I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
Which does nothing to address poverty as if 70% of people are failing to make ends meet, but with a short tail, then you have no poverty supposedly.
Whereas if you have everyone comfortably off, but with a long tail, you have lots of poverty supposedly.
Suppressing median wages should not be a way of "lowering poverty".
One of the big lessons of the Blair government was that there wasn't a target or a metric that couldn't be gamed. There's no such thing as a perfect way to measure things. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle means that it's impossible to measure anything without affecting the thing you are trying to measure.
So, we're only left with imperfect measurements. Defining poverty as 60% of median income is an imperfect measurement, and like you point out, it can be gamed in ways that are counterproductive. So we should be wary about elevating hitting it as the be-all and end-all. But, as long as we look at it in combination with other measurements, then I think it is useful, as it tells us something about our society.
It will be difficult for Farage to criticise a Kemi too much in light of his glowing praise for her when she first ran for the Tory leadership. I suppose he could say she has failed to deliver, but hopefully it leads to some sort of pact
I'd put that down as mistake by Nigel. When he was drenching Kemi with plaudits he was very much playing the role of the wise old statesman picking out a starlet for the distant future. But we've since had the Kemigasm, that future is now the present, and Nigel is fighting for his political survival. He needs her to fail. My God. He desperately needs her to fail.
He's also had relatively good words to say about Starmer in the past. That's just the kind of consensus politician he is.
People are frankly sick of the divisive approach of Labour and the Tories and want the gentler form of politics that he represents.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
Why would someone do that?
It's potentially very disruptive - eg rushing down an up escalator full of people.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
Why would someone do that?
It's potentially very disruptive - eg rushing down an up escalator full of people.
I’ve seen kids try to run up the down escalators as a challenge.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
We've all done it. And most of us have done it largely because it is not allowed. (But who else has done its vertical equivalent and been through the pit of a paternoster?)
I once reversed all the way round St. Ives. Could see where I wanted to get to, but it was all one way...
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
Why would someone do that?
It's potentially very disruptive - eg rushing down an up escalator full of people.
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers / devices.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
Why would someone do that?
It's potentially very disruptive - eg rushing down an up escalator full of people.
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
One way to find out would be to adopt a more Usonian approach to juries, which is far less buttoned down and expects members to take responsibility for excluding bias inside their own heads, rather than treating the whole thing with control freakery.
One downside is that their jury selection processes are interviews and assessments of up to hundreds of people.
This is disingenuous of LeftieStats. Green has dropped from 11% to 8% when comparing the latest Moreincommon 28Nov-1Dec to the previous Moreincommon 14-17 Nov
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
Thanks in advance.
Have a look at the Logi MX Keys for Business
Yes, logitec are solid keyboards, if you are not wanting a dongle make sure its bluetooth.
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers / devices.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
Thanks in advance. I suspect this means Logitech.
Apple do a small one and a large one (with numeric keypad). I use the large one. It is £179 though.
The key advantage is the including of a fingerprint sensor.
Edit: you save £50 if you don't care about the fingerprint bit.
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
Thanks in advance.
Have a look at the Logi MX Keys for Business
Yes, logitec are solid keyboards, if you are not wanting a dongle make sure its bluetooth.
Make sure it’s Mac version of the keyboard - most brands offer a version with the function keys etc to match.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
Which does nothing to address poverty as if 70% of people are failing to make ends meet, but with a short tail, then you have no poverty supposedly.
Whereas if you have everyone comfortably off, but with a long tail, you have lots of poverty supposedly.
Suppressing median wages should not be a way of "lowering poverty".
One of the big lessons of the Blair government was that there wasn't a target or a metric that couldn't be gamed. There's no such thing as a perfect way to measure things. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle means that it's impossible to measure anything without affecting the thing you are trying to measure.
So, we're only left with imperfect measurements. Defining poverty as 60% of median income is an imperfect measurement, and like you point out, it can be gamed in ways that are counterproductive. So we should be wary about elevating hitting it as the be-all and end-all. But, as long as we look at it in combination with other measurements, then I think it is useful, as it tells us something about our society.
Some people were going nuts that the metric on child poverty as laid down in the act, four measures, showed more or less continued reductions in poverty right through the coalition and a couple of years after.
So they would manufacture outrage by choosing one of the four measures that showed some kind of increase, or just as naughty, pick out a raw number. If you have a rapidly growing population you could easily put out a press release that there are 300,000 more children in poverty, whilst conveniently ignoring the reduction in the rate.
Poverty as measured is massively useless as an indicator, and it is word used to conjure up 19th century and early 20th century squaller. The more accurate term would be destitution, and this pretty much matches what people think of when the word poverty is used.
A trend worth keeping an eye on is the combined polling of Reform and Tory. At the GE of 2024 this was 39%. In this poll it is 52%, with the Tories 3.5 points lower than in the GE of 2024.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
We lock more people up than France and a lot more than Germany. It's hard to compare re-offending rates as different calculations are used. Table 1 at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235223000867 has a go and France has a slightly lower reoffending rate than the UK. Germany's 5-year rate is higher than England & Wales's 1-year rate, but that probably equates to a lower rate if you adjusted for time.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
We've all done it. And most of us have done it largely because it is not allowed. (But who else has done its vertical equivalent and been through the pit of a paternoster?)
I once reversed all the way round St. Ives. Could see where I wanted to get to, but it was all one way...
That would have made the how many were going to St Ives riddle more complex.
The current poll is being compared with a hypothetical MIC poll containing YP from July, not from the last MIC.
I know. That was the point I was making. They're picking the wrong comparator
Nah, YP are in the main prompts with this poll and the July poll, usually YP aren’t prompted, they are lumped in with others.
Delighted, if surprised, to see Yorkshire Party on 4% nationally. Assuming those voters are concentrated in Yorkshire, we'll likely see an SNP 2015-style near clean-sweep for YP. Bet accordingly (and DYOR!)
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
We lock more people up than France and a lot more than Germany. It's hard to compare re-offending rates as different calculations are used. Table 1 at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235223000867 has a go and France has a slightly lower reoffending rate than the UK. Germany's 5-year rate is higher than England & Wales's 1-year rate, but that probably equates to a lower rate if you adjusted for time.
The percentage of acquittals doesn’t vary much - in all first world countries, prosecution is only undertaken when there is a very, very high likelihood of conviction.
So numbers in prison doesn’t depend on jury trials or the lack of them.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
One way to find out would be to adopt a more Usonian approach to juries, which is far less buttoned down and expects members to take responsibility for excluding bias inside their own heads, rather than treating the whole thing with control freakery.
One downside is that their jury selection processes are interviews and assessments of up to hundreds of people.
One thing I noticed when doing jury service, albeit a decade ago, was the lack of real diversity among my fellow jurors. And I suspect this wasn't unconnected to the fact that we were all drawn from two demographically similar London boroughs.
It occurred to me at the time that someone facing a trial in rural Devon woud have a very different jury to someone who committed exactly the same crime in Lewisham. And that, possibly, justice shouldn't look like this.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
One way to find out would be to adopt a more Usonian approach to juries, which is far less buttoned down and expects members to take responsibility for excluding bias inside their own heads, rather than treating the whole thing with control freakery.
One downside is that their jury selection processes are interviews and assessments of up to hundreds of people.
One thing I noticed when doing jury service, albeit a decade ago, was the lack of real diversity among my fellow jurors. And I suspect this wasn't unconnected to the fact that we were all drawn from two demographically similar London boroughs.
It occurred to me at the time that someone facing a trial in rural Devon woud have a very different jury to someone who committed exactly the same crime in Lewisham. And that, possibly, justice shouldn't look like this.
Fortunately, the alternative, judges, are very diverse! Some of them went to Eton, while others went to Harrow.
There you go. All of you who have been criticising the relative measure, the Government has heard your prayers!
Let's hope it takes into account Barbara Castle's famous 1958 comment about how "the real poverty the Labour Party was set up to conquer has almost completely been eradicated".
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers / devices.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
Thanks in advance. I suspect this means Logitech.
Apple do a small one and a large one (with numeric keypad). I use the large one. It is £179 though.
The key advantage is the including of a fingerprint sensor.
Edit: you save £50 if you don't care about the fingerprint bit.
Thanks for your reply.
Since it's a MacBook I have the fingerprint sensor on the Macbook.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
One way to find out would be to adopt a more Usonian approach to juries, which is far less buttoned down and expects members to take responsibility for excluding bias inside their own heads, rather than treating the whole thing with control freakery.
One downside is that their jury selection processes are interviews and assessments of up to hundreds of people.
One thing I noticed when doing jury service, albeit a decade ago, was the lack of real diversity among my fellow jurors. And I suspect this wasn't unconnected to the fact that we were all drawn from two demographically similar London boroughs.
It occurred to me at the time that someone facing a trial in rural Devon woud have a very different jury to someone who committed exactly the same crime in Lewisham. And that, possibly, justice shouldn't look like this.
"You leave the dock with no stain on your character save that of being acquitted by a Snaresbrook jury". Apocryphal judge, but there are reasons for the story.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
One way to find out would be to adopt a more Usonian approach to juries, which is far less buttoned down and expects members to take responsibility for excluding bias inside their own heads, rather than treating the whole thing with control freakery.
One downside is that their jury selection processes are interviews and assessments of up to hundreds of people.
One thing I noticed when doing jury service, albeit a decade ago, was the lack of real diversity among my fellow jurors. And I suspect this wasn't unconnected to the fact that we were all drawn from two demographically similar London boroughs.
It occurred to me at the time that someone facing a trial in rural Devon woud have a very different jury to someone who committed exactly the same crime in Lewisham. And that, possibly, justice shouldn't look like this.
That's because you've been watching too much TV which has a whole industry of counters to make sure the output is the way they wish the country was rather than is.
Juries are selected randomly from the electoral role, and that is why Government's dont like them, because you can't fudge it, you can't reality show it to get the balance you wish the world was.
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
'Relative' is, I think you'll find, an important part of the term 'relative poverty'.
If everyone in the UK earned £100 a year there wouldn't be a government to measure poverty in the first place. It's a facile observation.
No measure is perfect, but there's no doubt that an income if 60% median is pretty tough, and there's a decent rationale for it given the current structure of our labour market, welfare system and economy. Other options are available and I look forward to Morris_Dancer explaining which is best.
Here is someone's calculation. TLDR The National Living Wage does not achieve this. QED minimum wages have to rise again* and QED2. Companies with a high labour content need to plan how to increase productivity or die**
According to this, for a 'minimum income standard' a couple with two children (pre school and primary) need an annual post income tax income of £64,767.
I know a lot of lovely mostly WWC people standing with me in the playground collecting children in north Cumberland who would find that a fascinating piece of information about life on planet Zarg.
Mad. Isn't it. Most people know there is something wrong with the benefits system but can't put their finger on it. So different theories emerge.
As a starting point, those receiving "working age" benefits are in work. This essentially means that the taxpayer is paying UK businesses a subsidy for employing people and quite a large one.
The second point, as illustrated by the graphs earlier, is that productivity has been forecast to grow in the UK but never does. So every budget that assumes future productivity growth is very likely to be wrong.
So what is the best way to grow productivity? Essentially you have to make work pay be reducing the compression that has built up between being in a job and on benefits. Some argue, freeze or reduce benefits but this doesn't address the issue of productivity which is the difference between the relative cost of labour versus capital. Normally in a capitalist society, this happens all the time as second nature but it's broken in the UK and has been for some time.
So time to reduce all those subsides to companies who threaten to leave. Allow then to go and take their low value, low productivity jobs with them.
I Know I keep mentioning the Speenhamland System. Which startled me when I first read about it. Taxpayers subsidising rich bastards not to pay their workers properly ( and even then the workers half-starved).
But historians keep saying it was a Bad Thing, like truck payments, the Norman idea of urban-improving Hartlepool, etc. etc.
Yet now it's almost the default.
If you talk to people in and around governments they will tell you that a real crackdown on sub-minimum wage jobs will “collapse chunks of the economy”.
See my idea to go after the employers for being scumbags.
The reality is that, like expensive & scarce housing, change is blocked by huge vested interests. And often, those vested interests are us.
This is the state capture of the productive parts of the economy to establish a client base to keep the government types in a job.
There are a lot of jobs in the civil service whose main task is to ensure that you get £0.99 in benefits and not £1.00. Checks on bank statements, letters to employers, raids on factories, HMRC payroll checks and there will be more in the forthcoming Employee Rights Act. Having spent about 8 years, at my own cost, voluntarily* helping people get benefits. I gave up when Rishi started hosing money at people struggling not due to the 'cost of living' but struggling due to not paying people properly.
We are not in the 70's/80's when governments would be toppled due to the numbers of unemployed. Our demographics are much, much different and bringing people in to suppress productivity is just bonkers.
* I could volunteer as I've spend a life ensuring jobs are productive. Each job supports a family not just the individual, so you are letting down families, children and their prospects by not addressing the productivity issues. Benefits are not the scandal. The timidity of governments are.
I see that the proposed Jury trial compromise is to "sentences likrly more than 3 years", plus a raised Upper Sentencing limit for magistrates, and various chinless wonders suggesting that this is the end of the world.
Richard Burgon (Lab) says the prospect of someone being jailed for three years without a jury hearing the case “sends a chill through my heart”. He suggest this is the sort of thing that would happen in Putin’s Russia.
I'd like to see a separation of the argument that it's a good thing, from the argument we should do it because there's a backlog. These are being deliberately conflated by the government. Are we getting jury trials back when the backlog is cleared? Of course not.
I agree that the arguments are being conflated. That said, I'm not convinced that jury trials deliver a better (more accurate) result. It's difficult to think of a way to prove it either way, but perhaps reoffending rates would be interesting, in the UK vs say France or Germany.
One way to find out would be to adopt a more Usonian approach to juries, which is far less buttoned down and expects members to take responsibility for excluding bias inside their own heads, rather than treating the whole thing with control freakery.
One downside is that their jury selection processes are interviews and assessments of up to hundreds of people.
One thing I noticed when doing jury service, albeit a decade ago, was the lack of real diversity among my fellow jurors. And I suspect this wasn't unconnected to the fact that we were all drawn from two demographically similar London boroughs.
It occurred to me at the time that someone facing a trial in rural Devon woud have a very different jury to someone who committed exactly the same crime in Lewisham. And that, possibly, justice shouldn't look like this.
"You leave the dock with no stain on your character save that of being acquitted by a Snaresbrook jury". Apocryphal judge, but there are reasons for the story.
For some things - like ripping down a statue - I think it's absolutely fine. For other things, it's not.
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers / devices.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
Thanks in advance. I suspect this means Logitech.
Apple do a small one and a large one (with numeric keypad). I use the large one. It is £179 though.
The key advantage is the including of a fingerprint sensor.
Edit: you save £50 if you don't care about the fingerprint bit.
Thanks for your reply.
Since it's a MacBook I have the fingerprint sensor on the Macbook.
Ah, yes. I was thinking of a clamshell setup. I use an external monitor and mouse too, and the macbook lid is closed - hence no access to the fingerprint sensor.
Moving the keyboard between devices is, as I remember it, fairly simple. But it's been a while since I've had to do it.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
Why would someone do that?
It's potentially very disruptive - eg rushing down an up escalator full of people.
I’ve seen kids try to run up the down escalators as a challenge.
We’ve all done it, but one suspects that doing it in a quiet department store goes down differently to doing it in a busy tube station, and that this lady was making a nuisance of herself that caused other passengers to have to avoid her.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
Why would someone do that?
It's potentially very disruptive - eg rushing down an up escalator full of people.
I’ve seen kids try to run up the down escalators as a challenge.
Getting on and off an escalator is a challenge these days for me
Indeed I avoid them
How mobility can change so quickly when as my doctor said apologetically, that she was referring me to the falls clinic run for the elderly to which my response was at 81 I am elderly !!!!!
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Truth? Too nuanced and complex. What they really want is for everyone to parrot the new narrative, e.g
- every single Liverpool fan at Hillsborough was an innocent victim and a wonderful person who never did anything wrong and certainly had nothing to do with an entirely unrelated Heysel incident.
- every single police officer there was a fascist bully scum.
- every single journalist reporting on it had evil intentions.
...and so on. This is the 'stunning and brave' version of 'truth' that we all must accept without question.
That is not what we are being asked to believe.
- The authorities knew very well there was a problem with football hooliganism which is why they were under an obligation to ensure that the steps taken were effective and safe. They failed in that. - We know exactly who died at Hillsborough. Do you have evidence that any of them were at Heysel or responsible for the rioting there? - The police did not do their job as well as they should have done. Some lied. Others tried to cover up what happened. - Journalists jumped to conclusions and wrote stories they had been fed by the police without doing any checking. - It took one hell of an effort to get the truth out of the authorities. That compounded a sense of victimhood, which was entirely justified for the families of those who died. - The fact that some of those at that football match have been less than saints does not justify anything the authorities did. Nor the untrue statements they made about those present who did not die.
Just to absolutely precise, my initial point was not that anyone who died at Hillsborough was responsible for Heysel. Read what I wrote. In the main the ones who died at Hillsborough were more likely to have been early to the ground and thus at the front of the cages.
My point was that the Liverpool (and all other English hooligans) created the culture where cages were needed at all.
And my point is that it's wilfully naive to assume that Death was somehow able to pick and choose, and only take innocent fans who did nothing to contribute to said hooligan culture.
Football in the 80s was pretty horrible. The violence and brutality might've been overstated, but it wasn't non-existent. Statistically, the crowd at an FA Cup semi would've almost certainly included some absolutely horrendous examples of wrongun. Why can't we be candid about this?
Even now there are some complete arsehole football supporters. Every team has them. Mine is no exception. They might be on the same side as me, but I see and hear fans in the stands near me and think 'Christ, you absolute cunt.' Embarrassing, but it's not going to change any time soon.
And everyone says nice things about the recently dead. If we took all eulogies at face value, no unpleasant people ever died. Every victim is a saint and there's no middle ground. See also Sir George Floyd.
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers / devices.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
Insider says only hull redesign can save British Ajax
https://defence-blog.com/insider-says-only-hull-redesign-can-save-british-ajax/ ...The insider believes the only realistic technical fix would require deep structural changes. “The Commander of the Armoured Trials & Development Unit (ATDU) told his superiors in 2020 that the only way to fix Ajax was to redesign the hull (including the engine mountings) and the running gear. He also suggested adopting Horstman’s hydro-pneumatic suspension and composite rubber tracks.” The Army did not pursue this option.
In the source’s view, “this is the ONLY viable fix.” Without such work, the programme is unlikely to deliver a functioning AFV. The insider also pointed to a related example: “General Dynamics has fixed Ajax. It’s called the M10 Booker.” The company initially considered using the Ajax chassis for Booker but determined “that it wasn’t up to the job,” leading to a new design...
The US terminated the Booker program back in June this year.
Dead on arrival: Army pulls plug on M10 Booker light tank https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/06/12/dead-on-arrival-army-pulls-plug-on-m10-booker-light-tank/ ..“This concept of sunk cost fallacy, it is a thing that human beings generally struggle with, which is if you’ve invested a lot in the past, and we do this in our personal lives, you get anchored to things that are suboptimal for the future,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told Defense News in a June 9 interview at the Pentagon. The Booker was “intended to be a light tank that served all of these new purposes,” he said. “It ended up medium. I don’t think the manufacturer liked it all that much, and we, the Army as a customer, kind of helped create this Frankenstein that came to be.”..
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
We've all done it. And most of us have done it largely because it is not allowed. (But who else has done its vertical equivalent and been through the pit of a paternoster?)
Me! University building had a paternoster. Naturally everyone did it...
This kind of thing definitely needs to go to a jury. Was it aggravated wrong directioning, or just casual?
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
If you make life worse for the median worker, you can certainly reduce "poverty", by that measure.
But the lefties will feel oh so good about themselves having eliminated poverty by making everyone poor.
But no one here is suggesting that's the best way to do it. Obviously. Because it doesn't improve the lot of people on low incomes.
If you don't like idea of trying to get people out of deprivation then own it. Don't hide behind mathematical gotchas.
Actually anyone defending this metric is defending that as a way of doing it.
And it is quite literally what politicians on both sides of the aisle have been doing in recent decades, chasing headlines over this stupid measure.
There was a comment a few days ago quoted by someone that compared a newly qualified teacher to minimum wage over time. Previously they were on 85% more than minimum wage, whereas now they're on 35% more than minimum wage. That's before taking into account things like student loans that the graduate is required to have.
Looking at it another way, previously the minimum wage was 54% of that income, whereas now it is 74% of it, thus meaning it has "reduced poverty".
That is not simply as the minimum wage has risen in real terms (it has) but because the teacher's salary has fallen in real terms (it has).
This wage suppression has occurred in industry after industry across the country. Ever higher proportions of the economy have seen their real incomes fall, and the delta between qualified or promoted individuals salaries and minimum wage has been falling across the board in many sectors, which has lowered living standards while supposedly reducing poverty.
This wage suppression happened because of austerity following the great financial crash, which Britain has never truly recovered from. It wasn't done as a policy to compress wage scales to reduce poverty. The Tories who were in government for most of that time often derided the relative poverty measure, so it would be pretty weird if they based government economic policy on achieving it.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
We've all done it. And most of us have done it largely because it is not allowed. (But who else has done its vertical equivalent and been through the pit of a paternoster?)
Me! University building had a paternoster. Naturally everyone did it...
This kind of thing definitely needs to go to a jury. Was it aggravated wrong directioning, or just casual?
Germany still has over 200 systems. They don't exist outside of Europe.
Insider says only hull redesign can save British Ajax
https://defence-blog.com/insider-says-only-hull-redesign-can-save-british-ajax/ ...The insider believes the only realistic technical fix would require deep structural changes. “The Commander of the Armoured Trials & Development Unit (ATDU) told his superiors in 2020 that the only way to fix Ajax was to redesign the hull (including the engine mountings) and the running gear. He also suggested adopting Horstman’s hydro-pneumatic suspension and composite rubber tracks.” The Army did not pursue this option.
In the source’s view, “this is the ONLY viable fix.” Without such work, the programme is unlikely to deliver a functioning AFV. The insider also pointed to a related example: “General Dynamics has fixed Ajax. It’s called the M10 Booker.” The company initially considered using the Ajax chassis for Booker but determined “that it wasn’t up to the job,” leading to a new design...
The US terminated the Booker program back in June this year.
Dead on arrival: Army pulls plug on M10 Booker light tank https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/06/12/dead-on-arrival-army-pulls-plug-on-m10-booker-light-tank/ ..“This concept of sunk cost fallacy, it is a thing that human beings generally struggle with, which is if you’ve invested a lot in the past, and we do this in our personal lives, you get anchored to things that are suboptimal for the future,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told Defense News in a June 9 interview at the Pentagon. The Booker was “intended to be a light tank that served all of these new purposes,” he said. “It ended up medium. I don’t think the manufacturer liked it all that much, and we, the Army as a customer, kind of helped create this Frankenstein that came to be.”..
The solution to Ajax’s manifest issues is simple: buy a fleet of CV90s. It will almost certainly be cheaper over the lifetime of the system to do that than to a) redesign Ajax to not deafen everyone without a 10km range & b) maintain a UK-specific IFV for the next fifty years.
Odds on this happening are very long unfortunately, but who knows? Maybe sanity will break out in the MoD?
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Truth? Too nuanced and complex. What they really want is for everyone to parrot the new narrative, e.g
- every single Liverpool fan at Hillsborough was an innocent victim and a wonderful person who never did anything wrong and certainly had nothing to do with an entirely unrelated Heysel incident.
- every single police officer there was a fascist bully scum.
- every single journalist reporting on it had evil intentions.
...and so on. This is the 'stunning and brave' version of 'truth' that we all must accept without question.
That is not what we are being asked to believe.
- The authorities knew very well there was a problem with football hooliganism which is why they were under an obligation to ensure that the steps taken were effective and safe. They failed in that. - We know exactly who died at Hillsborough. Do you have evidence that any of them were at Heysel or responsible for the rioting there? - The police did not do their job as well as they should have done. Some lied. Others tried to cover up what happened. - Journalists jumped to conclusions and wrote stories they had been fed by the police without doing any checking. - It took one hell of an effort to get the truth out of the authorities. That compounded a sense of victimhood, which was entirely justified for the families of those who died. - The fact that some of those at that football match have been less than saints does not justify anything the authorities did. Nor the untrue statements they made about those present who did not die.
Just to absolutely precise, my initial point was not that anyone who died at Hillsborough was responsible for Heysel. Read what I wrote. In the main the ones who died at Hillsborough were more likely to have been early to the ground and thus at the front of the cages.
My point was that the Liverpool (and all other English hooligans) created the culture where cages were needed at all.
And my point is that it's wilfully naive to assume that Death was somehow able to pick and choose, and only take innocent fans who did nothing to contribute to said hooligan culture.
Football in the 80s was pretty horrible. The violence and brutality might've been overstated, but it wasn't non-existent. Statistically, the crowd at an FA Cup semi would've almost certainly included some absolutely horrendous examples of wrongun. Why can't we be candid about this?
Even now there are some complete arsehole football supporters. Every team has them. Mine is no exception. They might be on the same side as me, but I see and hear fans in the stands near me and think 'Christ, you absolute c***.' Embarrassing, but it's not going to change any time soon.
And everyone says nice things about the recently dead. If we took all eulogies at face value, no unpleasant people ever died. Every victim is a saint and there's no middle ground. See also Sir George Floyd.
Why did the problems at Hillsborough only affect the Liverpool fans? I think Forest had an equal allocation of tickets.
You only ever hear the hagiographies for the dead Liverpool fans. They weren't killed by Forest fans trying to squeeze in. For once it would be nice to hear an acknowledgement that Liverpool fans were killed by Liverpool fans. And have some sympathy for the Forest fans, equally traumatised by watching the events unfold as the crushed were laid out on the pitch in an open-air morgue.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Meanwhile in the real world women live in - https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/sarah-everard-inquiry-news-0dlwjtvxx "Women’s lives are “at stake” because police chiefs and ministers are failing to stop predatory men committing sexually motivated crimes in public, a report has warned. Basic questions about the scale of rape, sexual assaults and indecent exposure “cannot be answered” because data collection is “patchy and difficult to obtain”, the Angiolini inquiry found.
....
Addressing police chiefs and ministers, Angiolini said: “I continue to be worried about [women’s] safety in public spaces. There is no better time to act than now. I want leaders to, quite simply, get a move on. There are lives at stake.
“My report sets out how sexually-motivated crimes against women remain widespread across public spaces in England and Wales, yet efforts to prevent them are fragmented, underfunded and overly-reliant on short-term solutions."
Previous recommendations not implemented etc, a failure described as "deeply disappointing". And so on.
File under: Women. Don't Count - Example 5381.
Cyclefree as ever is quick to call out men for raping and murdering women but she says nothing about the modern plague of female escalator crime.
TfL passenger to stand trial after she's charged with walking wrong way on escalator ... Michaela Copeland was charged with "walking on an escalator in the wrong direction" at North Greenwich Underground Station on the Transport for London (TfL) regional railway network on Thursday, November 27. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tfl-passenger-stand-trial-after-36336912
Up to £1000 fine.
We've all done it. And most of us have done it largely because it is not allowed. (But who else has done its vertical equivalent and been through the pit of a paternoster?)
Me! University building had a paternoster. Naturally everyone did it...
This kind of thing definitely needs to go to a jury. Was it aggravated wrong directioning, or just casual?
Germany still has over 200 systems. They don't exist outside of Europe.
I'm surprised there are any left in service in the UK but it seems there are one or two still going.
The one in the Arts Tower in Sheffield must be a bit tedious, as they are rather slow and there are a lot of floors.
They must have lots of sensors these days otherwise health and safety would shut them down immediately.
Insider says only hull redesign can save British Ajax
https://defence-blog.com/insider-says-only-hull-redesign-can-save-british-ajax/ ...The insider believes the only realistic technical fix would require deep structural changes. “The Commander of the Armoured Trials & Development Unit (ATDU) told his superiors in 2020 that the only way to fix Ajax was to redesign the hull (including the engine mountings) and the running gear. He also suggested adopting Horstman’s hydro-pneumatic suspension and composite rubber tracks.” The Army did not pursue this option.
In the source’s view, “this is the ONLY viable fix.” Without such work, the programme is unlikely to deliver a functioning AFV. The insider also pointed to a related example: “General Dynamics has fixed Ajax. It’s called the M10 Booker.” The company initially considered using the Ajax chassis for Booker but determined “that it wasn’t up to the job,” leading to a new design...
The US terminated the Booker program back in June this year.
Dead on arrival: Army pulls plug on M10 Booker light tank https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/06/12/dead-on-arrival-army-pulls-plug-on-m10-booker-light-tank/ ..“This concept of sunk cost fallacy, it is a thing that human beings generally struggle with, which is if you’ve invested a lot in the past, and we do this in our personal lives, you get anchored to things that are suboptimal for the future,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told Defense News in a June 9 interview at the Pentagon. The Booker was “intended to be a light tank that served all of these new purposes,” he said. “It ended up medium. I don’t think the manufacturer liked it all that much, and we, the Army as a customer, kind of helped create this Frankenstein that came to be.”..
The solution to Ajax’s manifest issues is simple: buy a fleet of CV90s. It will almost certainly be cheaper over the lifetime of the system to do that than to a) redesign Ajax to not deafen everyone without a 10km range & b) maintain a UK-specific IFV for the next fifty years.
Odds on this happening are very long unfortunately, but who knows? Maybe sanity will break out in the MoD?
Yup. Just bin the programme rather than throwing good money after bad.
Order the CV90 and have BAe set up a British production line to build them.
The Online Safety Act and now trials without juries..💩 The authoritarianism just keeps on coming to a degree no-one would thought possible 10 years ago..🧐
Comments
So, we're only left with imperfect measurements. Defining poverty as 60% of median income is an imperfect measurement, and like you point out, it can be gamed in ways that are counterproductive. So we should be wary about elevating hitting it as the be-all and end-all. But, as long as we look at it in combination with other measurements, then I think it is useful, as it tells us something about our society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhgPyDirRrM
It's potentially very disruptive - eg rushing down an up escalator full of people.
2) Because it looks cool (see 1:17 onwards here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8&list=RDwCDIYvFmgW8&start_radio=1).
3) As a challenge.
4) Sheer bloody-mindedness.
Does anyone have any recommendations for an external keyboard for a Macbook?
Requirements are: comfortable typing, preferably separate number keypad, ideally remote connection without a dongle, and also ideally ability to switch between different computers / devices.
I'm comfortable using the keypad on the machine itself whilst travelling.
Thanks in advance. I suspect this means Logitech.
On no 2) Rick Astley is cooler. *
* That's a comment on Fatboy Slim being very uncool, not the other way round
One downside is that their jury selection processes are interviews and assessments of up to hundreds of people.
The key advantage is the including of a fingerprint sensor.
Edit: you save £50 if you don't care about the fingerprint bit.
So they would manufacture outrage by choosing one of the four measures that showed some kind of increase, or just as naughty, pick out a raw number. If you have a rapidly growing population you could easily put out a press release that there are 300,000 more children in poverty, whilst conveniently ignoring the reduction in the rate.
Poverty as measured is massively useless as an indicator, and it is word used to conjure up 19th century and early 20th century squaller. The more accurate term would be destitution, and this pretty much matches what people think of when the word poverty is used.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002mqln/fake-friend-the-ticket-scammer
So numbers in prison doesn’t depend on jury trials or the lack of them.
It occurred to me at the time that someone facing a trial in rural Devon woud have a very different jury to someone who committed exactly the same crime in Lewisham. And that, possibly, justice shouldn't look like this.
Since it's a MacBook I have the fingerprint sensor on the Macbook.
Juries are selected randomly from the electoral role, and that is why Government's dont like them, because you can't fudge it, you can't reality show it to get the balance you wish the world was.
There are a lot of jobs in the civil service whose main task is to ensure that you get £0.99 in benefits and not £1.00. Checks on bank statements, letters to employers, raids on factories, HMRC payroll checks and there will be more in the forthcoming Employee Rights Act. Having spent about 8 years, at my own cost, voluntarily* helping people get benefits. I gave up when Rishi started hosing money at people struggling not due to the 'cost of living' but struggling due to not paying people properly.
We are not in the 70's/80's when governments would be toppled due to the numbers of unemployed. Our demographics are much, much different and bringing people in to suppress productivity is just bonkers.
* I could volunteer as I've spend a life ensuring jobs are productive. Each job supports a family not just the individual, so you are letting down families, children and their prospects by not addressing the productivity issues. Benefits are not the scandal. The timidity of governments are.
Moving the keyboard between devices is, as I remember it, fairly simple. But it's been a while since I've had to do it.
NEW THREAD
Indeed I avoid them
How mobility can change so quickly when as my doctor said apologetically, that she was referring me to the falls clinic run for the elderly to which my response was at 81 I am elderly !!!!!
Football in the 80s was pretty horrible. The violence and brutality might've been overstated, but it wasn't non-existent. Statistically, the crowd at an FA Cup semi would've almost certainly included some absolutely horrendous examples of wrongun. Why can't we be candid about this?
Even now there are some complete arsehole football supporters. Every team has them. Mine is no exception. They might be on the same side as me, but I see and hear fans in the stands near me and think 'Christ, you absolute cunt.' Embarrassing, but it's not going to change any time soon.
And everyone says nice things about the recently dead. If we took all eulogies at face value, no unpleasant people ever died. Every victim is a saint and there's no middle ground. See also Sir George Floyd.
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/p/mx-keys-mac-wireless-keyboard
Insider says only hull redesign can save British Ajax
https://defence-blog.com/insider-says-only-hull-redesign-can-save-british-ajax/
...The insider believes the only realistic technical fix would require deep structural changes. “The Commander of the Armoured Trials & Development Unit (ATDU) told his superiors in 2020 that the only way to fix Ajax was to redesign the hull (including the engine mountings) and the running gear. He also suggested adopting Horstman’s hydro-pneumatic suspension and composite rubber tracks.” The Army did not pursue this option.
In the source’s view, “this is the ONLY viable fix.” Without such work, the programme is unlikely to deliver a functioning AFV. The insider also pointed to a related example: “General Dynamics has fixed Ajax. It’s called the M10 Booker.” The company initially considered using the Ajax chassis for Booker but determined “that it wasn’t up to the job,” leading to a new design...
The US terminated the Booker program back in June this year.
Dead on arrival: Army pulls plug on M10 Booker light tank
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/06/12/dead-on-arrival-army-pulls-plug-on-m10-booker-light-tank/
..“This concept of sunk cost fallacy, it is a thing that human beings generally struggle with, which is if you’ve invested a lot in the past, and we do this in our personal lives, you get anchored to things that are suboptimal for the future,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told Defense News in a June 9 interview at the Pentagon.
The Booker was “intended to be a light tank that served all of these new purposes,” he said. “It ended up medium. I don’t think the manufacturer liked it all that much, and we, the Army as a customer, kind of helped create this Frankenstein that came to be.”..
This kind of thing definitely needs to go to a jury. Was it aggravated wrong directioning, or just casual?
They don't exist outside of Europe.
Odds on this happening are very long unfortunately, but who knows? Maybe sanity will break out in the MoD?
You only ever hear the hagiographies for the dead Liverpool fans. They weren't killed by Forest fans trying to squeeze in. For once it would be nice to hear an acknowledgement that Liverpool fans were killed by Liverpool fans. And have some sympathy for the Forest fans, equally traumatised by watching the events unfold as the crushed were laid out on the pitch in an open-air morgue.
The one in the Arts Tower in Sheffield must be a bit tedious, as they are rather slow and there are a lot of floors.
They must have lots of sensors these days otherwise health and safety would shut them down immediately.
Order the CV90 and have BAe set up a British production line to build them.