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The big win for Johnson was getting his 90 minutes in the Oval Office – politicalbetting.com

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  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080

    I am confused by this narrative that freedom of movement of Labour is suggested to be so strongly linked to holding back the pay of the lower paid.

    The Swiss have freedom of movement of Labour, they have 3 or 4 times the number of immigrants compared to the UK, yet the issues described about low wages being supressed, there being no career path etc. is not seemingly affecting the Swiss (and I would suggest many other EU countries).

    What are the Swiss doing in their Labour market to mean that they are able to gain from the EU trading relationships yet are not hampered by the supposed negative impact of freedom of movement ?

    Something does not seem right in this logic.

    That’s because the logic is bolleaux.
    Essentially the “lump of labour” fallacy.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

    I keep pointing out that academic research shows very little evidence of wage suppression, and quite a bit for wage growth, but each time I do I get shouted down by some old white man who hasn’t worked since 1987 due to alcohol problems and blames the “eye-ties”.
    The Lump Of Labour Fallacy doesn't mean what you think it means.

    Yes, increasing labour supply to the point that there is an excess *may* increase economic activity.

    But if there is no shortage of labour, increasing economic activity/jobs, will simply pull in more. The price for labour will stabilise at the lowest value for clearing - minimum wage or the cost of living, in the UK case.
    It not only *might*, it *did*.

    And no, the price of labour did not “stabilise at the minimum wage”. Just 6% of the U.K. workforce were on the minimum wage at last reckoning.
    Hence "cost of living" - minimum wage is not enough to live on in much of the South East, for example.

    Even foreigners have the strange habits of wanting to eat and preferring not to sleep on park benches.
    Not according to various posters who gripe about Kosovan beggars and 10-to-room HMOs in Newham.
    I have personally seen the conditions in the HMO ( Houses in Multiple Occupation ) world.

    Through a relative, I have an involvement in the building industry. Living 1 person to every room in a property is quite standard - and that is for a company that pays better than most.

    I have seen, in addition, in the leafy parts of West London, the shitty end. Where there are multiple adults per room.

    Not sure why people want to deny this is happening.
    Agree with most of that. Plus that regulation is a total mess.

    Worth various notes, such that for many a room in an HMO is not their main dwelling, or that there is also a major 'serviced accommodation' market which has been growing vigorously.
  • algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    algarkirk said:

    SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?

    I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
    Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.

    The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.

    Labour List manages this lapidary thought:


    The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.

    You don't say. Gosh.

    In common with, I suspect, 99% of PBers I haven't read it yet, but will by the end of the day. The essay is part of a process of a) setting out a vision and b) making Labour electable. The timing is right, with Covid finally (we hope) fading, normal politics and economics gradually returning, and Labour Conference looming.

    Starmer's not an idiot - he doesn't expect voters to read it. But he also knows that any hostages to fortune or stuff to make the Mail and Telegraph salivate would be reported to the exclusion of the rest of the essay, so it's no surprise if it's a bit cautious. The audience is largely internal at this stage, as evidenced by its publication by the Fabian Society, but of course Starmer is hoping that some positive titbits will be picked up by the media.

    Anyway, the bit you cite from Labour List looks fine to me, as far as it goes.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    tlg86 said:

    Farooq said:

    tlg86 said:

    Farooq said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Farooq said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Pulpstar said:

    HYUFD said:

    ping said:

    HYUFD said:

    Appalled that the judiciary and the government are still allowing abortions for disabled babies after 24 weeks.

    Time to end this inequality and for the government to step up and change the law
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-58662846

    What do you think the limit should be for downs terminations?

    Genuine question. I don’t know myself.
    He's a zealot that wants to interfere in other people's right to choose.

    There shouldn't be a limit. People should have the right to make the informed decision themselves if they wish to have a child with Down's and that decision be sensitively taken and seriously considered and shouldn't be rushed due to artificial deadlines.
    You are equally a pro choice zealot who would allow abortion up to birth for all babies
    What purpose does forcing a pregnant woman to rush a decision on whether to abort to 22 weeks without taking advice or getting education on the subject serve?

    I have done volunteering work with the Special Olympics so this is something I'm familiar with. Family I know with a Down's child said quite frankly that when they got the diagnosis at the 20 week scan they considered an abortion but went and spoke to charities and families with Down's children and made the decision they wanted to proceed with the pregnancy.

    Compelling people to rush the decision without stopping to think about it might not have the effect you desire.
    It's unusual Downs would be picked up that late I think now? - but still a possibility as your post indicates. A 24 week rule makes sense in that case, even though 99% of abortions for Downs (And other trisomy) would I hope be picked up at 11-14 weeks.
    The issue with a 16 week rule would be denying the choice to the desperately unlucky couple that have a late trisomy diagnosis.
    The family I know that got me involved with the Special Olympics, the kids with Downs is an adult with Downs now. So things may have changed in diagnoses.

    But certain things get discovered at certain dates - plus people can want second checks, second opinions etc. With our first daughter the scan was unclear on something so we were told not to panic but to come back for a second scan at 20 weeks which we did and got an all clear. Had it not been all clear, we'd have had to make a very difficult decision and it would be good to get some time and space to be able to think calmly and sensitively on that.

    Rushing people to make decisions due to an unnecessary and artificial deadline can just rush people into making a decision they may not have made otherwise. Let people in difficult circumstances take the time to think carefully and make a fully informed decision. Treat it sensitively.
    I think "Ground C" abortion (99% of terminations) should probably be reduced to 16 weeks maximum though. I can't think of a good justification for aborting a healthy 23 week foetus.
    I can think of one: if the woman chooses it.
    If that's the argument, why not 28, 30 or 35 weeks ?
    Why not indeed. Not a decision I'd recommend, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal.
    Would put the doctors and nurses in an interesting position...
    Doctors and nurses should be allowed to personally refuse to carry out terminations if they want.
    Ummm, I was thinking more about allowing abortion at the point where the baby is very much alive when it is extracted from the mother. Good luck getting medical professionals to just leave a child to die.
    You really, really don’t want to know the details of how late-term abortions work.

    Let’s just say that an awful lot of medical professionals, exercise their right to refuse to be involved.
  • tlg86 said:
    Looks good fun to me. Wish they'd done interesting stuff like that when I was at school.
  • kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    algarkirk said:

    SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?

    I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
    Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.

    The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.

    Labour List manages this lapidary thought:

    The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.

    You don't say. Gosh.
    I'm pleased they got "atomization" in there. It's a word I like and it perfectly describes something about how we're going that I dislike. One does have to careful not to slide into "old fart" or "guru of grim" territory with it though.
    In other words, Starmer stands for dull decency. Which is a perfectly reasonable opposite to the current government. Mark D'Arcy vs. Daniel Cleaver.

    Leads to two questions, though.

    First is will the GBP decide that they'd quite like a few years of dull decency in 2023/4? Some think that's impossible, that we're so addled by celebrity culture that we will inevitably vote for the Big Man. I'm not so sure, though that may be wishful thinking. (If the way to win elections is to just find the biggest gob and put it on the biggest stick, we're stuffed as a nation.)

    Second is that, if your USP is dull decency, how do you sell it? Hopefully Lefty Boris isn't needed (after all, that gets you Ken Livingstone or Derek Hatton) but a little bit of sparkly dust wouldn't go amiss.
  • Don't know whether this has already been covered, but it seems Keith Vaz is now officially a wrong 'un:

    "Ex-Labour MP Keith Vaz should be ashamed of his behaviour towards a House of Commons staff member, a report on his conduct has said.
    ...
    The panel says the former Labour minister - who stood down as an MP in 2019 - should be banned for life from the Parliamentary estate."

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58664788

    The question is whether his behaviour should have been picked up years earlier, rather than once he became an ex-MP.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,341
    edited September 2021
    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    algarkirk said:

    SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?

    I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
    Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.

    The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.

    Labour List manages this lapidary thought:

    The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.

    You don't say. Gosh.
    I'm pleased they got "atomization" in there. It's a word I like and it perfectly describes something about how we're going that I dislike. One does have to careful not to slide into "old fart" or "guru of grim" territory with it though.
    I too can give a list of nice things and say I support them, and a list of nasty things and say I oppose them and that my political opponents support them. This is the bread and butter of political knockabout. Everyone can do it a bit, and some do it well.

    None of it demonstrates fitness for office, or details the sorts of policies which would solve the (usefully abstract) problem of 'atomisation'. Unless policy involves hard choices between real alternatives, getting beyond tired old straw man arguments, it is hot air.

  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,670

    eek said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    eek said:

    Scott_xP said:

    "We need to fish from a bigger pond", says Iceland boss Richard Walker, as he implores the Government to add HGV drivers to the skilled workers list to help elevated the crisis.

    https://trib.al/Q11CKrm https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1440943260281810945/video/1

    As was explained this morning the shortage of HGV drivers is across Europe so there is no pool of drivers readily available
    The realité is irrelevant to Scott'n Paste
    And to Iceland's boss Richard Walker apparently, but then what does he know about food distribution, eh?

    https://trib.al/Q11CKrm https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1440943260281810945/video/1
    The boss of a company doesn't want to pay people more as a solution and wants to regain access to unlimited cheap labour instead?

    I'm shocked, shocked at this completely unprecedented and unforeseen situation.
    Sure there can and should be a wages hike. But that isn't going to generate new drivers this winter.
    He isn't listening. His theory of capitalism trumps the real world practice of capitalism.

    The industry have done every single thing he says they should do. Pay more. Offer better terms and conditions. Incentives to bring qualified drivers back. All it has done is explode the wage bill and is about to tip the first big firm over - it hasn't done the slightest thing to rapido fill the hole in driver numbers.

    The industry said this would be the case from the start. Philip said they were wrong. It shouldn't be a surprise that the people who do this for a living were right.

    They can't pay more to recruit drivers in the GB. They can't train more drivers even if they had the candidates which they don't. They can't continue the lottery of not knowing which driver will still be available for work tomorrow or will have been poached. And no, we can't bring in the army.

    So we either go to the short term fix of limited time visas for imported drivers. Or we have increasing shortages of food and fuel and blood and gritter drivers and bin lorries. We know that the government will bow to the inevitable at the top of the crisis, so why not do it now?

    Allowing in EU drivers on a temporary visa can be spun as "controlled migration". We need them, they are here, then they leave again. It should be a win for the government. They can even have that nice Ms Patel waving them off with a smirk when they depart in January.
    Except the issue has been fixed.

    Companies that pay enough are getting their stock moved.
    Companies that don't are not.

    What's the problem? 🤷‍♂️

    PS if they don't have candidates to train then they're not paying enough to attract candidates. 🤷‍♂️
    Genuine lol. "Companies that pay enough are getting their stock moved"

    Well the companies in question say they are not. Perhaps they are wrong about what they are doing and you are right?

    Seriously, you should either stop digging as its embarrassing for you, or keep digging because you enjoy doing a cabaret turn.
    Maybe the companies in question aren't paying enough while their competitors are.

    I get that you think we should listen to people with a vested interest in avoiding seeing their costs rise but this is embarrassing for you. Just because people moan and feel entitled to avoid paying people a decent wage doesn't make them right.
    You seem to be missing Rochdale Pioneers point.

    Yes, wages have been increased but it's not solved any problems with the shortage of Lorry drivers as nothing could solve the supply side issue except for time.

    All the higher wages has done is move the problems elsewhere and unsurprisingly the first casualty is seems to be a specialist (refrigeration) haulier. That's because they have an even smaller supply of drivers (it's harder work, requires additional training and less pleasant due to noise) and other agencies are stealing their drivers for easier (non refrigerated) work.

    The issue once again is that 300,000 drivers cannot do the work of 400,000 drivers no matter how you try and change the rules.
    And this is the bit that "the free market will just find a new equilibrium" misses.

    Of course it will, over time. But what we're seeing now is a transient shock. It's a bit like the way that you have to push something harder to start it moving than you do to keep it moving.

    By all means move to a situation where only UK citizens are doing UK driving, if that's what the UK wants. (Though maybe we should work through all of the consequences to be sure that is what the UK wants.) But creating a shock change that doesn't work with the various degrees of stickyness in the system is asking for trouble.

    (And remember that something with lots of interacting parts like an economy will have lots of equilibrium points. And some of them will be a bit rubbish and progress towards any of them might be incredibly slow. The atoms in diamonds aren't in their optimal state, and they last basically forever.)
    So there's some trouble, its not the end of the world.

    Companies that really, really need the stock moving will pay whatever they have to in order to get the stock moved. Hence why businesses like Aldi can keep their shelves full.

    Companies that don't really need the stock moving won't.

    Demand falls, supply rises, problem resolved.

    Or we can do what Rochdale and the bosses of the companies petrified of paying a market wage want and get the state to meddle with the market - which will never be undone since this issue will arise any time you cease to meddle.
    Um that isn't what Rochdale wants - all we are doing is pointing out

    300,000 drivers working at legal limits cannot do the work of 400,000 drivers.

    Getting to 400,000 drivers has a lead time of 2-3 years.

    So we either need to get used to shortages or we need to import drivers on a time limited basis until enough GB drivers are trained up...
    300,000 drivers can't do the work of 400,000 drivers.

    But 350,000 drivers can do the work of 350,000 drivers.

    Pay rates go up, more people are attracted into the industry - some clients are decide its not worth demanding from the industry.

    Yes it means some journeys that happen now won't happen in the future. Those should be the least productive, least economic ones that can't afford the pay rise and they go off the road. That's not a bad thing.
    1) We don't have 350,000 drivers
    2) All goods and a lot of services requires items to be delivered. Moving from 400,000 drivers down to 350,000 drivers will have serious impacts on other parts of economy. The demand for logistics is very inelastic, it will never be 350,000 drivers unless our economy shrank 5%.

    1) So are you telling me there aren't 50,000 potential or ex drivers who left the sector or can be trained up? That there has been absolutely zero turnover or people voluntarily leaving the sector due to poor pay and conditions that can't be tempted back by better pay and conditions?

    2) Not necessarily at all since the journeys dropped would be the least productive, least efficient ones.

    Does anyone have the figure for how many licenced ex drivers there are in this country?
    I believe its about 300,000. As (a) recruiting them to rejoin the industry and (b) retraining them so that their expired licenses are renewed is so obvious and so quick, you have to ask why this hasn't just happened. Just pay them more and the crisis disappears in a puff of remoaner smoke!

    Meanwhile, in the real world...
    In the real world companies that are prepared to pay what needs to be paid are getting stock moved.

    Again do you have anything by anyone without a vested interest where Mandy Rice Davies applies saying there's an issue?
    Can I correct a comment from earlier today.

    Philip's inability to understand what is being explained to him means I now suspect he's not just a Tory MP but a member of the current cabinet..
    So nobody without a vested interest thinks there's an issue? Good.

    For any Remoaners or bosses MRDA explains it all.

    I think Philip is a Tory troll on the paylist of cchq, who's only function in life is to argue black is white irrespective of any real evidence. He is only saying these things to wind people up. We must stop feeding him.
    He has his views as you have yours and there is a clash between those who support leaving the EU and those who do not

    In @Philip_Thompson and @RochdalePioneers you have examples of both fighting their cause but it does not serve the debate to suggest either are trolls

    However the difference is Rochdale has varying opinions on topics etc whereas if Boris ordered all pensioners shot tomorrow Philip would support it 100% and say it was a great policy and just what the country needed, Global Britain , anybody against it is crazy.
  • rpjsrpjs Posts: 3,787
    On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.

    And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).

    With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,840
    MrEd said:

    HYUFD said:

    Appalled that the judiciary and the government are still allowing abortions for disabled babies after 24 weeks.

    Time to end this inequality and for the government to step up and change the law
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-58662846

    HYUFD said:

    Appalled that the judiciary and the government are still allowing abortions for disabled babies after 24 weeks.

    Time to end this inequality and for the government to step up and change the law
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-58662846

    Agreed. The message is clear. If you are disabled, you are worth less than a “normal” baby. Equalise the limit.
    Doesn't really follow imo. Once born all are equal under the law. Eg the Texas limit now is 6 weeks, California is longer. Does this send a loud and clear message that a Californian child is worth less than a Texan one? Surely not. Or if a state has extensions for a pregnancy caused by rape, is the clear message there that children conceived in those circumstances are worth less than those who aren't? I don't think so. I find that a rather odd interpretation.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,243
    darkage said:

    Selebian said:

    Farooq said:

    MattW said:

    TimS said:

    The “what happens if the wind doesn’t blow” question will at least partly be addressed in due course with battery storage, but we sometimes miss the big picture on renewables.

    The reason we only have 1-2gw of wind power in calm anti cyclonic conditions is because we only have about 18gw of peak capacity. Build 10x as much, plus more solar (which often generates well during times there is little wind) and even in calm periods we have 10-20gw being generated. We have massive latency in traditional generation capacity. We need to get used to latency in renewables too. It’s already happening in parts of the US and China with solar. The infrastructure is cheap enough that it’s viable simply to build much more than you need and switch it off when there’s too much sun. (Or use the excess to smelt aluminium / make carbon fibre / isolate hydrogen).

    We are now into autumn winds. In Sky Blue. Wind running at 10+GW now.



    Plus (I think - this needs translating https://www.nationalgrid.com/incidents) the burnt down interconnector is about to come back on with 1GW capacity. And the Norway Interconnector comes on stream in the next month at 1.4GW.

    TBH I think the supply issue is very close to fixed. I think it will all be very different in just a month or so.

    Effectively artificially low prices have been subsidised or years by the capital of people who invested in companies with unsustainable business models. Who are now falling out.

    Personally I hope that we stick with somewhat higher prices, and the current 'crisis' will persuade some people to improve the Energy Efficiency of their homes.
    That's a tricky argument to take to renters.
    Are rental properties advertised with EPCs? Do they have to be?

    It's 7 years since I was last in the rental market, as tenant, so I'm out of touch. I know EPCs are pretty limited, but they do give some idea. When house-hunting (to buy) I do consider them at the filtering stage.

    An addition to headline EPC to give an average monthly energy bill for that type of property with that kind of EPC rating would enable landlords with better insulated homes to put the case that renting from them was preferable to renting a less insulated home.

    About ten years ago I lived in a total shocker of a flat, insulation-wise. Nice flat, nice block, nice location but the landlord had had no incentive to upgrade the origina 1970s standard (lack of) insulation. High bills, cold rooms.
    You need to decide what your priority is. I have always lived in old properties with high ceilings because I appreciate their aesthetic value, and take the high bills as part of the cost. That's my perspective. The EPC is largely irrellevant. It was true both when renting and after buying.

    Were I to upgrade my current building to get a better EPC I would need to do damaging works which would essentially amount to a form of vandalism; ie by ripping out the walls or ceiling, or the original single glazed windows.

    I have some scepticism about EPC's based on the current encouragement of electrical storage heaters, which the government are currently funding for low income households, and which would presumably increase the EPC rating of a building. These are universally derided by builders and tradesmen; they rely on uneconomic economy 7 tariffs forcing you to accept higher electricity prices in the daytime, and they don't heat the house when you most need it; ie on very cold winter evenings, forcing you to use expensive temporary electric heaters or portable gas heaters instead.



    Yes, there are plenty of other things to consider. I own a 1925 house and there are limits on what you can do (or, indeed, want to do). We could pay lower bills for a well-insulated rabbit hutch, but choose not to.

    What I'm talking about is the renter considering my old flat from ten years ago or the neighbouring flat (had the owner been renting that out). Both were pleasantly decorated, large flats. Ours was slightly larger by the thickness of internal insulation on external walls (under 2sqm floor space difference on a quick calc). Internal room height identical. Our energy bills were ~30% higher than the neighbour's. If both had been up for rent on Rightmove or wherever, there would have been pretty much nothing to choose between them on the information and pictures commonly provided. An EPC would have provided the differentiation and perhaps enabled the better insulated flat to be rented at a higher price.

    PS: You don't need to convince me on storage heaters - above mentioned flat had them.
  • Actually saw this on a spot of news yesterday: Lithuanian government found dodginess in Chinese mobiles:
    https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1440601477706178560
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10020619/Woman-Downs-syndrome-loses-High-Court-challenge-against-Government-abortion-law.html#comments-10020619

    Filtering the comments by “best rated” & “worst rated” - DM readers are very much in favour of the court ruling.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,341

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    algarkirk said:

    SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?

    I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
    Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.

    The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.

    Labour List manages this lapidary thought:

    The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.

    You don't say. Gosh.
    I'm pleased they got "atomization" in there. It's a word I like and it perfectly describes something about how we're going that I dislike. One does have to careful not to slide into "old fart" or "guru of grim" territory with it though.
    In other words, Starmer stands for dull decency. Which is a perfectly reasonable opposite to the current government. Mark D'Arcy vs. Daniel Cleaver.

    Leads to two questions, though.

    First is will the GBP decide that they'd quite like a few years of dull decency in 2023/4? Some think that's impossible, that we're so addled by celebrity culture that we will inevitably vote for the Big Man. I'm not so sure, though that may be wishful thinking. (If the way to win elections is to just find the biggest gob and put it on the biggest stick, we're stuffed as a nation.)

    Second is that, if your USP is dull decency, how do you sell it? Hopefully Lefty Boris isn't needed (after all, that gets you Ken Livingstone or Derek Hatton) but a little bit of sparkly dust wouldn't go amiss.
    Dull decency will do fine for me. But What is the dull decency plan for the next 10 years of Brexit, taxation, how much to spend on the NHS, solving social care, what do the dull decent do about tapering benefits, the NI/RoI border, membership of the single market, the customs union, paying off the debt, borrowing, the actuality of the painful bits of climate change policy when the rest of world is increasing emissions. Etc.

    Anyone know where SKS stands on any or all of these?

  • Mr. (Ms?) Kirk, dull decency is a draw for me. But it needs to be paired with competence.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,182
    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    algarkirk said:

    SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?

    I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
    Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.

    The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.

    Labour List manages this lapidary thought:

    The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.

    You don't say. Gosh.
    I'm pleased they got "atomization" in there. It's a word I like and it perfectly describes something about how we're going that I dislike. One does have to careful not to slide into "old fart" or "guru of grim" territory with it though.
    What is your understanding of atomisation? I agree that we are going through it - my understanding of it, at any rate - but it doesn't seem to be a party political issue; or, to the extent that either party has a position, the Conservatives occasionally rail against it half-heartedly and ineffectually, and Labour (up until now) and the Lib Dems say nothing at all.

    My view of what atomisation is includes:
    - people see, and know, fewer other people
    - decline in participation in clubs and societies
    - decline in commonly held culture and cultural values (banal example: we don't all watch the same things at the same time any more)
    - decline in household size
    - increase in not-knowing-your-neighbours syndrome

    These are not all inherently or wholly negative.

    But humans are social creatures. Our health and wellbeing and happiness depends on having our 150 people to rub along with - in real life, with eye contact, laughter, nuance, and so forth - and in having an 'us' with whom we identify. People who we don't, or only to a limited extent, choose. Families, for example; but there are dozens of other examples: clubs, schools, churches, other children's parents. Even workplaces. (I am back in the office today for the first time since March 2020. For some reason, being with work colleagues - agreeable enough people, but not people I have personally selected on my journey through life - rather than with family, feels curiously life-affirming.)

    There's something a bit paradoxical about this - I think the gist of my argument is that I want to be around people who I don't choose to be around.

    Perhaps there's something to be said for hygge after all, though it sounds bloody awful.

    I'm not sure where I'm going with this, or what the solution is. I'm not even sure there is a solution, or at least not a top-down one. I could perhaps add in some in effective railing at big tech, who are - if not the villains of all this, at least the enablers - but I'm not sure to what end.



  • rpjs said:

    On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.

    And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).

    With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.

    I agree with a lot of what you said but with a key divergence take the opposition position.

    Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.

    The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.

    Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.

    People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
  • MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I am confused by this narrative that freedom of movement of Labour is suggested to be so strongly linked to holding back the pay of the lower paid.

    The Swiss have freedom of movement of Labour, they have 3 or 4 times the number of immigrants compared to the UK, yet the issues described about low wages being supressed, there being no career path etc. is not seemingly affecting the Swiss (and I would suggest many other EU countries).

    What are the Swiss doing in their Labour market to mean that they are able to gain from the EU trading relationships yet are not hampered by the supposed negative impact of freedom of movement ?

    Something does not seem right in this logic.

    That’s because the logic is bolleaux.
    Essentially the “lump of labour” fallacy.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

    I keep pointing out that academic research shows very little evidence of wage suppression, and quite a bit for wage growth, but each time I do I get shouted down by some old white man who hasn’t worked since 1987 due to alcohol problems and blames the “eye-ties”.
    No, it's because Switzerland has put up a lot, lot of NTBs on employment of migrants.
    NTBs which have not, as the original poster noted, avoided very high volumes of immigration.
    Yes, the biggest moaners about immigration in Switzerland are high end workers. My wife's uncle was bitching about German doctors coming and working in Switzerland a couple of years ago. We wish we had that problem.
    Let me guess: they don't get called racist and stupid, do they?
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    rpjs said:

    On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.

    And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).

    With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.

    I agree with a lot of what you said but with a key divergence take the opposition position.

    Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.

    The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.

    Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.

    People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
    Which is fine but the government has approached the situation with its usual incompetence. People are unable to book HGV driving tests. That's mostly what this comes down to. Grant Shapps took the easy way out during COVID and halted tests and now we're all paying the price for that. Papering over the cracks with EU drivers won't change anything, in fact it will give the government a way out of the mess without fixing the bloody problem.

    All of this has got at least a 6 month lead time and a year ago we knew we needed to drastically increase driving test capacity for HGV licencing, both to keep up with renewals of existing drivers and to get new ones licenced. In that time nothing has really been done and all we've had from Shapps are a few token changes to licence terms.

    The system is bottlenecked by getting drivers licenced. The new salaries on offer are getting lots of people interested and then they get told, well you can train for 6 months but you won't get a test for 18 months so won't be earning that salary you read about for at least 2 years and they decide that working in Sainsbury's isn't so bad after all.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080

    rpjs said:

    On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.

    And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).

    With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.

    I agree with a lot of what you said but with a key divergence take the opposition position.

    Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.

    The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.

    Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.

    People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
    On the timber point, I know numbers of self-builders who have either a) Delayed their projects, or are doing them in a different order (eg landscaping first), because their timber frame kits are 25-50% up from the quotes of 12-18 months ago, or b) Proceeding because they agreed to pay the premium for a fixed price or firm price contract back then.

    Timber market is already starting to stabilise, but it will take time.
  • I get the arguments about violence and porn, but how do we explain away mainstream shows, including those like Game of Thrones, Spartacus, Tribes of Europa, and The Walking Dead that revel in showing extreme violence and sexual violence, which sells well and gives very high viewing figures?

    Some of these shows had female directors and writers. I stopped watching GoT after The Red Wedding, which I found disturbing, but this is a bit more complex than just saying it's male chauvinism, I think.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    edited September 2021
    Cookie said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    algarkirk said:

    SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?

    I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
    Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.

    The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.

    Labour List manages this lapidary thought:

    The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.

    You don't say. Gosh.
    I'm pleased they got "atomization" in there. It's a word I like and it perfectly describes something about how we're going that I dislike. One does have to careful not to slide into "old fart" or "guru of grim" territory with it though.
    What is your understanding of atomisation? I agree that we are going through it - my understanding of it, at any rate - but it doesn't seem to be a party political issue; or, to the extent that either party has a position, the Conservatives occasionally rail against it half-heartedly and ineffectually, and Labour (up until now) and the Lib Dems say nothing at all.

    My view of what atomisation is includes:
    - people see, and know, fewer other people
    - decline in participation in clubs and societies
    - decline in commonly held culture and cultural values (banal example: we don't all watch the same things at the same time any more)
    - decline in household size
    - increase in not-knowing-your-neighbours syndrome

    These are not all inherently or wholly negative.

    But humans are social creatures. Our health and wellbeing and happiness depends on having our 150 people to rub along with - in real life, with eye contact, laughter, nuance, and so forth - and in having an 'us' with whom we identify. People who we don't, or only to a limited extent, choose. Families, for example; but there are dozens of other examples: clubs, schools, churches, other children's parents. Even workplaces. (I am back in the office today for the first time since March 2020. For some reason, being with work colleagues - agreeable enough people, but not people I have personally selected on my journey through life - rather than with family, feels curiously life-affirming.)

    There's something a bit paradoxical about this - I think the gist of my argument is that I want to be around people who I don't choose to be around.

    Perhaps there's something to be said for hygge after all, though it sounds bloody awful.

    I'm not sure where I'm going with this, or what the solution is. I'm not even sure there is a solution, or at least not a top-down one. I could perhaps add in some in effective railing at big tech, who are - if not the villains of all this, at least the enablers - but I'm not sure to what end.



    But atomisation is a process both of Thatcherite individualism, and of "state does everything" socialism. Because both mitigate against small-scale human communities.

    And it is an observed phenomenon for at least 60 years.

    Movements such as community-living from the 1960s / 1970s are a response . critique, plus eg it was an element of thinking of people such as E F Schumacher.

    Or, as the Philosopher put it: "There is nothing new under the sun".
  • Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.

    May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    algarkirk said:

    SKS's essay seems to have vanished more or less without trace already. SFAICS it contains nothing except self evident general desires for a slightly better world. Has anyone spotted anything interesting in it?

    I posted a point made by Stephen Bush earlier this morning - about what it did not contain. Somewhere down below, about 9 am-ish.
    Yes, thanks. I noticed it at the time. What the excellent Stephen Bush didn't say was that the essay was brilliant, full of new ideas and made all the relevant calls about difficult choices so that we knew what SKS stood for.

    The usual suspects - BBC, Guardian, Mirror, are not giving it great prominence.

    Labour List manages this lapidary thought:


    The central point of the pamphlet is that Britain faces a choice between a country led by a Labour leader committed to equality, security, responsibility and collective action – or incompetence, selfishness, atomisation, cronyism and free-market dogma under the Tories.

    You don't say. Gosh.

    For a moment I interpreted "lapidary" as "like a rabbit".
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392
    edited September 2021

    Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.

    May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.

    Indeed - I like both, but they have very different feels.

    But then that was my reason with having a problem with Starfleet officers swearing at each other in Picard.
  • Going on all over Europe I'm sure.

    Douglas Fraser
    @BBCDouglasF
    BP: “We're experiencing fuel supply issues at some UK retail sites and unfortunately have therefore seen handful temporarily close due to lack of unleaded and diesel grades: caused by supply chain delays, industry-wide driver shortages: working hard to address this issue"
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    edited September 2021
    Selebian said:

    darkage said:

    Selebian said:

    Farooq said:

    MattW said:

    TimS said:

    The “what happens if the wind doesn’t blow” question will at least partly be addressed in due course with battery storage, but we sometimes miss the big picture on renewables.

    The reason we only have 1-2gw of wind power in calm anti cyclonic conditions is because we only have about 18gw of peak capacity. Build 10x as much, plus more solar (which often generates well during times there is little wind) and even in calm periods we have 10-20gw being generated. We have massive latency in traditional generation capacity. We need to get used to latency in renewables too. It’s already happening in parts of the US and China with solar. The infrastructure is cheap enough that it’s viable simply to build much more than you need and switch it off when there’s too much sun. (Or use the excess to smelt aluminium / make carbon fibre / isolate hydrogen).

    We are now into autumn winds. In Sky Blue. Wind running at 10+GW now.



    Plus (I think - this needs translating https://www.nationalgrid.com/incidents) the burnt down interconnector is about to come back on with 1GW capacity. And the Norway Interconnector comes on stream in the next month at 1.4GW.

    TBH I think the supply issue is very close to fixed. I think it will all be very different in just a month or so.

    Effectively artificially low prices have been subsidised or years by the capital of people who invested in companies with unsustainable business models. Who are now falling out.

    Personally I hope that we stick with somewhat higher prices, and the current 'crisis' will persuade some people to improve the Energy Efficiency of their homes.
    That's a tricky argument to take to renters.
    Are rental properties advertised with EPCs? Do they have to be?

    It's 7 years since I was last in the rental market, as tenant, so I'm out of touch. I know EPCs are pretty limited, but they do give some idea. When house-hunting (to buy) I do consider them at the filtering stage.

    An addition to headline EPC to give an average monthly energy bill for that type of property with that kind of EPC rating would enable landlords with better insulated homes to put the case that renting from them was preferable to renting a less insulated home.

    About ten years ago I lived in a total shocker of a flat, insulation-wise. Nice flat, nice block, nice location but the landlord had had no incentive to upgrade the origina 1970s standard (lack of) insulation. High bills, cold rooms.
    You need to decide what your priority is. I have always lived in old properties with high ceilings because I appreciate their aesthetic value, and take the high bills as part of the cost. That's my perspective. The EPC is largely irrellevant. It was true both when renting and after buying.

    Were I to upgrade my current building to get a better EPC I would need to do damaging works which would essentially amount to a form of vandalism; ie by ripping out the walls or ceiling, or the original single glazed windows.

    I have some scepticism about EPC's based on the current encouragement of electrical storage heaters, which the government are currently funding for low income households, and which would presumably increase the EPC rating of a building. These are universally derided by builders and tradesmen; they rely on uneconomic economy 7 tariffs forcing you to accept higher electricity prices in the daytime, and they don't heat the house when you most need it; ie on very cold winter evenings, forcing you to use expensive temporary electric heaters or portable gas heaters instead.

    Yes, there are plenty of other things to consider. I own a 1925 house and there are limits on what you can do (or, indeed, want to do). We could pay lower bills for a well-insulated rabbit hutch, but choose not to.

    What I'm talking about is the renter considering my old flat from ten years ago or the neighbouring flat (had the owner been renting that out). Both were pleasantly decorated, large flats. Ours was slightly larger by the thickness of internal insulation on external walls (under 2sqm floor space difference on a quick calc). Internal room height identical. Our energy bills were ~30% higher than the neighbour's. If both had been up for rent on Rightmove or wherever, there would have been pretty much nothing to choose between them on the information and pictures commonly provided. An EPC would have provided the differentiation and perhaps enabled the better insulated flat to be rented at a higher price.

    PS: You don't need to convince me on storage heaters - above mentioned flat had them.
    Agree that you both make good points.

    It is interesting that the number of "all electric" houses are rapidly increasing. I will do that with mine in due course, when I take the gas boiler out at the end of its life, but I need the EPC to be up around A95 first, which needs a couple more things doing.

    A possible approach for a person building a decent quality self-build now is to install ufh pipework in the slab just in case something is calculated wrong, then use a couple of immersion heaters to heat the slab on Economy 7, and have no heating upstairs except a couple of electric towel rails for the depth of winter.

    The sooner the energy efficiency becomes a huge factor in the market value for rent or sale, the better. Presumably the difference in value should be the same as the amount of capital needed to buy an equivalent annuity.

    One thing we need is for compulsion to do the fabric (eg insulation) before a heat pump, because if you sort the fabric properly you can have a heat pump half the size, which will probably save enough to pay for the insulation.

    We saw this with solar panels when the FIT payments were limited to dwellings with higher EPC values. We need it now.
  • Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.

    May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.

    Agreed, and it's not just on Netflix either: Industry (on BBC) had soft porn so hard it was almost censorable.

    I'm not a prude, and I wouldn't ban it myself, but I think to blame male violence on porn either isn't correct or we have a much, much broader problem with the darker side of our human psyche right across society because some of the most prominent and mainstream examples of extreme porn are on our TVs.

    I'm very sympathetic to the need to listen to women properly and treat them with respect. My line at work is that I'm anti-Woke and I like non-PC jokes, but I'm much more inclusive (in the proper sense of the word) of those from all sorts of different backgrounds than some of my publicly Woke colleagues, who are really performative narcissists.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080

    Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.

    May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.

    Who's going to get boffed in Tolkien?

    Galadriel on Gandalf? Bifor and Bofur on Bombur if we are on the pronhub threesome incest dwarf-tossing version?
    Or perhaps we are going to see a graphic novel of Beren and Luthien?

    The mind boggles.
  • kle4 said:

    Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.

    May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.

    Indeed - I like both, but they have very different feels.

    But then that was my reason with having a problem with Starfleet officers swearing at each other in Picard.
    I'd say Star Trek: The Next Generation was the most "woke" TV series ever made, and that was before Woke ever became a thing. There's little violence, lots of protracted moral conundrums, they don't eat meat, they're inclusive and respectful of others, and the sex is pretty innocent too - mainly Riker flirting on shore leave.

    And it's one of my favourites. The crucial thing is that all of that is incidental to the story; it isn't rubbed in your face by peacocking morons delivering a hectoring lecture.
  • Say what you like about Johnson, the guy's a genius communicator. He knows his fans will absolutely lap this franglais up and his haters will make sure his fans will hear all about it if they haven't already.

    https://twitter.com/ProfTimBale/status/1440765148365393926?s=20

    I definitely remember very similar observations being made about another populist with a complicated relationship with the truth. Fans of genius communicator Johnson never seem very keen on that comparison though.
    Yes, Salmond certainly has "the gift of the gab"!
  • Don't know whether this has already been covered, but it seems Keith Vaz is now officially a wrong 'un:

    "Ex-Labour MP Keith Vaz should be ashamed of his behaviour towards a House of Commons staff member, a report on his conduct has said.
    ...
    The panel says the former Labour minister - who stood down as an MP in 2019 - should be banned for life from the Parliamentary estate."

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58664788

    The question is whether his behaviour should have been picked up years earlier, rather than once he became an ex-MP.

    Who was responsible for Commons staff at the time? Oh yes, Bercow.....
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    edited September 2021

    kle4 said:

    Mr. Royale, rumour has it the Netflix Tolkien series will ape Game of Thrones in that regard.

    May work but I think a lot of fans will not be pleased. Tolkien's stuff was notable for its lack of such things.

    Indeed - I like both, but they have very different feels.

    But then that was my reason with having a problem with Starfleet officers swearing at each other in Picard.
    I'd say Star Trek: The Next Generation was the most "woke" TV series ever made, and that was before Woke ever became a thing. There's little violence, lots of protracted moral conundrums, they don't eat meat, they're inclusive and respectful of others, and the sex is pretty innocent too - mainly Riker flirting on shore leave.

    And it's one of my favourites. The crucial thing is that all of that is incidental to the story; it isn't rubbed in your face by peacocking morons delivering a hectoring lecture.
    TNS was quite PC. Had men in miniskirts as an option for the Star Fleet Uniform: "skorts".

    (Though it may be an excuse for keeping miniskirts for women.)

    At this point, I withdraw from the thread.


  • Mr. kle4, aye. Felt no temptation to watch Picard.

    If the idiots in charge had wanted something less straightforwardly hopeful then a continuation of the DS9 timeline with Worf/Martok struggling to hold the Klingons together and war-footing versus democrat types in the Federation arguing among themselves would've fit perfectly.

    Mr. W, it's Second Age, so none of those (I imagine Gandalf might feature. I can't recall precisely when the Istari first appear).

    It sounds like mindless copying "Game of Thrones did this and people like that" etc.
  • Mr. W, Seven of Nine in a catsuit was delightful.

    I can just imagine the off-camera scene.

    "But Captain Janeway, everyone else is wearing a uniform with trousers."
    "Shh. Just put on the skintight catsuit, don the high heels, and look pretty."
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    it isn't rubbed in your face by peacocking morons delivering a hectoring lecture.

    (that's your job)
  • Say what you like about Johnson, the guy's a genius communicator. He knows his fans will absolutely lap this franglais up and his haters will make sure his fans will hear all about it if they haven't already.

    https://twitter.com/ProfTimBale/status/1440765148365393926?s=20

    I definitely remember very similar observations being made about another populist with a complicated relationship with the truth. Fans of genius communicator Johnson never seem very keen on that comparison though.
    Yes, Salmond certainly has "the gift of the gab"!
    Well, Alex certainly had 'certain parties' on PB convinced during the Holyrood enquiry.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    edited September 2021

    Mr. kle4, aye. Felt no temptation to watch Picard.

    If the idiots in charge had wanted something less straightforwardly hopeful then a continuation of the DS9 timeline with Worf/Martok struggling to hold the Klingons together and war-footing versus democrat types in the Federation arguing among themselves would've fit perfectly.

    Mr. W, it's Second Age, so none of those (I imagine Gandalf might feature. I can't recall precisely when the Istari first appear).

    It sounds like mindless copying "Game of Thrones did this and people like that" etc.

    Galadriel ? And her flirtations with hobbits; don't tell Big Bad John.

    OK. Elrond and Celebrian, Ar-Pharazon & Mrs somebody else on the swaying ship on the tidal wave from sunken Numenor.

    Definitely leaving this thread now :smile: .
  • Finally!

    Nick Tyrone
    @NicholasTyrone
    22m
    I actually came up with a Brexit benefit today: it caused the DUP to self-destruct in the most spectacular way imaginable. That's one unreservedly good thing to come out of it all.
  • Andy_CookeAndy_Cooke Posts: 4,793

    Mr. kle4, aye. Felt no temptation to watch Picard.

    If the idiots in charge had wanted something less straightforwardly hopeful then a continuation of the DS9 timeline with Worf/Martok struggling to hold the Klingons together and war-footing versus democrat types in the Federation arguing among themselves would've fit perfectly.

    Mr. W, it's Second Age, so none of those (I imagine Gandalf might feature. I can't recall precisely when the Istari first appear).

    It sounds like mindless copying "Game of Thrones did this and people like that" etc.

    No Gandalf, but Tolkien was not consistent on when the Blue Wizards of the Istari first appeared. In one place, he said they arrived with Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast around 1000 of the Third Age (and were called Alatar and Pallando); later, he stated that they were sent with the re-embodied Glorfindel to help in the Second Age when things became very dangerous (around 1600 of the Second Age), and the Blue Wizards were then named Morinehtar and Romestamo.

    So it all depends which they go with, but Gandalf shouldn't appear.
  • MaxPB said:

    rpjs said:

    On the supply-chain, truck-driver shortage thing, it’s certainly true that it’s a problem across the developed world. Here in the US we’re not just seeing a truck-driver shortage but a school bus-driver shortage too as in many states the licensing (sic) is compatible for at least smaller trucks and trucking is paying much better right now.

    And of course the root cause of that is the pandemic, not Brexit. However, an advantage that US and the EU have is that we and they are operating on continental-scales for this sort of thing, which makes it easier to either deliberately or through the “invisible hand” manage the supply to match the demand overall. Cabotage within the EU means that a truck driver’s regular work can be a mixture of long-distance international jobs supplemented by local jobs within a particular country, not necessarily their own. And of course that’s even simpler in the US as a single country/economy (not sure if there is any cabotage for Mexican or Canadian truckers allowed under NAFTA/USMCA but I doubt it would be as significant as in the EU anyway).

    With the UK’s hard Brexit from the CU/SM, it’s been cut off from those advantages. That is what it is, but as I’ve posted here before I feel that we have sleepwalked (across the world) into a world of highly-efficient, very interconnected supply chains that are also very brittle. The machine started to misfire with the pandemic, and instead of trying to oil it, the UK seems intent on poking a stick into the spokes.

    I agree with a lot of what you said but with a key divergence take the opposition position.

    Yes you're right that this is a global issue and in other countries the "invisible hand" is fixing the issue. Which is precisely what I and others on the right of politics are advocating should happen here too.

    The problem in this country is not Brexit but that its so easy for people to blame their issues on Brexit and so think someone else should solve them for them.

    Earlier in this thread a discussion of timber came up and the eventual position seems to be that American companies are paying what they need to for timber, so buying up timber supplies. The invisible hand is working there because companies are just quietly getting on with it and paying whatever has to be paid.

    People in this country need to do the same. Stop whinging excessively and blaming all your ills on Brexit, just Keep Calm And Carry On. Get on with the job, like is happening in the USA. The incessant moaning and seeking to use politics to solve your ills, rather than just paying what has to be paid and moving on, is the stick in the spokes.
    Which is fine but the government has approached the situation with its usual incompetence. People are unable to book HGV driving tests. That's mostly what this comes down to. Grant Shapps took the easy way out during COVID and halted tests and now we're all paying the price for that. Papering over the cracks with EU drivers won't change anything, in fact it will give the government a way out of the mess without fixing the bloody problem.

    All of this has got at least a 6 month lead time and a year ago we knew we needed to drastically increase driving test capacity for HGV licencing, both to keep up with renewals of existing drivers and to get new ones licenced. In that time nothing has really been done and all we've had from Shapps are a few token changes to licence terms.

    The system is bottlenecked by getting drivers licenced. The new salaries on offer are getting lots of people interested and then they get told, well you can train for 6 months but you won't get a test for 18 months so won't be earning that salary you read about for at least 2 years and they decide that working in Sainsbury's isn't so bad after all.
    Well that's a different issue with a different fix needed.

    We've been debating this issue on this site for over six months now and all we hear generally is "Brits don't want to do the job" and "we need immigrants to do it". If people don't want to do the job, then there's a simple fix. Pay them a good wage and people will want to.

    If the issue is government regulations and incompetence getting in the way of approving tests then that is something that should be fixed. Improving capacity so testing can be authorised should be a priority. If testing capacity had been doubled six months ago then how many could have been authorised by now?

    That's a completely different matter and if the state is the issue then it needs to get out of the way.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392

    Mr. W, Seven of Nine in a catsuit was delightful.

    I can just imagine the off-camera scene.

    "But Captain Janeway, everyone else is wearing a uniform with trousers."
    "Shh. Just put on the skintight catsuit, don the high heels, and look pretty."

    The funny thing was she was central to the show from then on and was by far the best actor. But the teen boy in me didn't really notice so much at the time.
  • Farooq said:

    it isn't rubbed in your face by peacocking morons delivering a hectoring lecture.

    (that's your job)
    I don't do that. People like working with me because I'm fun, honest and treat everyone as an individual.

    My view is you don't show off about yourself. You let others do that on your behalf, if they want to, and otherwise do a darn good job and let that speak for itself.
  • Platitude generator malfunction

    SpinningHugo
    @SpinningHugo
    "Our country is now at a crossroads. Down one path is the same old insecurity and lack of opportunity. But down the Labour one is something better"

    That is a T junction.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    A belated thanks for an interesting comment, Mike.

    Serious on topic question of the day:

    Is it a good idea for the UK to join NAFTA II, aka United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement? How does it damage us?
  • I'm guessing this film (if it ever comes to pass) will not be a moving tribute to the personal struggles of the Biden family.



  • Mr. Cooke, a fair point, things did change over his lifetime. But the Blue Wizards went to the East and I think the TV series will be focusing on Numenor. Could be wrong.

    Mr. kle4, aye. Best looking, and she had a genuinely interesting character.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,670

    Say what you like about Johnson, the guy's a genius communicator. He knows his fans will absolutely lap this franglais up and his haters will make sure his fans will hear all about it if they haven't already.

    https://twitter.com/ProfTimBale/status/1440765148365393926?s=20

    I definitely remember very similar observations being made about another populist with a complicated relationship with the truth. Fans of genius communicator Johnson never seem very keen on that comparison though.
    Yes, Salmond certainly has "the gift of the gab"!
    I see he is a failed comedienne as well as a failed politician now, lucky he has clown to fall back on.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,226

    Mr. Cooke, a fair point, things did change over his lifetime. But the Blue Wizards went to the East and I think the TV series will be focusing on Numenor. Could be wrong.

    Mr. kle4, aye. Best looking, and she had a genuinely interesting character.

    I am all for promoting new talent but it’s a bit of a concern how little substance there is to the cv’s of the writers and director attached to season 1.
  • NEW THREAD (for some time..)
This discussion has been closed.