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The LDs have a better than 6% chance of taking Chesham & Amersham – politicalbetting.com

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  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,354

    ydoethur said:

    Its getting very frustrating hearing the media reporting how many cases of the Indian variant using cumulative rather than new totals.

    Sky talking about how there are nearly 3,500 cases of the Indian variant - which sounds like a lot, until you realise that there were 2,874 daily cases today. So 122% of today's cases sound like they were from the Indian variant.

    What a stupid way of reporting it. Report the increase not the cumulative. 🤦‍♂️

    Journalists have throughout this pandemic demonstrated a grasp of mathematics that would make the average civil servant at the DfE blush.

    Any time they run out of fingers they struggle.
    They should start wearing open-toed sandals year round!
    But surely declaring their allegiance to the Liberal Democrats like that would breach impartiality rules?
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 26,174
    Pulpstar said:

    Evening from a pub !

    How busy is it? We went out for a meal in the Surrey Hills on Tuesday night and it was very quiet.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,468
    edited May 2021

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Brand and first mover advantage
    Perceived as buying for the future
    Absurd amounts of liquidity that need to deployed
    And there was me thinking it was the oat equivalent of a micro-brewery!
    The amount of IP protected technology development needed to effectively milk an oat is astounding. It’s a Tesla-seque step change.
    According to my Google search, you steep the oats in water, crush it into a pulp, then strain off the solids. It that what you mean by protected IP?
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 18,354
    TimT said:

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Brand and first mover advantage
    Perceived as buying for the future
    Absurd amounts of liquidity that need to deployed
    And there was me thinking it was the oat equivalent of a micro-brewery!
    The amount of IP protected technology development needed to effectively milk an oat is astounding. It’s a Tesla-seque step change.
    According to my Google search, you steep the oats in water, crush it into a pulp, then strain off the solids. It that what you mean by protected IP?
    Mmm, yes, but then you have to do a whole bunch of other things to it to make it even halfway palatable and inoffensive to look at.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 78,174
    tlg86 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Evening from a pub !

    How busy is it? We went out for a meal in the Surrey Hills on Tuesday night and it was very quiet.
    14 of us from the running club here round 3 tables perhaps 6 others in whole pub
  • No_Offence_AlanNo_Offence_Alan Posts: 4,513
    moonshine said:

    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.

    Let me guess the conclusion - more budget needed for military/NASA?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,627

    TimT said:

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Brand and first mover advantage
    Perceived as buying for the future
    Absurd amounts of liquidity that need to deployed
    And there was me thinking it was the oat equivalent of a micro-brewery!
    The amount of IP protected technology development needed to effectively milk an oat is astounding. It’s a Tesla-seque step change.
    According to my Google search, you steep the oats in water, crush it into a pulp, then strain off the solids. It that what you mean by protected IP?
    Mmm, yes, but then you have to do a whole bunch of other things to it to make it even halfway palatable and inoffensive to look at.
    I am quite a fan of oatmilk and use it on cereal. It keeps well and is low carbon and high fibre. Nice and creamy in a cappuccino too.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747

    moonshine said:

    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.

    Let me guess the conclusion - more budget needed for military/NASA?
    I don’t know if you’ve ever followed US politics and foreign affairs before. But it turns out there are far more effective ways of motivating for higher military spending than concocting a cross party conspiracy theory that aliens are buzzing carrier groups.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
  • AnExileinD4AnExileinD4 Posts: 337
    TimT said:

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Brand and first mover advantage
    Perceived as buying for the future
    Absurd amounts of liquidity that need to deployed
    And there was me thinking it was the oat equivalent of a micro-brewery!
    The amount of IP protected technology development needed to effectively milk an oat is astounding. It’s a Tesla-seque step change.
    According to my Google search, you steep the oats in water, crush it into a pulp, then strain off the solids. It that what you mean by protected IP?
    Amusement at an inflated valuation for business which trades solely on its name, not IP protection and is not direct B2C doesn’t carry well. I’m sure it’s not the next pets.com but equally I’m sure that it’s not the new Facebook.
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    TimT said:

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Brand and first mover advantage
    Perceived as buying for the future
    Absurd amounts of liquidity that need to deployed
    And there was me thinking it was the oat equivalent of a micro-brewery!
    The amount of IP protected technology development needed to effectively milk an oat is astounding. It’s a Tesla-seque step change.
    According to my Google search, you steep the oats in water, crush it into a pulp, then strain off the solids. It that what you mean by protected IP?
    That's one way, and VERY cruel to the oat.

    Surely MUCH more humane (and eco-friendly) method of obtaining oat milk, is the same old-school, hands-on approach used to milk cows, goats, badgers, etc, etc?

    Which in the case of oats- wild or otherwise - is indeed challenging!
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,773

    Cookie said:

    Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.

    A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.

    LOL. Wishful thinking.

    I actually have a lot of time for the traditional counties but putting boundaries down the middle of rivers in the middle of big cities is senseless. Just as London is rightfully one unit (rather than split between Surrey and Middlesex) so should be Newcastle.

    By the way, guess what, it's generational? In his excellent book Engel's England Matthew Engels was dismayed to find younger people baffled by the idea that Barnoldswick* was in Yorkshire.

    Engels asked 10 people which county it was in:

    Four said Lancashire, three said Yorkshire and three didn't care... A teenage girl kindly switched off her iPad to talk to me and looked disgusted."Yorkshire? It's just the elderly people who think that."


    (*It's been in Lancashire since 1974, whatever the 'Yorkshire Riding Society' – er, who? – might wish to be the case)

    Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.

    A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.

    LOL. Wishful thinking.

    I actually have a lot of time for the traditional counties but putting boundaries down the middle of rivers in the middle of big cities is senseless. Just as London is rightfully one unit (rather than split between Surrey and Middlesex) so should be Newcastle.

    By the way, guess what, it's generational? In his excellent book Engel's England Matthew Engels was dismayed to find younger people baffled by the idea that Barnoldswick* was in Yorkshire.

    Engels asked 10 people which county it was in:

    Four said Lancashire, three said Yorkshire and three didn't care... A teenage girl kindly switched off her iPad to talk to me and looked disgusted."Yorkshire? It's just the elderly people who think that."


    (*It's been in Lancashire since 1974, whatever the 'Yorkshire Riding Society' – er, who? – might wish to be the case)
    But local government boundaries don't need to match county boundaries. I have no qualms with dividing Cheshire/Lancashire down the Mersey while letting Trafford Council collect the bins on both sides.
    It makes no sense for me whatsoever to have Cheshire/Lancashire divided down the Mersey when it comes to eg Warrington which spans both sides of the water now.

    Warrington itself originally may be north of the river, but whether north or south of it, its one town, and it makes far more sense for me to consider Warrington as part of Cheshire than Lancashire.
    I still consider Liverpool to be in Lancashire.
    Warrington is Lancashire.. it was historically in Lancashire just like Liverpool and Manchester. Cheshire Proper is south of the M56
    I think the Merseyside was the historical boundary rather than a motorway not built until the 1970s!
    So the southern suburbs of Warrington -Stockton Heath, Grappenhall - are on the Cheshire side.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.

    Let me guess the conclusion - more budget needed for military/NASA?
    I don’t know if you’ve ever followed US politics and foreign affairs before. But it turns out there are far more effective ways of motivating for higher military spending than concocting a cross party conspiracy theory that aliens are buzzing carrier groups.
    Many ways, and press hype is indeed among the most cost-effective.

    Will be interesting to see what the report actually says, when it's actually released. Certainly won't be the first on this topic. Or the last.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758
    Omnium said:

    glw said:

    R4 "AZ highly effective against the Indian variant" - real world data from India.

    So AZ is a top-notch vaccine, effective against current variants, and the 12 week dosing was a very good idea. Of course AZ is also cheap and easy to deploy. Could the many critics of the UK's approach to vaccination — including all sorts of prestigous bodies — have been more wrong? No, they are chumps.
    Be quiet spreading all your pseudo-science.....we all know it is only quasi effective.
    It's a brilliant vaccine. It may turn out that there are other vaccines that are better, but to call it quasi-effective isn't on really.
    To be fair, from a French perspective, nothing the Brits do is effective. Since the Wallenbergs only own 20% of AstraZeneca then by definition the vaccine can only be quasi effective
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.

    Let me guess the conclusion - more budget needed for military/NASA?
    I don’t know if you’ve ever followed US politics and foreign affairs before. But it turns out there are far more effective ways of motivating for higher military spending than concocting a cross party conspiracy theory that aliens are buzzing carrier groups.
    Yeah but winding up conspiracy loons is more fun.

    They're laughing at you.
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    Its getting very frustrating hearing the media reporting how many cases of the Indian variant using cumulative rather than new totals.

    Sky talking about how there are nearly 3,500 cases of the Indian variant - which sounds like a lot, until you realise that there were 2,874 daily cases today. So 122% of today's cases sound like they were from the Indian variant.

    What a stupid way of reporting it. Report the increase not the cumulative. 🤦‍♂️

    Journalists have throughout this pandemic demonstrated a grasp of mathematics that would make the average civil servant at the DfE blush.

    Any time they run out of fingers they struggle.
    They should start wearing open-toed sandals year round!
    But surely declaring their allegiance to the Liberal Democrats like that would breach impartiality rules?
    You better watch it, buster, or some sandal-maker is gonna sue your ass off for libel!
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.

    Let me guess the conclusion - more budget needed for military/NASA?
    I don’t know if you’ve ever followed US politics and foreign affairs before. But it turns out there are far more effective ways of motivating for higher military spending than concocting a cross party conspiracy theory that aliens are buzzing carrier groups.
    Many ways, and press hype is indeed among the most cost-effective.

    Will be interesting to see what the report actually says, when it's actually released. Certainly won't be the first on this topic. Or the last.
    It’s taken 3 years for there to be anything resembling popular press attention on this topic, beyond a few articles. Quite patient are these dastardly big military budget plotters.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 13,773
    MattW said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.

    A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.

    LOL. Wishful thinking.

    I actually have a lot of time for the traditional counties but putting boundaries down the middle of rivers in the middle of big cities is senseless. Just as London is rightfully one unit (rather than split between Surrey and Middlesex) so should be Newcastle.

    By the way, guess what, it's generational? In his excellent book Engel's England Matthew Engels was dismayed to find younger people baffled by the idea that Barnoldswick* was in Yorkshire.

    Engels asked 10 people which county it was in:

    Four said Lancashire, three said Yorkshire and three didn't care... A teenage girl kindly switched off her iPad to talk to me and looked disgusted."Yorkshire? It's just the elderly people who think that."


    (*It's been in Lancashire since 1974, whatever the 'Yorkshire Riding Society' – er, who? – might wish to be the case)

    Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.

    A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.

    LOL. Wishful thinking.

    I actually have a lot of time for the traditional counties but putting boundaries down the middle of rivers in the middle of big cities is senseless. Just as London is rightfully one unit (rather than split between Surrey and Middlesex) so should be Newcastle.

    By the way, guess what, it's generational? In his excellent book Engel's England Matthew Engels was dismayed to find younger people baffled by the idea that Barnoldswick* was in Yorkshire.

    Engels asked 10 people which county it was in:

    Four said Lancashire, three said Yorkshire and three didn't care... A teenage girl kindly switched off her iPad to talk to me and looked disgusted."Yorkshire? It's just the elderly people who think that."


    (*It's been in Lancashire since 1974, whatever the 'Yorkshire Riding Society' – er, who? – might wish to be the case)
    But local government boundaries don't need to match county boundaries. I have no qualms with dividing Cheshire/Lancashire down the Mersey while letting Trafford Council collect the bins on both sides.
    Then what is the point of a "county"?
    Cricket, obvs.

    Essex, cricket wise, includes those parts between the M25 and River Lea, such as Romford and Leyton, which are now part of London
    It may be a niche interest, but I regret the sidelining of the rugby county championship. Before professionalism, it was quite a big deal. The 1980 England grand slam winning side was basically built around the Lancashire County side - Beaumont, Uttley, Colclough, Slemen, Smith, Cotton, Neary ...
    The championship wasn't strictly counties, though, was it. I have fond memories of a reporter remarking on a young spectator shouting 'Come on NottsLincsandDerby!
    Ha ha - that's true. I remember going to a match between NottsLincsDerbys (or 'three counties'), and, I think North Midlands (which I was always puzzled by - if we have NottsLincsDerbys and we also have Staffordshire, who are North Midlands? Turns out - and I have only just thought to look this up 23 years after the event - it's Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Birmingham, which is slightly counter-intuitive.
    Perhaps the North Midlands are the bits of Derbyshire stolen by Sheffield - places like Dore, Totley and the Mosborough Townships?

    That Dan Jarvis wants much of all the surrounding counties. Need to keep an eye on the bugger.

    Or they might just be the bits that are nameless because they can't play cricket.
    Ha ha - don't go telling Eagles that Dore and Totley are really in Derbyshire!
  • Cookie said:

    Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.

    A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.

    LOL. Wishful thinking.

    I actually have a lot of time for the traditional counties but putting boundaries down the middle of rivers in the middle of big cities is senseless. Just as London is rightfully one unit (rather than split between Surrey and Middlesex) so should be Newcastle.

    By the way, guess what, it's generational? In his excellent book Engel's England Matthew Engels was dismayed to find younger people baffled by the idea that Barnoldswick* was in Yorkshire.

    Engels asked 10 people which county it was in:

    Four said Lancashire, three said Yorkshire and three didn't care... A teenage girl kindly switched off her iPad to talk to me and looked disgusted."Yorkshire? It's just the elderly people who think that."


    (*It's been in Lancashire since 1974, whatever the 'Yorkshire Riding Society' – er, who? – might wish to be the case)

    Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.

    A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.

    LOL. Wishful thinking.

    I actually have a lot of time for the traditional counties but putting boundaries down the middle of rivers in the middle of big cities is senseless. Just as London is rightfully one unit (rather than split between Surrey and Middlesex) so should be Newcastle.

    By the way, guess what, it's generational? In his excellent book Engel's England Matthew Engels was dismayed to find younger people baffled by the idea that Barnoldswick* was in Yorkshire.

    Engels asked 10 people which county it was in:

    Four said Lancashire, three said Yorkshire and three didn't care... A teenage girl kindly switched off her iPad to talk to me and looked disgusted."Yorkshire? It's just the elderly people who think that."


    (*It's been in Lancashire since 1974, whatever the 'Yorkshire Riding Society' – er, who? – might wish to be the case)
    But local government boundaries don't need to match county boundaries. I have no qualms with dividing Cheshire/Lancashire down the Mersey while letting Trafford Council collect the bins on both sides.
    It makes no sense for me whatsoever to have Cheshire/Lancashire divided down the Mersey when it comes to eg Warrington which spans both sides of the water now.

    Warrington itself originally may be north of the river, but whether north or south of it, its one town, and it makes far more sense for me to consider Warrington as part of Cheshire than Lancashire.
    I still consider Liverpool to be in Lancashire.
    I consider it to be in Merseyside, with Birkenhead.
    Good grief!

  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 41,950
    Leon said:

    glw said:

    glw said:

    R4 "AZ highly effective against the Indian variant" - real world data from India.

    So AZ is a top-notch vaccine, effective against current variants, and the 12 week dosing was a very good idea. Of course AZ is also cheap and easy to deploy. Could the many critics of the UK's approach to vaccination — including all sorts of prestigous bodies — have been more wrong? No, they are chumps.
    Be quiet spreading all your pseudo-science.....we all know it is only quasi effective.
    Essentially every criticism of what the UK chose to do, and the effectiveness of the AZ vaccine in particular, has proven to be unfounded. Do you think a single one of the scaremongerers will ever admit to being wrong? I doubt it.

    Come the next New Years Honours I expect a lot of gongs to be dished out amongst the CMOs, JCVI, MHRA, PHE, NHS, etc. They have done a spectacularly good job with the vaccination programme, and undoubtedly saved many lives, and had to do it in the face of all sorts of nonsense from people and organisations that are meant to be peers.
    Those utter c**ts at Handelsblatt need a spanking. "8% effective. Basically useless*

    HOW have they not resigned? They probably killed 5,000 people themselves
    Ooh, a Handelsblatt, haven’t had one of them for a while.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,468

    TimT said:

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Brand and first mover advantage
    Perceived as buying for the future
    Absurd amounts of liquidity that need to deployed
    And there was me thinking it was the oat equivalent of a micro-brewery!
    The amount of IP protected technology development needed to effectively milk an oat is astounding. It’s a Tesla-seque step change.
    According to my Google search, you steep the oats in water, crush it into a pulp, then strain off the solids. It that what you mean by protected IP?
    That's one way, and VERY cruel to the oat.

    Surely MUCH more humane (and eco-friendly) method of obtaining oat milk, is the same old-school, hands-on approach used to milk cows, goats, badgers, etc, etc?

    Which in the case of oats- wild or otherwise - is indeed challenging!
    I guess the protected IP is in genetically engineering those milking maids to have such tiny hands and digits.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    edited May 2021

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.

    Let me guess the conclusion - more budget needed for military/NASA?
    I don’t know if you’ve ever followed US politics and foreign affairs before. But it turns out there are far more effective ways of motivating for higher military spending than concocting a cross party conspiracy theory that aliens are buzzing carrier groups.
    Yeah but winding up conspiracy loons is more fun.

    They're laughing at you.
    Oh the irony. That you cannot see the contorted conspiracy explanations you’re coming up with to deny what you’re being told by a cross section of reputable people. That there is an ultra technology out there that is not understood by the most senior levers of American government, and that its presence has been obscured from the top of the chain of command due to the culture of ridicule that you seem to think is so clever.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,468
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.

    Let me guess the conclusion - more budget needed for military/NASA?
    I don’t know if you’ve ever followed US politics and foreign affairs before. But it turns out there are far more effective ways of motivating for higher military spending than concocting a cross party conspiracy theory that aliens are buzzing carrier groups.
    Many ways, and press hype is indeed among the most cost-effective.

    Will be interesting to see what the report actually says, when it's actually released. Certainly won't be the first on this topic. Or the last.
    It’s taken 3 years for there to be anything resembling popular press attention on this topic, beyond a few articles. Quite patient are these dastardly big military budget plotters.
    They understand that government budgets have long, long, long lead times.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,128
    edited May 2021
    ..
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407
    Sean_F said:

    Pro_Rata said:

    Leon said:

    We should now go round putting up MORE statues of the great colonial mastermind, Sir Cecil Rhodes

    Thaaaasands of ‘em

    A Rhodes on every road; a Cecil in every square

    The Enver Hoxha approach to culture wars. Nice ☺️!
    Shades of the Saki story where someone proposes building thousands of copies of the Albert Memorial, all over Britain.
    Have a statue of Rhodes trampling his boot into the face of a scrofulous student - forever.
    Like I said earlier, students should watch the BBC series Rhodes: the Life and Legend.

    Yes, Antony Thomas is vehemently anti-Rhodes (and he makes sure he comes across in the series as a manipulative, scheming and deceitful bully) but it puts across some of his vision, and arguments of the time - in at least some context - and has fascinating cinematography set in South Africa.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    edited May 2021

    rcs1000 said:

    alex_ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    alex_ said:

    MaxPB said:

    I'm starting to wonder about the government's strategy now. Is it deliberately giving the zerovidians enough rope? Crank up pressure on the antivaxxers and discredit the zerovidians when their tales of doom fail to materialise.

    Almost certainly a daft conspiracy theory too far. But given hospitalisation rates? Hmm.

    I think they are. It seems to have got a lot of people in Bolton out to get the vaccine that were previously refusing and they will also get to discredit these doom modellers once and for all. It's not even a high risk strategy given what we know about the AZ vaccine having 90% efficacy against infection and Pfizer at 91%. Almost every single person in groups 1-9 will have had both doses in advance of June 21st. Exactly who will end up in hospital?!
    Not just in hospital but 10,000 A DAY in hospital. And that wasn’t even the worst case scenario!
    SAGE should be made to show their workings. Use both sides of the paper.

    What's particularly infuriating is that the EU is opening up now, despite not having anywhere near the vaccine protection we do.

    We had this massive lead, that we're in the process of squandering due to a bunch of zero Covid nutters.
    Unfortunately, that's a consequence of the history of the last year in the UK.

    Those who have argued for earlier, harder lockdowns have been shown to be right last March, last autumn, last December. Anti-lockdown types called it wrong each time, to tragic effect.

    So on the occasion where we probably do have leeway to unlock faster, the public confidence isn't there- and one has to wonder if the PM has the confidence to go faster.

    It's kind of the boy who cried wolf in reverse.

    (The three month vaccination lead the UK had was always going to close a fair bit, but even I'm surprised at how much the reopening gap is closing.)
    Whilst the point about December/Xmas is fair, it could be noted that countries like Germany were almost just as bad in the second wave. And still posting numbers closing the gap and a reasonable rate. Their lower death rates are almost entirely a consequence of their “first wave” success.

    It defies sense that the EU should be claiming fear of what’s currently happening in the U.K. as a reason to restrict foreign travel.
    It defies sense that the EU should be claiming fear of what’s currently happening in the U.K. as a reason to restrict foreign travel

    Errr, that would be because they're doing for domestic political consumption, rather than because of any real fear.

    THAT SAID.

    I foolishly watched MSNBC the other day, and it had a feature on the Indian Covid variant, and it identifed the UK as a hotspot alongside India. Anyone watching it would have assumed the UK was being swamped by hundreds of thousands of new cases of Indian variant CV19.

    Which was, it is fair to say, utterly ridiculous.
    Of course the UK is actually testing its strains, how many other countries are doing the same even now?
    Anyone online in EU or watching EU domestic media care to comment on how UK now being portrayed? I understood, and please correct me where wrong, in a beautiful symmetrical turn around, anything that goes wrong in EU now is getting effectively blamed on UK. Can’t get vaccines - UK to blame, vaccines don’t work UK to blame, high unemployment UKs fault, bad weather, ah you get the picture.

    QUESTION. Is how others see us and report us a problem for us.

    I reckon it is.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,627
    Serbia looking good:

    Scantily clad S and M outfits, reasonable tune and plenty of voting neighbours.

  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/london-playbook/politico-london-playbook-bordering-on-farce-v-o-c-d-it-up-burger-bunfight/

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Playbook can’t quite believe he is writing this — or whether he had something dodgy for dinner — but there are increasing rumors among well-informed government insiders that the publication of a U.S. government report on UFOs due next month could become one of the stories of the summer, or indeed, century.

    Let me guess the conclusion - more budget needed for military/NASA?
    I don’t know if you’ve ever followed US politics and foreign affairs before. But it turns out there are far more effective ways of motivating for higher military spending than concocting a cross party conspiracy theory that aliens are buzzing carrier groups.
    Many ways, and press hype is indeed among the most cost-effective.

    Will be interesting to see what the report actually says, when it's actually released. Certainly won't be the first on this topic. Or the last.
    It’s taken 3 years for there to be anything resembling popular press attention on this topic, beyond a few articles. Quite patient are these dastardly big military budget plotters.
    The topic of UFOs (yours truly being old-school) comes up in the media on a regular basis every few years or so. And has for a LONG time now. Especially in times of strife, stress & tension.

    Which is big reason why Orson Welles made such as splash with his famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast in 1938, on Halloween (just after the Munich Crisis).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)

    Here is audio recording of the actual broadcast:

    https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu/items/show/1972
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,129
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    It'll be a very short day, however, as the aliens vaporize planet Earth to stop us colonizing the universe.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407
    MaxPB said:

    .

    Maffew said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Maffew said:

    alex_ said:

    MaxPB said:

    I'm starting to wonder about the government's strategy now. Is it deliberately giving the zerovidians enough rope? Crank up pressure on the antivaxxers and discredit the zerovidians when their tales of doom fail to materialise.

    Almost certainly a daft conspiracy theory too far. But given hospitalisation rates? Hmm.

    I think they are. It seems to have got a lot of people in Bolton out to get the vaccine that were previously refusing and they will also get to discredit these doom modellers once and for all. It's not even a high risk strategy given what we know about the AZ vaccine having 90% efficacy against infection and Pfizer at 91%. Almost every single person in groups 1-9 will have had both doses in advance of June 21st. Exactly who will end up in hospital?!
    Not just in hospital but 10,000 A DAY in hospital. And that wasn’t even the worst case scenario!
    SAGE should be made to show their workings. Use both sides of the paper.

    Having a go at some workings of my own:

    Peak in January was about 4,000 hospitalisations a day with no vaccinations.
    Deaths peaked at roughly 1,250 a day.

    Let's assume a 0.7% fatality rate, since that seems to be the number I've seen floating around.

    That gives approximately 180,000 infections per day (1,250/0.007).

    So, in an unvaccinated population you would need around 450,000 infections per day to get 10,000 admissions.

    Let's say vaccination is about 75% effective at preventing hospitalisation across the population. It's a bit finger in the air, but basically discounting actual effectiveness by a bit to account for the young not being vaccinated and a low level of vaccine hesitancy.

    That means you then need approximately 1,800,000 infections per day to get 10,000 hospitalisations. So a little under 3% of the population needing to be infected every day. This feels... implausible even with no restrictions (or self-imposed restrictions given people would react to rising case rates and hospitalisations).

    Even if you say our current level of vaccination would only prevent 50% of hospitalisations across the population (hugely pessimistic I'd think). You'd still need to see 900,000 people a day being infected to get 10,000 a day hospitalisations.

    Of course, all of the above is based on vaccinations having 0% efficacy in preventing infections, which is stupid.

    It also doesn't take into account that the unvaccinated population will be considerably smaller in a few weeks' time.
    Also.

    0.7% is for the population as a whole. Which is something like 10% for the 80+ group, and 0.05% for the under 20s.

    The most vulnerable people are all vaccinated. And efficacy against hospitalisation and death is much higher than 91% - it's more like 99%.

    So, I simply can't see how they can possibly have the assumptions they do - even ignoring the other massive elephant in the room, which is that the virus can't spread *that* quickly as there aren't that many people for it to infect any more.
    I deliberately chose pessimistic figures for hospitalisation and death rates. As you say, it's difficult to see how you can get to 10,000 admissions a day unless your assumptions are basically:

    a) Everyone is a perfect sphere in a single room.
    b) Vaccines have no effect on tranmission.
    c) Indian variant is super deadly.
    From the CFR data from 1 December 2020, percentage probability of death given infection was

    0-14 0.0001
    15-44 0.0004
    45-64 0.0066
    65-74 0.0711
    75-84 0.1889
    85+ 0.3055

    I took the number of people unvaccinated (as of todays update).

    With a bit of forcing numbers together I got that if every single unvaccinated person caught COVID, we should expect -

    Age, Unvaccinated, Deaths for 100% infection
    0-44, 16,908,941, 6,897
    45-64, 4,537,066, 29,842
    65-74, 418,129, 29,714
    75-84, 101,661, 19,203
    85+, 142,568, 43,556

    I rather think that it is the unprotected elderly that is causing worry, looking at those numbers.

    There are no unprotected elderly that haven't been offered the vaccine.

    If vaccine refusers get sick and die then that's on them.
    I was watching something earlier where a black diversity inclusion person was banging on about how it's fair for black people to refuse the vaccine and still expect to be protected by the state because of historical trust issues. This is the kind of shite that needs to be completey destroyed. 37m people have had the vaccine in this country, white, black, brown, old, young, men, women, even a few kids who have got severe health issues. It's safer effective and the roll out has not discriminated against any race, it's been a huge success story for everyone involved.
    Applause, Sir.

    It's that sort of crap that needs to be utterly crushed in the culture wars.
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    Foxy said:

    Serbia looking good:

    Scantily clad S and M outfits, reasonable tune and plenty of voting neighbours.

    Voting neighbors who virtually all hate the Serbs, for something or other.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    The eeriest solution I've read is that this is a super intelligent species living alongside us, but unobserved, in our solar system, perhaps even under the oceans of earth

    Ooo-er

    For those that think this is a load of bollocks this guy is a pretty good debunker. He's thorough and he doesn't sneer (as some do, off-puttingly)

    https://twitter.com/MickWest


    Here's a good monologue from a guy explaining why this probably isn't US DoD Psy-ops to increase military spending

    "Saagar Enjeti
    @esaagar
    ·
    4h
    People are skeptical of UFO disclosures as psyop by the Pentagon for more funding

    I understand why BUT modern history of UFO/Pentagon is DOD blocking all attempts to uncover evidence and eventually resigning themselves to leaks

    My monologue today:"

    https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1395396833317376000?s=20
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    It'll be a very short day, however, as the aliens vaporize planet Earth to stop us colonizing the universe.
    The Dark Forest Theory... no thanks
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 26,174
    edited May 2021
    Apparently the comeback for the 90s sitcom Friends isn't going down well with the woke. Not because it was simply unfunny, but because it was offensive.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,128
    edited May 2021
    Cookie said:

    MattW said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.

    A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.

    LOL. Wishful thinking.

    I actually have a lot of time for the traditional counties but putting boundaries down the middle of rivers in the middle of big cities is senseless. Just as London is rightfully one unit (rather than split between Surrey and Middlesex) so should be Newcastle.

    By the way, guess what, it's generational? In his excellent book Engel's England Matthew Engels was dismayed to find younger people baffled by the idea that Barnoldswick* was in Yorkshire.

    Engels asked 10 people which county it was in:

    Four said Lancashire, three said Yorkshire and three didn't care... A teenage girl kindly switched off her iPad to talk to me and looked disgusted."Yorkshire? It's just the elderly people who think that."


    (*It's been in Lancashire since 1974, whatever the 'Yorkshire Riding Society' – er, who? – might wish to be the case)

    Of course the problem with outsiders telling locals that they are no longer Lancastrians / Yorkshire / Durham is that it tends to provoke all kinds of nasty reactions. Durham runs from the Tyne to the Tees, always has, always will do. Yorkshire is North, West and East despite South also being a new Ceremonial county. Same thing with T&W - giving it a Lord Lieutenant doesn't suddenly give it value.

    A ceremonial county is not a historic country. Twatting around with borders is a touchy subject in my part of England that seems to drive the natives absolutely mental. Did have to laugh though when His Eminence the Mayor for Life of Thornaby-on-Tees gobbed off about county names and had his sizeable arse handed to him by the Chair of the Yorkshire Ridings Socirty.

    LOL. Wishful thinking.

    I actually have a lot of time for the traditional counties but putting boundaries down the middle of rivers in the middle of big cities is senseless. Just as London is rightfully one unit (rather than split between Surrey and Middlesex) so should be Newcastle.

    By the way, guess what, it's generational? In his excellent book Engel's England Matthew Engels was dismayed to find younger people baffled by the idea that Barnoldswick* was in Yorkshire.

    Engels asked 10 people which county it was in:

    Four said Lancashire, three said Yorkshire and three didn't care... A teenage girl kindly switched off her iPad to talk to me and looked disgusted."Yorkshire? It's just the elderly people who think that."


    (*It's been in Lancashire since 1974, whatever the 'Yorkshire Riding Society' – er, who? – might wish to be the case)
    But local government boundaries don't need to match county boundaries. I have no qualms with dividing Cheshire/Lancashire down the Mersey while letting Trafford Council collect the bins on both sides.
    Then what is the point of a "county"?
    Cricket, obvs.

    Essex, cricket wise, includes those parts between the M25 and River Lea, such as Romford and Leyton, which are now part of London
    It may be a niche interest, but I regret the sidelining of the rugby county championship. Before professionalism, it was quite a big deal. The 1980 England grand slam winning side was basically built around the Lancashire County side - Beaumont, Uttley, Colclough, Slemen, Smith, Cotton, Neary ...
    The championship wasn't strictly counties, though, was it. I have fond memories of a reporter remarking on a young spectator shouting 'Come on NottsLincsandDerby!
    Ha ha - that's true. I remember going to a match between NottsLincsDerbys (or 'three counties'), and, I think North Midlands (which I was always puzzled by - if we have NottsLincsDerbys and we also have Staffordshire, who are North Midlands? Turns out - and I have only just thought to look this up 23 years after the event - it's Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Birmingham, which is slightly counter-intuitive.
    Perhaps the North Midlands are the bits of Derbyshire stolen by Sheffield - places like Dore, Totley and the Mosborough Townships?

    That Dan Jarvis wants much of all the surrounding counties. Need to keep an eye on the bugger.

    Or they might just be the bits that are nameless because they can't play cricket.
    Ha ha - don't go telling Eagles that Dore and Totley are really in Derbyshire!
    I refer you to Hansard::

    "1809 - The Dore Enclosure Act ("An Act for Inclosing Lands in the Parish of Dronfield in the County of Derby") is passed. "

  • FossFoss Posts: 1,019
    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    It'll be a very short day, however, as the aliens vaporize planet Earth to stop us colonizing the universe.
    That'd still be better than blowing us up to build a hyperspace expressway.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,128
    tlg86 said:

    Apparently the comeback for the 90s sitcom Friends isn't going down well with the woke. Not because it was simply unfunny, but because it was offensive.

    They must hate sofas as well.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239

    Leon said:

    glw said:

    glw said:

    R4 "AZ highly effective against the Indian variant" - real world data from India.

    So AZ is a top-notch vaccine, effective against current variants, and the 12 week dosing was a very good idea. Of course AZ is also cheap and easy to deploy. Could the many critics of the UK's approach to vaccination — including all sorts of prestigous bodies — have been more wrong? No, they are chumps.
    Be quiet spreading all your pseudo-science.....we all know it is only quasi effective.
    Essentially every criticism of what the UK chose to do, and the effectiveness of the AZ vaccine in particular, has proven to be unfounded. Do you think a single one of the scaremongerers will ever admit to being wrong? I doubt it.

    Come the next New Years Honours I expect a lot of gongs to be dished out amongst the CMOs, JCVI, MHRA, PHE, NHS, etc. They have done a spectacularly good job with the vaccination programme, and undoubtedly saved many lives, and had to do it in the face of all sorts of nonsense from people and organisations that are meant to be peers.
    Those utter c**ts at Handelsblatt need a spanking. "8% effective. Basically useless*

    HOW have they not resigned? They probably killed 5,000 people themselves
    Ooh, a Handelsblatt, haven’t had one of them for a while.
    I like to nurture ancient, pointless grievances. As a Scottish Nationalist, I thought you of all people would empathise
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    The eeriest solution I've read is that this is a super intelligent species living alongside us, but unobserved, in our solar system, perhaps even under the oceans of earth

    Ooo-er

    For those that think this is a load of bollocks this guy is a pretty good debunker. He's thorough and he doesn't sneer (as some do, off-puttingly)

    https://twitter.com/MickWest


    Here's a good monologue from a guy explaining why this probably isn't US DoD Psy-ops to increase military spending

    "Saagar Enjeti
    @esaagar
    ·
    4h
    People are skeptical of UFO disclosures as psyop by the Pentagon for more funding

    I understand why BUT modern history of UFO/Pentagon is DOD blocking all attempts to uncover evidence and eventually resigning themselves to leaks

    My monologue today:"

    https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1395396833317376000?s=20
    “ perhaps even under the oceans of earth “

    Kraken Awakes.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,627

    Foxy said:

    Serbia looking good:

    Scantily clad S and M outfits, reasonable tune and plenty of voting neighbours.

    Voting neighbors who virtually all hate the Serbs, for something or other.
    I have always found it pleasantly surprising how readily former Yugoslavs vote in Eurovision for countries that they used to be at war with in recent memory.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,129
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    @moonshine

    As far as I'm aware there are:

    1. Things that air force pilots have seen for fifty years in the upper atmosphere that defy our understanding
    2. Some drone footage that has people very excited
    3. A jokey (and not particularly committal) answer to a question by Barack Obama
    and...
    4. The possibility that the US government will release a report in the coming months

    What am I missing?

    My guess, fwiw, is that the report will say:

    Air force pilots have seen things in the upper atmosphere that we can't explain.

    Which is true!

    But it's not anything like conclusive evidence of extra-terrestrials flying space ships around the US.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    Foss said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    It'll be a very short day, however, as the aliens vaporize planet Earth to stop us colonizing the universe.
    That'd still be better than blowing us up to build a hyperspace expressway.
    Or to build some of Philip’s two up two down Rodger Boxes
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    Foss said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    It'll be a very short day, however, as the aliens vaporize planet Earth to stop us colonizing the universe.
    That'd still be better than blowing us up to build a hyperspace expressway.
    HE2. 😃
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,129
    gealbhan said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    The eeriest solution I've read is that this is a super intelligent species living alongside us, but unobserved, in our solar system, perhaps even under the oceans of earth

    Ooo-er

    For those that think this is a load of bollocks this guy is a pretty good debunker. He's thorough and he doesn't sneer (as some do, off-puttingly)

    https://twitter.com/MickWest


    Here's a good monologue from a guy explaining why this probably isn't US DoD Psy-ops to increase military spending

    "Saagar Enjeti
    @esaagar
    ·
    4h
    People are skeptical of UFO disclosures as psyop by the Pentagon for more funding

    I understand why BUT modern history of UFO/Pentagon is DOD blocking all attempts to uncover evidence and eventually resigning themselves to leaks

    My monologue today:"

    https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1395396833317376000?s=20
    “ perhaps even under the oceans of earth “

    Kraken Awakes.
    That's a great book.
  • FossFoss Posts: 1,019
    gealbhan said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    The eeriest solution I've read is that this is a super intelligent species living alongside us, but unobserved, in our solar system, perhaps even under the oceans of earth

    Ooo-er

    For those that think this is a load of bollocks this guy is a pretty good debunker. He's thorough and he doesn't sneer (as some do, off-puttingly)

    https://twitter.com/MickWest


    Here's a good monologue from a guy explaining why this probably isn't US DoD Psy-ops to increase military spending

    "Saagar Enjeti
    @esaagar
    ·
    4h
    People are skeptical of UFO disclosures as psyop by the Pentagon for more funding

    I understand why BUT modern history of UFO/Pentagon is DOD blocking all attempts to uncover evidence and eventually resigning themselves to leaks

    My monologue today:"

    https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1395396833317376000?s=20
    “ perhaps even under the oceans of earth “

    Kraken Awakes.
    Good book. I'm a little surprised that it's not turned up as a mini-series.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    @moonshine

    As far as I'm aware there are:

    1. Things that air force pilots have seen for fifty years in the upper atmosphere that defy our understanding
    2. Some drone footage that has people very excited
    3. A jokey (and not particularly committal) answer to a question by Barack Obama
    and...
    4. The possibility that the US government will release a report in the coming months

    What am I missing?

    My guess, fwiw, is that the report will say:

    Air force pilots have seen things in the upper atmosphere that we can't explain.

    Which is true!

    But it's not anything like conclusive evidence of extra-terrestrials flying space ships around the US.
    You are missing tons of stuff, and the entire narrative. And, as a smart guy, you really should be doing better. Google!

    I am 100% unconvinced this is aliens. The hypothesis is still way out there

    But I cannot explain the behaviour and statements of multiple, senior actors on the US political and journalistic stage, unless some of them - or all of them - really are mystified by these gravity-defying OMFG-drones
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    Foxy said:

    Foxy said:

    Serbia looking good:

    Scantily clad S and M outfits, reasonable tune and plenty of voting neighbours.

    Voting neighbors who virtually all hate the Serbs, for something or other.
    I have always found it pleasantly surprising how readily former Yugoslavs vote in Eurovision for countries that they used to be at war with in recent memory.
    Interesting. So maybe the best way to restore amity between England and Scotland (or visa versa) would be to have an actual, 21st-century Anglo-Scottish war? With guns, bombs, tanks, etc, etc?

    HYUFD might really be on to something!
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 18,354
    Foxy said:

    TimT said:

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Brand and first mover advantage
    Perceived as buying for the future
    Absurd amounts of liquidity that need to deployed
    And there was me thinking it was the oat equivalent of a micro-brewery!
    The amount of IP protected technology development needed to effectively milk an oat is astounding. It’s a Tesla-seque step change.
    According to my Google search, you steep the oats in water, crush it into a pulp, then strain off the solids. It that what you mean by protected IP?
    Mmm, yes, but then you have to do a whole bunch of other things to it to make it even halfway palatable and inoffensive to look at.
    I am quite a fan of oatmilk and use it on cereal. It keeps well and is low carbon and high fibre. Nice and creamy in a cappuccino too.
    I really wanted to like oatmilk for reasons of carbon and land-use. I've tried three times, but it's no good to me. My daughter says pea milk is better, which at least is a viable alternative in a way soya and almond milk aren't (for environmental reasons), but I was so disappointed with oat milk, I'm wary.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,354
    Leon said:

    glw said:

    glw said:

    R4 "AZ highly effective against the Indian variant" - real world data from India.

    So AZ is a top-notch vaccine, effective against current variants, and the 12 week dosing was a very good idea. Of course AZ is also cheap and easy to deploy. Could the many critics of the UK's approach to vaccination — including all sorts of prestigous bodies — have been more wrong? No, they are chumps.
    Be quiet spreading all your pseudo-science.....we all know it is only quasi effective.
    Essentially every criticism of what the UK chose to do, and the effectiveness of the AZ vaccine in particular, has proven to be unfounded. Do you think a single one of the scaremongerers will ever admit to being wrong? I doubt it.

    Come the next New Years Honours I expect a lot of gongs to be dished out amongst the CMOs, JCVI, MHRA, PHE, NHS, etc. They have done a spectacularly good job with the vaccination programme, and undoubtedly saved many lives, and had to do it in the face of all sorts of nonsense from people and organisations that are meant to be peers.
    Those utter c**ts at Handelsblatt need a spanking. "8% effective. Basically useless*

    HOW have they not resigned? They probably killed 5,000 people themselves
    After the Hitler Diaries fiasco, those who tried to stop publication were sacked, and those who had slavishly followed the forgers and swallowed every lie they were told were promoted.

    Why should Handelsblatt be different?
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,952
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    Quick question.

    How do we know that you're not an alien?
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    edited May 2021
    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    @moonshine

    As far as I'm aware there are:

    1. Things that air force pilots have seen for fifty years in the upper atmosphere that defy our understanding
    2. Some drone footage that has people very excited
    3. A jokey (and not particularly committal) answer to a question by Barack Obama
    and...
    4. The possibility that the US government will release a report in the coming months

    What am I missing?

    My guess, fwiw, is that the report will say:

    Air force pilots have seen things in the upper atmosphere that we can't explain.

    Which is true!

    But it's not anything like conclusive evidence of extra-terrestrials flying space ships around the US.
    But they’ve also seen them at 50ft above sea level.

    Edit - and below sea level!
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 42,952
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    @moonshine

    As far as I'm aware there are:

    1. Things that air force pilots have seen for fifty years in the upper atmosphere that defy our understanding
    2. Some drone footage that has people very excited
    3. A jokey (and not particularly committal) answer to a question by Barack Obama
    and...
    4. The possibility that the US government will release a report in the coming months

    What am I missing?

    My guess, fwiw, is that the report will say:

    Air force pilots have seen things in the upper atmosphere that we can't explain.

    Which is true!

    But it's not anything like conclusive evidence of extra-terrestrials flying space ships around the US.
    You are missing tons of stuff, and the entire narrative. And, as a smart guy, you really should be doing better. Google!

    I am 100% unconvinced this is aliens. The hypothesis is still way out there

    But I cannot explain the behaviour and statements of multiple, senior actors on the US political and journalistic stage, unless some of them - or all of them - really are mystified by these gravity-defying OMFG-drones
    No offense but same question. How do we know you're not an alien?
  • stodgestodge Posts: 13,871
    Evening all :)

    My first chance to comment on the proposals to "transform" the railways.

    I used to travel by train 3-4 times per week before the pandemic, for both business and pleasure. The business model for train companies, based on high-earning sardine trains morning and evening, has been demolished and while it's worth noting weekend travel numbers have stood up rather better, it's a good time to start re-thinking public transport.

    I'm not quite sure what to make of GBR - it sounds a bit like a country-wide Transport for London whereby different services run services but constrained by centrally-driven ticketing and timetabling. Of course, there's not much competition out there now - yes, if I want to go from London to Exeter, I can either go GWR from Paddington or SWR from Waterloo.

    It's a broad brush but the faster the train the more expensive the fare - there are big differences from London to York if you want to get there in two hours or two and a half hours. If time's not an issue and you can book well in advance, train travel is very reasonably priced but that's not where the operators make their money - they can afford to run off-peak services as loss leaders as the commuter trains will pay their way.

    Or at least they did.

    The concern I have is the funding of GBR and whether Sunak, in his need to plug the deficit, will look to reduce unprofitable services (I'm sure he wants Beeching's reputation) and cut back on modernisation and improvements. The problem is a profitable public transport model in a post-pandemic environment isn't easy to find - Gatwick and Heathrow Express perhaps the two best examples.

    Ultimately, perhaps, public transport shouldn't be about profit and market forces. Good transport is an enabler across the wider economy - a reliable transport system benefits the economy in many ways and perhaps the lesson is it will pay for itself in terms of boosting growth regionally and nationally.

    For a Government wishing to burnish its environmental credentials, additionally, looking like you are serious about public transport (not just rail but local light rail systems and buses) as a way of offering a reliable and viable alternative to road traffic seems sensible and plans to restore some rail lines (which isn't cheap) are a step in a promising direction. I'd also argue transport infrastructure provision is an integral part of a successful housing and planning policy.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    rcs1000 said:

    gealbhan said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    The eeriest solution I've read is that this is a super intelligent species living alongside us, but unobserved, in our solar system, perhaps even under the oceans of earth

    Ooo-er

    For those that think this is a load of bollocks this guy is a pretty good debunker. He's thorough and he doesn't sneer (as some do, off-puttingly)

    https://twitter.com/MickWest


    Here's a good monologue from a guy explaining why this probably isn't US DoD Psy-ops to increase military spending

    "Saagar Enjeti
    @esaagar
    ·
    4h
    People are skeptical of UFO disclosures as psyop by the Pentagon for more funding

    I understand why BUT modern history of UFO/Pentagon is DOD blocking all attempts to uncover evidence and eventually resigning themselves to leaks

    My monologue today:"

    https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1395396833317376000?s=20
    “ perhaps even under the oceans of earth “

    Kraken Awakes.
    That's a great book.
    The old “science fiction” era was just more creative and thoughtful than the “syfi” era?
    And just a lot more unnerving?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,627
    gealbhan said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    The eeriest solution I've read is that this is a super intelligent species living alongside us, but unobserved, in our solar system, perhaps even under the oceans of earth

    Ooo-er

    For those that think this is a load of bollocks this guy is a pretty good debunker. He's thorough and he doesn't sneer (as some do, off-puttingly)

    https://twitter.com/MickWest


    Here's a good monologue from a guy explaining why this probably isn't US DoD Psy-ops to increase military spending

    "Saagar Enjeti
    @esaagar
    ·
    4h
    People are skeptical of UFO disclosures as psyop by the Pentagon for more funding

    I understand why BUT modern history of UFO/Pentagon is DOD blocking all attempts to uncover evidence and eventually resigning themselves to leaks

    My monologue today:"

    https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1395396833317376000?s=20
    “ perhaps even under the oceans of earth “

    Kraken Awakes.
    Who you gonna call:

    https://youtu.be/k-YbsiU9bUY
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,128
    edited May 2021
    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    alex_ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    alex_ said:

    MaxPB said:

    I'm starting to wonder about the government's strategy now. Is it deliberately giving the zerovidians enough rope? Crank up pressure on the antivaxxers and discredit the zerovidians when their tales of doom fail to materialise.

    Almost certainly a daft conspiracy theory too far. But given hospitalisation rates? Hmm.

    I think they are. It seems to have got a lot of people in Bolton out to get the vaccine that were previously refusing and they will also get to discredit these doom modellers once and for all. It's not even a high risk strategy given what we know about the AZ vaccine having 90% efficacy against infection and Pfizer at 91%. Almost every single person in groups 1-9 will have had both doses in advance of June 21st. Exactly who will end up in hospital?!
    Not just in hospital but 10,000 A DAY in hospital. And that wasn’t even the worst case scenario!
    SAGE should be made to show their workings. Use both sides of the paper.

    What's particularly infuriating is that the EU is opening up now, despite not having anywhere near the vaccine protection we do.

    We had this massive lead, that we're in the process of squandering due to a bunch of zero Covid nutters.
    Unfortunately, that's a consequence of the history of the last year in the UK.

    Those who have argued for earlier, harder lockdowns have been shown to be right last March, last autumn, last December. Anti-lockdown types called it wrong each time, to tragic effect.

    So on the occasion where we probably do have leeway to unlock faster, the public confidence isn't there- and one has to wonder if the PM has the confidence to go faster.

    It's kind of the boy who cried wolf in reverse.

    (The three month vaccination lead the UK had was always going to close a fair bit, but even I'm surprised at how much the reopening gap is closing.)
    Whilst the point about December/Xmas is fair, it could be noted that countries like Germany were almost just as bad in the second wave. And still posting numbers closing the gap and a reasonable rate. Their lower death rates are almost entirely a consequence of their “first wave” success.

    It defies sense that the EU should be claiming fear of what’s currently happening in the U.K. as a reason to restrict foreign travel.
    It defies sense that the EU should be claiming fear of what’s currently happening in the U.K. as a reason to restrict foreign travel

    Errr, that would be because they're doing for domestic political consumption, rather than because of any real fear.

    THAT SAID.

    I foolishly watched MSNBC the other day, and it had a feature on the Indian Covid variant, and it identifed the UK as a hotspot alongside India. Anyone watching it would have assumed the UK was being swamped by hundreds of thousands of new cases of Indian variant CV19.

    Which was, it is fair to say, utterly ridiculous.
    Of course the UK is actually testing its strains, how many other countries are doing the same even now?
    Anyone online in EU or watching EU domestic media care to comment on how UK now being portrayed? I understood, and please correct me where wrong, in a beautiful symmetrical turn around, anything that goes wrong in EU now is getting effectively blamed on UK. Can’t get vaccines - UK to blame, vaccines don’t work UK to blame, high unemployment UKs fault, bad weather, ah you get the picture.

    QUESTION. Is how others see us and report us a problem for us.

    I reckon it is.
    It's an interesting question. However, how widespread is this - I only really get to see the small-bubble EU yellow press, plus France 24 and a couple of others.

    I expect trade with the EU to shrink a little, as we pivot to the wider world. And I expect tourism to shrink between a little and decisively until electronic systems are up and running in a year or two, depending on how extensively the required doclist is enforced. There may be a potential competitive advantage there.

    In other EU news, a French fishing boat was warned off fishing in a no-fishing-because-of-research zone.
    https://www.itv.com/news/channel/2021-05-19/french-fishing-boat-caught-in-protected-waters

    Jersey are only going to get one opportunity to reset the culture.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,627
    TOPPING said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    Quick question.

    How do we know that you're not an alien?
    He does come from the moon...
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    TOPPING said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    Quick question.

    How do we know that you're not an alien?
    Well I’ve never made a real life PB event so you never can tell.

    If Putin can use social media for his own ends, then a higher intelligence could too I suppose. Depends on their motivation though doesn’t it.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    stodge said:

    Evening all :)

    My first chance to comment on the proposals to "transform" the railways.

    I used to travel by train 3-4 times per week before the pandemic, for both business and pleasure. The business model for train companies, based on high-earning sardine trains morning and evening, has been demolished and while it's worth noting weekend travel numbers have stood up rather better, it's a good time to start re-thinking public transport.

    I'm not quite sure what to make of GBR - it sounds a bit like a country-wide Transport for London whereby different services run services but constrained by centrally-driven ticketing and timetabling. Of course, there's not much competition out there now - yes, if I want to go from London to Exeter, I can either go GWR from Paddington or SWR from Waterloo.

    It's a broad brush but the faster the train the more expensive the fare - there are big differences from London to York if you want to get there in two hours or two and a half hours. If time's not an issue and you can book well in advance, train travel is very reasonably priced but that's not where the operators make their money - they can afford to run off-peak services as loss leaders as the commuter trains will pay their way.

    Or at least they did.

    The concern I have is the funding of GBR and whether Sunak, in his need to plug the deficit, will look to reduce unprofitable services (I'm sure he wants Beeching's reputation) and cut back on modernisation and improvements. The problem is a profitable public transport model in a post-pandemic environment isn't easy to find - Gatwick and Heathrow Express perhaps the two best examples.

    Ultimately, perhaps, public transport shouldn't be about profit and market forces. Good transport is an enabler across the wider economy - a reliable transport system benefits the economy in many ways and perhaps the lesson is it will pay for itself in terms of boosting growth regionally and nationally.

    For a Government wishing to burnish its environmental credentials, additionally, looking like you are serious about public transport (not just rail but local light rail systems and buses) as a way of offering a reliable and viable alternative to road traffic seems sensible and plans to restore some rail lines (which isn't cheap) are a step in a promising direction. I'd also argue transport infrastructure provision is an integral part of a successful housing and planning policy.

    What is the better model for the operators? The concession model or the franchise model?
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,986
    Farmers fucked by BoZo

    Tariffs on imports and exports on all goods would be "tapered out slowly" to allow Brit farmers to adjust after major row. Dubbed “battle for the soul of Brexit" - PM threw his weight behind free traders led by Truss in a blow to protectionists who wanted to limit terms of deal.
    https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1395471571553341445
  • AnExileinD4AnExileinD4 Posts: 337
    TOPPING said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    Quick question.

    How do we know that you're not an alien?
    Dangle a hamster in front of him and see if he reacts. The V effect,.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 27,865
    Cookie said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    Cookie said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    On Topic

    I've always equated a 5pc chance as about 20/1 (100 divided by 20 = 5).

    How wrong am I?

    Only very slightly, I think. a 5pc chance is 19/1 - remember you also get your stake back as well.
    Pulpstar said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    On Topic

    I've always equated a 5pc chance as about 20/1 (100 divided by 20 = 5).

    How wrong am I?

    Almost, it is 19-1
    Thanks dudes.

    Glad I wasn't that off target but I still haven't quite got the thing of things yet.

    20/1 = 21 decimal.

    But when I divide 100 by 21;

    I get 4.7619

    What am I getting wrong?
    You get your stake back.
    So to translate fractional odds into decimals, you need to calculate (numerator/denominator)+1

    So 20/1 becomes (20/1)+1 = 21

    Decimal odds are much easier to work with!

    The percentage chance of this happening is 100%* 1/decimal - therefore 100%*1/21 = 4.76%

    So to turn fractional odds into percentages, it's
    100%*1/(denominator/(numerator+1))

    This is helpful when you get odds like 13/8 which aren't quite so intuitively graspable.



    What OP is missing is that fractional odds are badly misnamed: they are not fractions; they are ratios. And once you know that, the rest is easy. They are a ratio of how much you will win, to how much you risk losing, or winnings to stake. 20/1 means you risk losing one pound to win twenty.

    So for the allegedly impossible 15/8, you stand to win 15 eighths of a pound for every eight eighths of a pound you stake, and as everyone knows, eight eighths of a pound is a pound.

    Of course, all this was easier when we had an eighth of a pound coin, aka half a crown. HTH. :smiley:
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,986
    EXCLUSIVE: Britain will offer Australia a 15 year transition to an historic zero tariff, zero quota trade deal, The Sun can reveal.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/15019727/australian-trade-deal-in-15-years-time/
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    TOPPING said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    @moonshine

    As far as I'm aware there are:

    1. Things that air force pilots have seen for fifty years in the upper atmosphere that defy our understanding
    2. Some drone footage that has people very excited
    3. A jokey (and not particularly committal) answer to a question by Barack Obama
    and...
    4. The possibility that the US government will release a report in the coming months

    What am I missing?

    My guess, fwiw, is that the report will say:

    Air force pilots have seen things in the upper atmosphere that we can't explain.

    Which is true!

    But it's not anything like conclusive evidence of extra-terrestrials flying space ships around the US.
    You are missing tons of stuff, and the entire narrative. And, as a smart guy, you really should be doing better. Google!

    I am 100% unconvinced this is aliens. The hypothesis is still way out there

    But I cannot explain the behaviour and statements of multiple, senior actors on the US political and journalistic stage, unless some of them - or all of them - really are mystified by these gravity-defying OMFG-drones
    No offense but same question. How do we know you're not an alien?
    Aren't we all *aliens*, in some deep, somewhat Wokey way? Who has never looked out at Modern Britain and thought, "Fuck, I do not belong here"
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559

    Sean_F said:

    Pro_Rata said:

    Leon said:

    We should now go round putting up MORE statues of the great colonial mastermind, Sir Cecil Rhodes

    Thaaaasands of ‘em

    A Rhodes on every road; a Cecil in every square

    The Enver Hoxha approach to culture wars. Nice ☺️!
    Shades of the Saki story where someone proposes building thousands of copies of the Albert Memorial, all over Britain.
    Have a statue of Rhodes trampling his boot into the face of a scrofulous student - forever.
    Like I said earlier, students should watch the BBC series Rhodes: the Life and Legend.

    Yes, Antony Thomas is vehemently anti-Rhodes (and he makes sure he comes across in the series as a manipulative, scheming and deceitful bully) but it puts across some of his vision, and arguments of the time - in at least some context - and has fascinating cinematography set in South Africa.
    Thanks for the tip!
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 52,555
    edited May 2021
    Leon said:

    We should now go round putting up MORE statues of the great colonial mastermind, Sir Cecil Rhodes

    Thaaaasands of ‘em

    A Rhodes on every road; a Cecil in every square

    We could rename Bishop's Stortford "Rhodesia". It's currently not being utilised.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,213
    ydoethur said:

    Leon said:

    glw said:

    glw said:

    R4 "AZ highly effective against the Indian variant" - real world data from India.

    So AZ is a top-notch vaccine, effective against current variants, and the 12 week dosing was a very good idea. Of course AZ is also cheap and easy to deploy. Could the many critics of the UK's approach to vaccination — including all sorts of prestigous bodies — have been more wrong? No, they are chumps.
    Be quiet spreading all your pseudo-science.....we all know it is only quasi effective.
    Essentially every criticism of what the UK chose to do, and the effectiveness of the AZ vaccine in particular, has proven to be unfounded. Do you think a single one of the scaremongerers will ever admit to being wrong? I doubt it.

    Come the next New Years Honours I expect a lot of gongs to be dished out amongst the CMOs, JCVI, MHRA, PHE, NHS, etc. They have done a spectacularly good job with the vaccination programme, and undoubtedly saved many lives, and had to do it in the face of all sorts of nonsense from people and organisations that are meant to be peers.
    Those utter c**ts at Handelsblatt need a spanking. "8% effective. Basically useless*

    HOW have they not resigned? They probably killed 5,000 people themselves
    After the Hitler Diaries fiasco, those who tried to stop publication were sacked, and those who had slavishly followed the forgers and swallowed every lie they were told were promoted.

    Why should Handelsblatt be different?
    D K Brown referenced "The stages of a project" (An MoD joke)


    Enthusiasm
    Disillusionment
    Panic
    Search for the Guilty
    Punishment of the Innocent
    Praise and Honour for the non-Participants


    He was doing so in the context of the story of HMS Captain.

    Childers - the 1st Lord of the Admiralty who'd backed the stupidity, carefully blamed everyone else.
    Reed - the brilliant designer who had pointed out the problems* had been forced to resign.
    Spencer Robinson - the far thinking Admiral who had backed Reed and his designs was forced to resign.
    Laird - the man who mis-built the ship was nearly given Reeds job**.

    *And refused to have anything to do with the ship.
    **It took some brilliant office politics to get Nathanial Barnaby in the role
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,627
    Scott_xP said:

    Farmers fucked by BoZo

    Tariffs on imports and exports on all goods would be "tapered out slowly" to allow Brit farmers to adjust after major row. Dubbed “battle for the soul of Brexit" - PM threw his weight behind free traders led by Truss in a blow to protectionists who wanted to limit terms of deal.
    https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1395471571553341445

    Yes, but not until after the next election, clever.

    It was cheap agricultural imports from America and the colonies that were the cause of Britain's great agricultural depression of 1870-1940.

  • Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    The eeriest solution I've read is that this is a super intelligent species living alongside us, but unobserved, in our solar system, perhaps even under the oceans of earth

    Ooo-er

    For those that think this is a load of bollocks this guy is a pretty good debunker. He's thorough and he doesn't sneer (as some do, off-puttingly)

    https://twitter.com/MickWest


    Here's a good monologue from a guy explaining why this probably isn't US DoD Psy-ops to increase military spending

    "Saagar Enjeti
    @esaagar
    ·
    4h
    People are skeptical of UFO disclosures as psyop by the Pentagon for more funding

    I understand why BUT modern history of UFO/Pentagon is DOD blocking all attempts to uncover evidence and eventually resigning themselves to leaks

    My monologue today:"

    https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1395396833317376000?s=20
    Maybe it’s the dolphins?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    Scott_xP said:

    Farmers fucked by BoZo

    Tariffs on imports and exports on all goods would be "tapered out slowly" to allow Brit farmers to adjust after major row. Dubbed “battle for the soul of Brexit" - PM threw his weight behind free traders led by Truss in a blow to protectionists who wanted to limit terms of deal.
    https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1395471571553341445

    No, this is the right approach. In the end Zero Tariffs are best


    New Zealand long ago decided to aim at Total Free Trade in Agriculture. It was controversial, but it seems to be working:

    "Agricultural goods – New Zealand is the world’s 12th largest agricultural exporter by value and the #2 dairy exporter in the world. We’re the number one sheep meat exporter, the number one dairy product exporter and the second biggest wool exporter. Improving productivity, value-add and export earnings in this sector are critical to New Zealand's sustainable economic growth. FTAs are one way the government can support such growth."

    https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/nz-trade-policy/

    In all honesty I find that hard to believe. NZ dairy is the biggest "dairy exporter" in the world? More than French cheese and yoghurt? Truly? Perhaps they mean sheep-dairy

    Anyway it is fairly impressive for a tiny faraway country
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 62,700
    Just wandered into anti-vax land on twitter by mistake. Wow. Some of these guys are seriously nuts.

    Seems to be a load of stuff about even being near someone who has been vaccinated can make you very ill.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,407

    Foxy said:

    TimT said:

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Brand and first mover advantage
    Perceived as buying for the future
    Absurd amounts of liquidity that need to deployed
    And there was me thinking it was the oat equivalent of a micro-brewery!
    The amount of IP protected technology development needed to effectively milk an oat is astounding. It’s a Tesla-seque step change.
    According to my Google search, you steep the oats in water, crush it into a pulp, then strain off the solids. It that what you mean by protected IP?
    Mmm, yes, but then you have to do a whole bunch of other things to it to make it even halfway palatable and inoffensive to look at.
    I am quite a fan of oatmilk and use it on cereal. It keeps well and is low carbon and high fibre. Nice and creamy in a cappuccino too.
    I really wanted to like oatmilk for reasons of carbon and land-use. I've tried three times, but it's no good to me. My daughter says pea milk is better, which at least is a viable alternative in a way soya and almond milk aren't (for environmental reasons), but I was so disappointed with oat milk, I'm wary.
    Just drink normal milk, FFS.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,627
    Leon said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Farmers fucked by BoZo

    Tariffs on imports and exports on all goods would be "tapered out slowly" to allow Brit farmers to adjust after major row. Dubbed “battle for the soul of Brexit" - PM threw his weight behind free traders led by Truss in a blow to protectionists who wanted to limit terms of deal.
    https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1395471571553341445

    No, this is the right approach. In the end Zero Tariffs are best


    New Zealand long ago decided to aim at Total Free Trade in Agriculture. It was controversial, but it seems to be working:

    "Agricultural goods – New Zealand is the world’s 12th largest agricultural exporter by value and the #2 dairy exporter in the world. We’re the number one sheep meat exporter, the number one dairy product exporter and the second biggest wool exporter. Improving productivity, value-add and export earnings in this sector are critical to New Zealand's sustainable economic growth. FTAs are one way the government can support such growth."

    https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/nz-trade-policy/

    In all honesty I find that hard to believe. NZ dairy is the biggest "dairy exporter" in the world? More than French cheese and yoghurt? Truly? Perhaps they mean sheep-dairy

    Anyway it is fairly impressive for a tiny faraway country
    Lots of dairy and sheep in NZ (though anchor butter is now made in Britain) and with its climate and cheap well watered agricultural land about the best agricultural land in the world.

  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,926
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Farmers fucked by BoZo

    Tariffs on imports and exports on all goods would be "tapered out slowly" to allow Brit farmers to adjust after major row. Dubbed “battle for the soul of Brexit" - PM threw his weight behind free traders led by Truss in a blow to protectionists who wanted to limit terms of deal.
    https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1395471571553341445

    No, this is the right approach. In the end Zero Tariffs are best


    New Zealand long ago decided to aim at Total Free Trade in Agriculture. It was controversial, but it seems to be working:

    "Agricultural goods – New Zealand is the world’s 12th largest agricultural exporter by value and the #2 dairy exporter in the world. We’re the number one sheep meat exporter, the number one dairy product exporter and the second biggest wool exporter. Improving productivity, value-add and export earnings in this sector are critical to New Zealand's sustainable economic growth. FTAs are one way the government can support such growth."

    https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/nz-trade-policy/

    In all honesty I find that hard to believe. NZ dairy is the biggest "dairy exporter" in the world? More than French cheese and yoghurt? Truly? Perhaps they mean sheep-dairy

    Anyway it is fairly impressive for a tiny faraway country
    Lots of dairy and sheep in NZ (though anchor butter is now made in Britain) and with its climate and cheap well watered agricultural land about the best agricultural land in the world.

    Looks quite middling, actually.

    https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/soils/use/worldsoils/?cid=nrcs142p2_054011
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,128
    edited May 2021
    Scott_xP said:

    EXCLUSIVE: Britain will offer Australia a 15 year transition to an historic zero tariff, zero quota trade deal, The Sun can reveal.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/15019727/australian-trade-deal-in-15-years-time/

    That was what was reported everywhere days ago.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-18/u-k-ministers-stuck-in-talks-over-terms-of-australia-trade-deal

    I would not offer zero tariff no volume limit - too much potential for a disorderly market outside any control if eg China sanctions Oz. And they don't need to offer it to get what we want.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,986
    RobD said:

    Zero tariffs zero quotas with EU good, zero tariffs zero quotas with Australia bad?

    Hormone injections, good????
  • Pagan2Pagan2 Posts: 9,870

    dixiedean said:

    Endillion said:

    I assume the local Labour party are on the hunt for a candidate called John Conservative.

    Seriously, I wonder if Ms Green could actually lose because voters are confused which party she's standing for.

    The Mayor of Toronto is John Tory. Close enough!
    Currently (as per wiki) number of Conservative MPs from Toronto in Canadian federal parliament = 0

    However, Progressive Conservative Party has 11 MLPs out of 25 from Toronto in the Ontario provincial legislature, including Premier Doug Ford.
    In same line of country, a professor years ago told my class that at some point in Bohemia (think just before WW1) one of the leaders of the local Germans was Dr. Tschech, while one of the leaders of the Czechs was Dr. Deutsch.
    Cant beat the philipino catholic that died a couple of years ago in my opinion Cardinal Syn
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    . . . meanwhile back on Planet Earth, another very interesting Politico story . . .

    Politico.com - Pardon-probe ruling roils legal teams for Trump ally Broidy, associate
    The legal shakeup involves two of Washington’s most powerful lawyers.

    https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/20/pardon-ruling-trump-ally-489724

    VERY complex story. But the phrase "bribery-for-pardon" DOES help cut through the legalese.

    As well as the following quote from the article:

    "It’s unclear what led to the delays in shaking up the legal teams for both Broidy and Davis, but the two appear to have been preoccupied in December and January by another, higher-priority effort: winning pardons from Trump.

    Broidy drew on his personal ties to Trump to seek clemency, while Davis paid $100,000 to lobbyists Mark Cowan, Philip Bond and Mattie Amagai of Potomac International Partners to try to secure a pardon, federal disclosure filings show.

    A day before Trump left office, he signed off on a batch of clemency requests. They included a full and unconditional pardon for Broidy, but nothing for Davis. She was still on the hook for potential prison time and a $3 million forfeiture, but the bigger fish — Broidy — was off."

  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,239
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Farmers fucked by BoZo

    Tariffs on imports and exports on all goods would be "tapered out slowly" to allow Brit farmers to adjust after major row. Dubbed “battle for the soul of Brexit" - PM threw his weight behind free traders led by Truss in a blow to protectionists who wanted to limit terms of deal.
    https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1395471571553341445

    No, this is the right approach. In the end Zero Tariffs are best


    New Zealand long ago decided to aim at Total Free Trade in Agriculture. It was controversial, but it seems to be working:

    "Agricultural goods – New Zealand is the world’s 12th largest agricultural exporter by value and the #2 dairy exporter in the world. We’re the number one sheep meat exporter, the number one dairy product exporter and the second biggest wool exporter. Improving productivity, value-add and export earnings in this sector are critical to New Zealand's sustainable economic growth. FTAs are one way the government can support such growth."

    https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/nz-trade-policy/

    In all honesty I find that hard to believe. NZ dairy is the biggest "dairy exporter" in the world? More than French cheese and yoghurt? Truly? Perhaps they mean sheep-dairy

    Anyway it is fairly impressive for a tiny faraway country
    Lots of dairy and sheep in NZ (though anchor butter is now made in Britain) and with its climate and cheap well watered agricultural land about the best agricultural land in the world.

    Sure, I just doubt that NZ - a small, faraway archipelago, next to no-one - can export so MUCH quick-to-spoil dairy, compared to, say, France, a large, fertile country with a famed agriculture sector, immediately surrounded by 500m people

    Perhaps they are excluding intra-EU trade? Then it might be believable. Kinda

    EDIT: Wow, I've had a look. And it seems to be basically true


    "Fonterra is a truly global superpower in a sector in which New Zealand punches well above its weight. For a nation of just under 4.5 million, New Zealand’s dairy exports performance is startling.

    "It is the world’s largest exporter of butter, churning out 550,000 tonnes in 2016, more than double the amount of the EU and almost 20 times more than neighbouring Australia.

    "The country is second only to the EU in cheese exports, is by far the largest exporter of dry milk powder products, and is the fourth-largest exporter of milk. It helps that there are more than twice as many cows as people in New Zealand, but experts trace the success of the industry to an economic catastrophe that happened more than 40 years ago."

    https://www.gtreview.com/magazine/volume-15issue-5/milk-new-zealands-dairy-exports-conquered-world/

    Lesson? FTAs really work. The UK should aim for this. Boris is right

  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,812

    Just wandered into anti-vax land on twitter by mistake. Wow. Some of these guys are seriously nuts.

    Seems to be a load of stuff about even being near someone who has been vaccinated can make you very ill.

    Here is my top tip for avoiding accidentally wandering anti vax land on twitter.

    Do not type twitter.com into your computer browser or follow twitter links.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,926
    Scott_xP said:

    RobD said:

    Zero tariffs zero quotas with EU good, zero tariffs zero quotas with Australia bad?

    Hormone injections, good????
    That's not related to tariffs or quotas, is it?
  • squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,723
    rpjs said:

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    Makes sense when you know how much the youngs love their oat milk here in the US.
    It tastes vile. My niece uses it. I take my own milk if I visit.....
  • SeaShantyIrish2SeaShantyIrish2 Posts: 17,559
    Pagan2 said:

    dixiedean said:

    Endillion said:

    I assume the local Labour party are on the hunt for a candidate called John Conservative.

    Seriously, I wonder if Ms Green could actually lose because voters are confused which party she's standing for.

    The Mayor of Toronto is John Tory. Close enough!
    Currently (as per wiki) number of Conservative MPs from Toronto in Canadian federal parliament = 0

    However, Progressive Conservative Party has 11 MLPs out of 25 from Toronto in the Ontario provincial legislature, including Premier Doug Ford.
    In same line of country, a professor years ago told my class that at some point in Bohemia (think just before WW1) one of the leaders of the local Germans was Dr. Tschech, while one of the leaders of the Czechs was Dr. Deutsch.
    Cant beat the philipino catholic that died a couple of years ago in my opinion Cardinal Syn
    Who spelled his surname the old-fashioned way "Sin".

    FYI, once rented an apartment from a lawyer by name of Rooks. And recently for a brief time my medico of record was Dr. Coffin.
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,678
    edited May 2021
    RobD said:

    Scott_xP said:

    EXCLUSIVE: Britain will offer Australia a 15 year transition to an historic zero tariff, zero quota trade deal, The Sun can reveal.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/15019727/australian-trade-deal-in-15-years-time/

    Zero tariffs zero quotas with EU good, zero tariffs zero quotas with Australia bad?
    Well yes. British agriculture will be trapped in a pincer movement, and they'll be more to come if The Truss has her way. I feel sorry for the British farmers, I really do, but all this was inevitable I'm afraid.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 27,865
    edited May 2021
    Middle-East peace in 2-and-a-half hours.
    2am cease-fire.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-middle-east-57183127

    Victory for Hamas and Bibi.
    Defeat for the ordinary people of Israel and Palestine.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 35,986
    RobD said:

    That's not related to tariffs or quotas, is it?

    yes
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,129
    moonshine said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    @moonshine

    As far as I'm aware there are:

    1. Things that air force pilots have seen for fifty years in the upper atmosphere that defy our understanding
    2. Some drone footage that has people very excited
    3. A jokey (and not particularly committal) answer to a question by Barack Obama
    and...
    4. The possibility that the US government will release a report in the coming months

    What am I missing?

    My guess, fwiw, is that the report will say:

    Air force pilots have seen things in the upper atmosphere that we can't explain.

    Which is true!

    But it's not anything like conclusive evidence of extra-terrestrials flying space ships around the US.
    But they’ve also seen them at 50ft above sea level.

    Edit - and below sea level!
    All the low level stuff I've seen has been amateur rather than military.
  • Pagan2Pagan2 Posts: 9,870
    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    alex_ said:

    rcs1000 said:

    alex_ said:

    MaxPB said:

    I'm starting to wonder about the government's strategy now. Is it deliberately giving the zerovidians enough rope? Crank up pressure on the antivaxxers and discredit the zerovidians when their tales of doom fail to materialise.

    Almost certainly a daft conspiracy theory too far. But given hospitalisation rates? Hmm.

    I think they are. It seems to have got a lot of people in Bolton out to get the vaccine that were previously refusing and they will also get to discredit these doom modellers once and for all. It's not even a high risk strategy given what we know about the AZ vaccine having 90% efficacy against infection and Pfizer at 91%. Almost every single person in groups 1-9 will have had both doses in advance of June 21st. Exactly who will end up in hospital?!
    Not just in hospital but 10,000 A DAY in hospital. And that wasn’t even the worst case scenario!
    SAGE should be made to show their workings. Use both sides of the paper.

    What's particularly infuriating is that the EU is opening up now, despite not having anywhere near the vaccine protection we do.

    We had this massive lead, that we're in the process of squandering due to a bunch of zero Covid nutters.
    Unfortunately, that's a consequence of the history of the last year in the UK.

    Those who have argued for earlier, harder lockdowns have been shown to be right last March, last autumn, last December. Anti-lockdown types called it wrong each time, to tragic effect.

    So on the occasion where we probably do have leeway to unlock faster, the public confidence isn't there- and one has to wonder if the PM has the confidence to go faster.

    It's kind of the boy who cried wolf in reverse.

    (The three month vaccination lead the UK had was always going to close a fair bit, but even I'm surprised at how much the reopening gap is closing.)
    Whilst the point about December/Xmas is fair, it could be noted that countries like Germany were almost just as bad in the second wave. And still posting numbers closing the gap and a reasonable rate. Their lower death rates are almost entirely a consequence of their “first wave” success.

    It defies sense that the EU should be claiming fear of what’s currently happening in the U.K. as a reason to restrict foreign travel.
    It defies sense that the EU should be claiming fear of what’s currently happening in the U.K. as a reason to restrict foreign travel

    Errr, that would be because they're doing for domestic political consumption, rather than because of any real fear.

    THAT SAID.

    I foolishly watched MSNBC the other day, and it had a feature on the Indian Covid variant, and it identifed the UK as a hotspot alongside India. Anyone watching it would have assumed the UK was being swamped by hundreds of thousands of new cases of Indian variant CV19.

    Which was, it is fair to say, utterly ridiculous.
    Of course the UK is actually testing its strains, how many other countries are doing the same even now?
    Anyone online in EU or watching EU domestic media care to comment on how UK now being portrayed? I understood, and please correct me where wrong, in a beautiful symmetrical turn around, anything that goes wrong in EU now is getting effectively blamed on UK. Can’t get vaccines - UK to blame, vaccines don’t work UK to blame, high unemployment UKs fault, bad weather, ah you get the picture.

    QUESTION. Is how others see us and report us a problem for us.

    I reckon it is.
    Why should we care its only a torpid backwater of the world, its like when mugabe blames zimbabwe's current problems on colonial rule
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,926
    Scott_xP said:

    RobD said:

    That's not related to tariffs or quotas, is it?

    yes
    Those are standards. Unless it is also a zero-standard trade agreement.
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556
    Scott_xP said:

    RobD said:

    Zero tariffs zero quotas with EU good, zero tariffs zero quotas with Australia bad?

    Hormone injections, good????
    Give it a go and let us know how you get on?
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,747
    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    rcs1000 said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    @Leon

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-jTiKNR_euQ

    Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat, New Mexico

    Member of Senate Intelligence Committee and Member of Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

    The two areas of government most closely associated with UAP investigation.

    LOL he's clearly humouring the guy! 😂
    TMZ is leading entertainment tabloid television show in the USA. Must see TV for huge number of folks, in particular younger viewers and (someday) voters.

    Any politico being interviewed by TMZ who does NOT humor the interviewer would be a flaming idiot.

    PLUS note that Roswell is in Sen. Heinrich's bailiwick.
    Of course! 👽

    Anyone who takes TMZ seriously ... needs help!
    You’ve spent months talking about weirdos on YouTube not counting. We give you cnn, fox, the NY Times, NBC, 60 mins etc... We give you serving senators, ex presidents, ex CIA heads. Multiple military personnel talking on the record about the same event that has also had video, infrared and telemetrics supporting their story.

    Nothing will ever satisfy you that there’s some extraordinary technology that needs to be explained. Nothing. Not even Leon’s space bassoon. I don’t know whether it’s aliens, it would concern me less than it being earthly at this stage frankly.
    Oh I 100% understand that there's advanced technologies.
    Let’s run with your theory. What happens next if someone inside the DoD has been falsifying Navy flight video and telemetrics with off the shelf software? To the extent that it’s made its way to the highest levels of classified briefings and motivated a cross party congressional initiative to demand answers from the executive?

    The day is going to come when you will look back and be embarrassed by what you’re writing now.
    They're feeding conspiracy lunatics with a more entertaining conspiracy that justifies DoD spending, rather than having them hooked on a conspiracy about underground paedophile networks and shadow Presidents only known about by Q and his followers.

    It's conspiracy detox. It's a joke.
    Ok let’s run with your latest theory. Do you not think that would be perhaps the biggest story of post war American politics, given the senior politicians from both sides of the aisle that have apparently fallen for it?
    @moonshine

    As far as I'm aware there are:

    1. Things that air force pilots have seen for fifty years in the upper atmosphere that defy our understanding
    2. Some drone footage that has people very excited
    3. A jokey (and not particularly committal) answer to a question by Barack Obama
    and...
    4. The possibility that the US government will release a report in the coming months

    What am I missing?

    My guess, fwiw, is that the report will say:

    Air force pilots have seen things in the upper atmosphere that we can't explain.

    Which is true!

    But it's not anything like conclusive evidence of extra-terrestrials flying space ships around the US.
    But they’ve also seen them at 50ft above sea level.

    Edit - and below sea level!
    All the low level stuff I've seen has been amateur rather than military.
    That is because for curious reasons you refuse to engage with the source material released by the DoD.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,789

    Off topic: Oatly is valued at $13 billion. WTF?!?

    It's a great product. The only non dairy milk like stuff that I can deal with. Everything else is universally crap, soy, almond, hazelnut, hemp, pea - all terrible. Even non-oatly oat milks are awful.

    Definitely an oatly convert.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,128
    edited May 2021
    Scott_xP said:

    RobD said:

    Zero tariffs zero quotas with EU good, zero tariffs zero quotas with Australia bad?

    Hormone injections, good????
    Bit of a red herring, that. And lots of handwaving by various lobbyists.

    Most Ozzie beef does not have those. EU already has a trade deal with Oz which excludes hormone treated, and importing it here is illegal.

    B minus. Must try harder :smile:

This discussion has been closed.