voters
    It’s nice that PB has a range of views. However, I don’t think it’s nice having people posting disinformation. Sandpit posts endless MAGA propaganda and then tried to claim he’s just a neutral observer.
    Yes, he seemed to be immune to factchecking and would repeat the same misinformation repeatedly, even after being corrected. That is not putting a different opinion, it is pure propaganda.
    @Sandpit has very close Ukrainian family, and actually visited Ukraine during the war

    You’re a semi retired provincial quack from “Leicester”. What on earth makes you think your opinion is more interesting or useful than his, on Ukraine?

    This is the essence of the pb midwit dad. Pontificating from some tedious little place in England with their numbingly predictable petit bourgeois opinions delivered like great and sagacious insights

    If Foxy were Sandpit he'd flounce after that abuse.

    But centrist dads are made of sterner stuff.
    Centrist dad has to be my least favourite slang term ever. It's meaningless by itself and the only people who understand the joke are people who live in the same echo chamber as those they are sniggering at. It's like Communists calling other socialists Trotskyites.
    "I don't feel comfortable with you calling me that and promoting those kinds of stereotypes."

    I found that response in connection with "Karen", not as a pisstake but meant as serious advice.

    Anyone for whom "centrist dad" is their least favourite slang term is one. When they age a bit more, they may become a gammon.
    Time for me to point out "Karen" is racist towards the Karen People of Burma:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_people
    Different "Karen"

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)

    However it was an awesome haircut:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Karen_haircut
    https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21079162/karen-name-insult-meme-manager
    But it's racist against the Karens!
    But she is racist towards the Karens. That's the point. It's a caricature.
  • MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    There were no operational battleships armed with 16" guns in WW1.

    Japan's Nagato and Mutsu, while being under construction during WW1, didn't enter service until 1920 and 1921, and the USA's Colorado, West Virginia and Maryland not until 1921-1923.
  • FossFoss Posts: 1,237
    Election Maps UK have updated their nowcast. As well as major Labour losses they now have Cons losing net seats.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,816
    edited February 19
    viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    Yeah boycott all that shit as far as possible, or all the world's wealth will be in the hands of a few foreign oligarchs. The fact the richest of them all is also a malign antidemocratic shithead just makes it more urgent.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 25,220
    edited February 19

    MattW said:

    Scott_xP said:

    MattW said:

    Good morning everyone.

    Sorry to see @Sandpit take a break. A different view, even though I don't agree on that many things with him these days.

    For a diversion. Yesterday we were talking about the Bismarck wreck having lost it's gun turrets.

    Gun turrets were also involved in the wreck of HMS Victoria, a battlecruiser which sank off the coast of Lebanon in 1893 - and is one of a very few wrecks which is stuck vertically in the seabed (mud), with the stern poking up 100 ft or more. It had an enormous turret that took it straight down, after a collision caused by Admiral Tryon, trying too hard. He went down with the ship and ~350 others. It had a ram bow which helped it keep together.

    It reportedly still has one of Nelson's swords on board, but is in about 400ft of water.

    My image quota.

    Short video about finding it in 2004:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKVymgGyYKo

    Also FPT


    Heavy old beasts but you wonder how much vertical movement there was in really rough seas,

    Not much. It takes a great deal of force to move a 1000 ton turret vertically, although it did sometimes happen there was enough movement to knock the turret off its bearings. The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau both had their forward turrets disabled in heavy seas multiple times, although their turrets were fairly light as they only mounted 11-inch guns compared to the 14/15/16-inch on most battleships.
    Fun fact: the bearings which allow the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to rotate vertically came from battleship gun turrets.
    That appears to be a well known story, but begs an obvious question

    The start of this discussion was the observation that gun turrets rely on gravity to keep them in place. The bearings explicitly and exclusively support vertical loads.

    The Jodrell Bank trunnion bearings are horizontal, requiring an entirely different design...
    I'm not sure where they are from in the battleship gun turret.

    In Jodrell Bank they support vertical loads, but I think not along the bearing axis - rather across it, because they are at the top of the two towers at either side with a horizontal axis between them around which the dish rotates in the vertical plane.

    In a cannon on a sailing ship, the trunnion pivots are the point where the middle point of the gun sits on the carriage so the gun muzzle can be elevated up and down.

    That is a similar physical orientation, but I don't know how that works on a WW1 16" battleship turret.
    There were no operational battleships armed with 16" guns in WW1.

    Japan's Nagato and Mutsu, while being under construction during WW1, didn't enter service until 1920 and 1921, and the USA's Colorado, West Virginia and Maryland not until 1921-1923.
    That's correct - typo from me, they were from 15" gun turrets.

    Apologies, and well-spotted.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 23,434

    kamski said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    Must be terrible if you actually drive one of those nazimobiles these days.
    The thinking person's term is "Swasticar"

    I do confess to having offered a mild excuse to a party colleague on Saturday when they saw I drove a Tesla. I find Musk's politics to be embarrassingly absurd. And when I say embarrassed I mean for him - he's making an absolute tit of himself.

    But that doesn't impact onto his companies. I love my Tesla. Starlink has transformed my ability to do business. And I'm agog every time SpaceX smash another impossible mission goal. I think the hand-wringer types think that I should sell the Tesla and bin Starlink with the £££ and business costs being a suitable price for their morality. No thanks.

    And as its confessional time I love Michael Jackson music, think Kevin Spacey is a brilliant actor and enjoy Harry Potter. I know, I know...
    Imagine comparing JK Rowling to MJ, Elon Musk and Kevin Spacey. Vile.
    Both JK Rowling and Elon Musk believe that men cannot become women under any circumstances, surgical or otherwise, and agitate continously to that end. They are both billionaires and contribute portions of their wealth to that cause. In what way are they not comparable?
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,263
    I don't understand what 'centrist dad' means either.

    Googling it : 'Centrist dads are middle-aged men who cannot come to terms with the world and politics changing.'

    But what has that got to do with being centrist or whether or not you have children?
  • StockyStocky Posts: 10,263

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    I bet you never thought you'd end up the front line of the culture war for reviewing electric cars.
    Quite. Why simply disliking a company's owner/director/whatever should mean you will not, on principle, buy a product of said company is very odd to me.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 14,474

    slade said:

    We have 5 local by-elections tomorrow. There is a double Lab defence in Hammersmith and Fulham, Lab defences in East Ayrshire and Barking and Dagenham, and a Con defence in Colchester.

    Don't forget the by-election held last night! A LibDem hold in Brent: https://www.markpack.org.uk/174328/alperton-ward-brent-council-by-election/
    Ta. Where else but pb would we be alerted to local election results whimsically taking place on a non-Thursday? That's quite a swing against Labour there.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 50,169
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Apart from Trump’s despicable suggestion that Ukraine started the war, I’m not sure PB has fully absorbed the horror of the US’s attempt to impose a economic treaty on Ukraine, with terms worse than those imposed at Versailles on Germany.

    That document will go down in infamy, I can’t think of anything analogous in modern times.

    How is it going down Stateside?

    Any hints of "oops, we may have done a booboo" from the Republicans?
    I have been moving apartments through the weekend and barely spoken to anyone outside my family, so I can’t say.

    I think Americans are also a bit slow on the uptake, generally, and the stuff coming out of Trumpland is quite cognitively dissonant with how Americans see themselves in the world, so it goes almost ignored.

    Give it a few weeks.
    Mother-in-law has a birthday zoom call with much of the family last night and it does sound like there's a lot of denial of the situation in the US.

    You just can't analyse who Trump is and what he does as though he's a normal politician who has to keep the people who voted for him happy. Or is even interested in doing so.
    This isn't politics, its cultural survival. People can support the things that will directly damage them because they have been gaslit to believe that the things that may indirectly challenge their world view are worse and the other real things are just fake news.

    Several interesting pieces in the FT about American farming. They voted Trump in vast numbers and are now horrified about the direct impacts of tariffs and deporting their workers.

    They knew Trump would take these actions. They knew how devastating these actions would be, directly onto their farms, their businesses, their entire way of life - or at least they would know if they stopped to think.

    But how were they supposed to do that? The entire media they consume said not a word about these realities, instead focusing on the real life and death issues of how black men crash planes and how the Biden Crime Family are going to turn your son into a daughter one day at school.

    I await the "they lied to us" scene in Don't Look Up...
    That depends, if big landowning US farms see more US consumers buying their produce and food due to tariffs making imports more expensive that would be a net benefit for them. The average farmer in the Plains states or the Midwest and deep South won't export much abroad and most of their workers will be US born.

    Though that would also reduce choice and increase prices for US consumers.

    Indeed Starmer's family farms tax is probably more damaging to UK family farms than Trump's tariffs are to US family owned farms or agricorps
    You can say that. But *the farmers* are saying the opposite. You do have this tendency to tell people their business and that they have their business all wrong
    I read the article, one of those complaining most was a likely Democrat voting economist at a university not actually a farmer.

    The Corn Laws for example were welcomed by big landowners and landed gentry who owned lots of farmland as it increased prices and demand for their produce. It was consumers who resented them as they were the ones who had to pay the extra prices for bread and food.

    If you are a farmer who exports a lot from the US then obviously Trump's tariffs are bad news, if you mainly farm for the home market though you could well be a beneficiary
    Only if your workers are not migrants. Even farmers for a domestic audience need pickers, and there simply aren't enough domestic labourers.
  • NEW THREAD

  • kamskikamski Posts: 5,816
    edited February 19

    viewcode said:

    TDS continues. Latest comment on my channel: "I get it, it's a Tesla fanboy channel, people with no moral qualms about facilitating the the rise of Nazim in the USA and Europe. Have you resigned from the Lib Dems yet?"

    Erm, I'm not a fanboi - I upset those by taking the piss out of Musk and calling out Tesla flaws. And I'm facilitating what? How? And why would I resign from the LibDems?

    Too many self-righteous wazzocks out there, full of themselves and how all right-thinking people must think like them.

    (I didn't post that comment btw)

    Your channel is called "JustGetATesla". It's difficult to accurately characterise yourself as being anti-Musk when you are contributing to his company.
    It isn't his company though. He is the CEO and figurehead, he doesn't own it. Shareholders could vote him away if they wanted to and the board absolutely could fire him.
    The internet says Musk owns 13% of Tesla, and is the biggest shareholder . Is that not true?
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