Not sure that this premise is entirely correct, but it may not be entirely off base - a lot of things get very small details scrutinised, while big things go through on the nod, see many budgets for many authorities. People focus on what seems manageable.
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure. https://twitter.com/polanskydj/status/1530242120778383360?cxt=HHwWgICw1b3GwbwqAAAA
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Er, how did you know which fleg to buy? Or did you get one of each?
Interestimg, though, as dinosaur = coeval with people is a standard creationist view, and some of the Unionists don't like geological time. So there is a curious inverted dilemma there - either interpretation is going to be unacceptable ...
And there's that word again. The one I had to Google yesterday.
Not sure that this premise is entirely correct, but it may not be entirely off base - a lot of things get very small details scrutinised, while big things go through on the nod, see many budgets for many authorities. People focus on what seems manageable.
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure. https://twitter.com/polanskydj/status/1530242120778383360?cxt=HHwWgICw1b3GwbwqAAAA
Well Cressida Dick is a prime example of zero accountability the more she fucks up the more she gets promoted
Can someone explain this yougov poll to me - for the last seven- eight months we have had some fairly reasonable (not big) Labour leads but when these polls have been tested at elections Labour haven't done well enough. I'm not convinced Labour have sealed the deal with the electorate.
As OGH wrote, these results are all consistent with a 10% swing. I don't know which elections you mean. They did well at the local elections relative to the 2018 baseline, which means a vast improvement on the much lower 2019 baseline.
I'd have Rory Stewart as PM, he warned us about Johnson very early on
It was obvious from the very first time he appeared on HIGNFY that Johnson was a malignant shit. The curiosity for me is still why couldn't the English see it?
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
My point about driver pay was simple. Unless and until more drivers appear you pay more without actually fixing the problem. There is still a shortage of drivers - albeit not as acute as it was - and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by.
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
The latter part though you have in the past argued people need to be paid more so a job actually delivers a life rather than get by. One sector gets some payrise and you immediately up in horror because them being payed more might be inflationary. So how do you suggest people get more money so they can actually live rather than merely try to stagger from paypacket to paypacket merely scratching by without increasing their pay?
You utterly miss the point. There are a whole swathe of jobs where people do not get paid enough to be able to live on. So we have to give in-work assistance to people via UC where working loing hard hours is not enough to pay their bills.
Spending power will not increase if we pay more for jobs at the bottom end and reduce in work benefits. "Make Work Pay" was the Tory slogan, but they never did - witness the appalling taper rate in UC where more work is punitively taxed.
Yes there are, hospitality workers and lorry drivers were on that list. I know my ex step brother was a lorry driver and got min wage. So you dont actually want them to earn more from what you say you merely want the governement to increase the money they still give them from uc?
How does that help anyone if they are still reliant on state handouts except for people who want voters reliant on state handouts so they keep voting for parties that might up them.....ah now I get where you are coming from.
I want them *not* to be reliant on state handouts. For jobs to pay wages sufficient to live on. As I wrote above. If you read it and stop guessing where you want me to be "coming from".
Whilst in-work assistance is better than not being there at all it is appalling that so many jobs are so poorly paid. Would be far better had the government tax cuts for companies been predicated on them paying decent wages rather than our taxes being used to subsidise Asda et al and boost shareholder dividends.
Ok then we agree we want jobs to pay without government assistance and those working to not be living from hand to mouth.
How do we get there without those people getting payrises which in your words will lead to an inflationary spiral I quote you here "and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by."
Payrises aren't the problem providing that they are balanced. Instead of Asda workers being subsidised by the state, how about we tax Asda more to pay for it? They can have their tax cut back if they pay proper wages.
Obligatory booze-with-view photo. Tbilisi is really really lovely. Quite unexpectedly so
One of my wanderlust friends loves Tbilisi. She was raving about a trip to Tashkent she'd had the summer before covid hit - another unexpected 'hit'.
It somehow seems to have escaped the endless-Stalinist-blocks and brutalist-towers-in-the-middle that blight most once-Soviet cities. The old town is near perfect in its preservation - and of course many old buildings are now being speedily turned into boutique hotels and chic wine bars, tho there are still plenty left in a state of greatly picturesque dilapidation. A brilliant mix
I wonder if there was a tacit edict from Stalin, who must have known Tbilisi so well. “Don’t touch Tbilisi!”
I liked Tbilisi as well, apparently in Soviet times it considered itself the third city of the Soviet Union and I believe did get special treatment. Hope you are enjoying the wine, the qvevri white is a revalation. The problem with reds is that too much goes into the production of boring semisweet and sedemidry blends, originally made for Russian tastes. You sometimes encounter people selling their homemade wine from roadside stalls, often from plastic bottles.
Tory MP thinks the number of no confidence letters sent in could now be in the “high 40s” (trigger is 54) and that Graham Brady may announce the threshold has been reached when MPs return from recess the week after next. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1530565729988366337
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
If Russia is to grind out a victory of sorts, which does seem more on the cards now than back in March, I hope the West and Ukraine will ensure it’s a grubby, expensive, Pyrrhic victory that leaves Russia exhausted and bankrupt.
A ceasefire doesn't mean that the border dispute would disappear. We have disputed borders all over the world. Nobody has recognised the division of Cyprus. What is more likely is a larger area of disputed territory. Another frozen conflict. The idea that Ukraine conceding land for peace will end all this is naive though. Putin has made it clear he does not respect Ukraine as a sovereign independent nation. The idea that this is all about a couple of Oblasts is rubbish. Putin thinks a westwards facing Ukraine (i.e free, non-corrupt and democratic) is an existential threat to him in Russia and he is probably right. He has a permanent interest in Ukraine being a weak or failed state. I can well understand those in Ukraine who feel the only way to end this is to defeat Putin's Russia militarily.
And if they can't? Well Putin may not be around for much longer. Russia has completely destroyed its relations with its fellow Slavic countries. How will it ever be able to repair those whilst Ukraine feels (rightly) that Russia is occupying its territory. Here the west ought to be clear in its desire for a ceasefire NOT support for Russia's claim to territory. It should be made clear to Russia that theft of its neighbour's territory, resources even children(!) is inexcusable and they have a choice. Withdraw their troops or face continuing sanctions, frozen assets and a future as China's lapdog. It's up to them which they would prefer.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
What makes teachers special is that like many in the private sector there simply aren't enough of them. It's market forces. And of course it will feed through to costs. That's the market again. Not a "complaint".
Market forces is one thing and no complaints if it drives up pay it was the sentiment that because they were having conversations about heating the house they should get paid more than I objected too.
Many in the private sector will have that same conversation was the point. Yet when people like hospitality staff and lorry drivers get paid more you get lefties like Rochdale pioneers bemoaning it because it will raise the cost of things. I think most people in the country are underpaid because bosses could get away with it and profits have increased while pay has remained static for most. Now the boot is on the other foot and employees have the whip hand in pay negotiations for the first time in 20 years.
By all means argue from that perspective.....just dont come with the we should be paid more because we are public sector bull.
You're a bit tetchy today, with the "bull" and using lefties regularly. Perhaps some of our contributors should be using "right wingers" and "fascists" more.
I used lefties in the context there were many who claim to be of the left persuasion complaining about people like hospitality workers and lorry drivers getting pay rises as it would drive up costs. And yes the argument came across from MaxH as we deserve more because we are talking about heating and we are public sector so yes used the term bull. Sorry if it offends you but it is true. And to note I am not saying teachers don't deserve a payrise just saying that isn't a reason.
The thing is, I've yet to come across any of my fellow lefties (notwithstanding your comment about a couple on here) complaining about low paid workers getting big pay rises - whether private sector or public sector. We think that all low paid workers should get rises that at least match inflation, and this should be financed by acquiring money from the grotesque profiteering that is in evidence across much of industry - whether private or public. Like the P&O chap who earns a fortune but then sacks all the workers rather than paying them more. Or the Bank of England Chair earning a fortune telling us not to be greedy. And thousands more of their ilk.
I reckon you're a secret socialist, really.
Rochdale Pioneers is definitely a leftie and has been bemoaning the fact that lorry drivers getting a payrise would feed through into higher food prices
He's a Lib Dem.
My point about driver pay was simple. Unless and until more drivers appear you pay more without actually fixing the problem. There is still a shortage of drivers - albeit not as acute as it was - and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by.
Which of course is the curse of inflation - the more inflation goes up the more pay people demand, Which increases inflation, and then pay demands again...
The latter part though you have in the past argued people need to be paid more so a job actually delivers a life rather than get by. One sector gets some payrise and you immediately up in horror because them being payed more might be inflationary. So how do you suggest people get more money so they can actually live rather than merely try to stagger from paypacket to paypacket merely scratching by without increasing their pay?
You utterly miss the point. There are a whole swathe of jobs where people do not get paid enough to be able to live on. So we have to give in-work assistance to people via UC where working loing hard hours is not enough to pay their bills.
Spending power will not increase if we pay more for jobs at the bottom end and reduce in work benefits. "Make Work Pay" was the Tory slogan, but they never did - witness the appalling taper rate in UC where more work is punitively taxed.
Yes there are, hospitality workers and lorry drivers were on that list. I know my ex step brother was a lorry driver and got min wage. So you dont actually want them to earn more from what you say you merely want the governement to increase the money they still give them from uc?
How does that help anyone if they are still reliant on state handouts except for people who want voters reliant on state handouts so they keep voting for parties that might up them.....ah now I get where you are coming from.
I want them *not* to be reliant on state handouts. For jobs to pay wages sufficient to live on. As I wrote above. If you read it and stop guessing where you want me to be "coming from".
Whilst in-work assistance is better than not being there at all it is appalling that so many jobs are so poorly paid. Would be far better had the government tax cuts for companies been predicated on them paying decent wages rather than our taxes being used to subsidise Asda et al and boost shareholder dividends.
Ok then we agree we want jobs to pay without government assistance and those working to not be living from hand to mouth.
How do we get there without those people getting payrises which in your words will lead to an inflationary spiral I quote you here "and despite deliveries still being affected by it the transport costs are way higher for no real benefit. Great for the drivers, though they are contributing to the runaway price inflation they are being hit by."
Payrises aren't the problem providing that they are balanced. Instead of Asda workers being subsidised by the state, how about we tax Asda more to pay for it? They can have their tax cut back if they pay proper wages.
Done.
So you tax a company more to pay for handouts and the loss by the fuckwit civil servants handling it more than offsets that I doubt it by the time we pay not only their wages but the ludicrous 20% odd pension contributions. If the state is the positive answer you are asking the wrong question.
Simply put wages =
value of work = money brought in vs hours worked = productivity * % for wages
in the last 20 years money brought in has increased....productivity has largely stayed the same and %age for wages has at best lagged cost of living if not downright been degraded due to a near infinite labour pool. What you are really complaining about with wage rises is the wages they would have got if wages had kept up with inflation.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
Obligatory booze-with-view photo. Tbilisi is really really lovely. Quite unexpectedly so
One of my wanderlust friends loves Tbilisi. She was raving about a trip to Tashkent she'd had the summer before covid hit - another unexpected 'hit'.
It somehow seems to have escaped the endless-Stalinist-blocks and brutalist-towers-in-the-middle that blight most once-Soviet cities. The old town is near perfect in its preservation - and of course many old buildings are now being speedily turned into boutique hotels and chic wine bars, tho there are still plenty left in a state of greatly picturesque dilapidation. A brilliant mix
I wonder if there was a tacit edict from Stalin, who must have known Tbilisi so well. “Don’t touch Tbilisi!”
I liked Tbilisi as well, apparently in Soviet times it considered itself the third city of the Soviet Union and I believe did get special treatment. Hope you are enjoying the wine, the qvevri white is a revalation. The problem with reds is that too much goes into the production of boring semisweet and sedemidry blends, originally made for Russian tastes. You sometimes encounter people selling their homemade wine from roadside stalls, often from plastic bottles.
Ta! Any more tips welcome
What food delicacies/recipes should I seek out? Georgian cuisine is so unusual I don’t know where to start
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
Hey @Theuniondivvie - both myself and @foxy have asked if your photo shows the location of the Wannsee Conference. It looks roughly right, and that is certainly grim, but there are many places around Berlin with a grim history…
Is it? I do love a travel quiz
Ah sorry, I’ve been making the most of my last day in Berlin so only dipping in. It is indeed the villa where the Wannsee conference took place viewed from the lesser seen lakeside pov.
Ta for that. What is it like?
I’ve always wanted to go there. In a macabre way. Just to see if it has a mood to match its history. I’m a firm believer in Sinclarian psychogeography
I had exactly that experience in Terezin. Will never go there again
Terezin was upsetting.
Not least because when I visited, there was a loud party of Czech school kids presuably on a compulsory school trip, busy with their phones and their music and unconcerned with what had happened at the place.
Also, I was amazed to discover that the place -- 30 miles North of Prague -- had a German-speaking majority in the years before the Second World War.
Trivial historical note, the fortress of Terezin was the place where the imprisoned Gavrilo Princip died of TB in 1918. Some places may feel that they’ve had their fill of history.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
If there is a negotiated peace do you think it will stop ukranians being killed, I don't believe so, the ukranians don't believe so. I don't think many western governements believe so though some like germany are willing to turn a blind eye
I am not sure there are good options for Ukraine, there are just different shades of bad options.
For ukranians the worst option is to stop resisting in their minds I suspect. They don't want to surrender to a regime that will rape their mothers and daughters, murder sons and husbands and abduct their children on a whim. I wouldn't want to surrender to such a regime either I suspect neither would you.
YBarrdcwsc thinks it's all about the rights of the Ukrainian language - hence his comparison with Wales.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
Not sure that this premise is entirely correct, but it may not be entirely off base - a lot of things get very small details scrutinised, while big things go through on the nod, see many budgets for many authorities. People focus on what seems manageable.
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure. https://twitter.com/polanskydj/status/1530242120778383360?cxt=HHwWgICw1b3GwbwqAAAA
Well Cressida Dick is a prime example of zero accountability the more she fucks up the more she gets promoted
Being pedantic, she is an example (one of many) of negative accountability. As you say, the worse she performs the higher sh rises.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
But what about those which can be both linear and areal? Rods and poles and perches.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
How many bloody times have we heard this particular piece of bollocks announced?
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
Bringing back old money L.s.d would be great for the tourist industry. The amount off short changing they could do when folk work from the assumption 100 pennies equals a pound
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
How many bloody times have we heard this particular piece of bollocks announced?
As often as the oldie Tory voters forget the last time? I really can't see any other reason.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
Bringing back old money L.s.d would be great for the tourist industry. The amount off short changing they could do when folk work from the assumption 100 pennies equals a pound
Oh yes, brings back memories of how the tourists used to give up and just tell the robber, sorry tourist industry provider, to pick the correct sum from their hand.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
Yeah. You may be struggling to pay your bills but you're going to vote Tory because you can now buy a firkin of ale - or could if you had any money.
I'd have Rory Stewart as PM, he warned us about Johnson very early on
It was obvious from the very first time he appeared on HIGNFY that Johnson was a malignant shit. The curiosity for me is still why couldn't the English see it?
I think let's say 30-40% of the country are immune to Johnson. I consider myself one of those.
Sadly the other lot are not.
This all misses out the fact that 2019 GE was a contest between 2 unsuitable leaders, not between Boris and a centrist Labour leader who had a coherent worked out and popular policy on Brexit.
Also that Boris would not have been in the frame if Parliament had done its job of dealing with the post Brexit referendum realities in a grown up, cross party and collaborative way.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
I've worked in adult numeracy. A shockingly high number of the population can't add two double digit numbers together. Let alone convert from kilos to pounds. I don't care about metric. I am sick of the kneejerk predictability of the bollocks they come out with though. Must be at least 5 times we've discussed metric on here after an announcement like this.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
Yes, but it's like the C of E - the original reason has itself disappeared many years ago ...
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
Yeah. You may be struggling to pay your bills but you're going to vote Tory because you can now buy a firkin of ale - or could if you had any money.
I suspect for CHB it would need to be a firkin of shandy and we would still end up carrying him home
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
I'd have Rory Stewart as PM, he warned us about Johnson very early on
It was obvious from the very first time he appeared on HIGNFY that Johnson was a malignant shit. The curiosity for me is still why couldn't the English see it?
I think let's say 30-40% of the country are immune to Johnson. I consider myself one of those.
Sadly the other lot are not.
This all misses out the fact that 2019 GE was a contest between 2 unsuitable leaders, not between Boris and a centrist Labour leader who had a coherent worked out and popular policy on Brexit.
Also that Boris would not have been in the frame if Parliament had done its job of dealing with the post Brexit referendum realities in a grown up, cross party and collaborative way.
I think Johnson would have beaten any Labour leader who was actually in the frame.
But it was Corbyn that delivered him an 80 seat majority
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
Yeah. You may be struggling to pay your bills but you're going to vote Tory because you can now buy a firkin of ale - or could if you had any money.
One could make a joke about the Tories being so keen on retrograde evolution they'll end up with gills.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
Yeah. You may be struggling to pay your bills but you're going to vote Tory because you can now buy a firkin of ale - or could if you had any money.
I suspect for CHB it would need to be a firkin of shandy and we would still end up carrying him home
Not sure that this premise is entirely correct, but it may not be entirely off base - a lot of things get very small details scrutinised, while big things go through on the nod, see many budgets for many authorities. People focus on what seems manageable.
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure. https://twitter.com/polanskydj/status/1530242120778383360?cxt=HHwWgICw1b3GwbwqAAAA
Well Cressida Dick is a prime example of zero accountability the more she fucks up the more she gets promoted
Being pedantic, she is an example (one of many) of negative accountability. As you say, the worse she performs the higher sh rises.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
Except to the ten-digited among us
Thats very ableist of you many folk have divergent numbers of digits especially in norfolk
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
Except to the ten-digited among us
Are you implying that the Tories are appealing to the, erm, inbred? The ones with 12 fingers?
Tory MP thinks the number of no confidence letters sent in could now be in the “high 40s” (trigger is 54) and that Graham Brady may announce the threshold has been reached when MPs return from recess the week after next. https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1530565729988366337
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
But what's the point?
The point is 1/72 of an inch.
Typography joke.
One must draw the line somewhere. Except it's not at all clear where.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
I've worked in adult numeracy. A shockingly high number of the population can't add two double digit numbers together. Let alone convert from kilos to pounds. I don't care about metric. I am sick of the kneejerk predictability of the bollocks they come out with though. Must be at least 5 times we've discussed metric on here after an announcement like this.
Why on earth would anyone want to convert between pounds and kilograms? Just use one or the other, then all you need to know is that 4 weighs more than 3 weighs more than 2.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
If carpet is £3/14/2d a square yard how much will it cost to purchase thirteen and five eighths square yards before and after you have agreed a discount of two seventeenths of the price.
A generation older then me (my dad for example) did that sort of thing in their heads.
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
Fuck off to the Donbas then, and fight.
You are not fighting, you are drinking beer & having sex in Greece.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
If carpet is £3/14/2d a square yard how much will it cost to purchase thirteen and five eighths square yards before and after you have agreed a discount of two seventeenths of the price.
A generation older then me (my dad for example) did that sort of thing in their heads.
You sure? My memory is that they had pre-printed books on the counter of their shops etc. called 'ready reckoners' with tables to do all that sort of thing. Like log tables but for non-log arithmetic.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Leaving aside whether or not teachers complain, and ignoring universities and banks, surely the Conservative solution, the market solution, to attract more teachers is to pay them more and offer better conditions generally.
I'm the son of a teacher, husband of one and grandfather of, so far, two. Teaching quality is far, far more than exam results.
Long-time lurker, first comment. I'm a teacher myself so interested in this one (also, as an aside, attended a Russell Group uni and have only ever taught in state comprehensives).
An anecdote to back up what Old King Cole and others say: I teach in a very high performing maths department. We *could* get even better GCSE results by gaming the system (there is an obvious opportunity to achieve more passes at GCSE maths by entering low attaining students for higher tier and coaching them through a few key topics - a friend at another school does this with real flair). We choose not to do this. Should I be paid less as a result HYUFD?
I have never had much truck with those who complain in teaching. It is by far the most rewarding job I've done (and I've done quite a few). However, with my wife also a teacher and with a reasonably big mortgage on a house in south Bristol and a two-year old, we are having genuine conversations about not heating our house this coming winter to pay the bills. That's why teachers should be paid more.
You don't think private sector workers will be having the same conversations? When private sector workers like hospitality and lorry drivers were getting pay rises many of the left were complaining though that it would feed through to the cost of things. What makes teachers special in this regard and more worthy than that person who cleans your toilet, delivers your food so you can eat
I'm struggling to find anything at all in the post you're responding to that says teachers are a special case, so I'm not sure why you're attacking a new poster (welcome).
Thanks! I don't mind the response. I enjoy reading the bickering on here, so would feel hypocritical if I wasn't OK to be part of it. Anyway, I'm not sure that was an attack so much as a valid point (albeit misreading my poorly expressed point).
Welcome aboard. If you enjoy bickering you have come to the right place
amateur bickering that is, want professional bickering get elected to stormont nods
True enough My very Unionist mother is now spitting teeth because the Irish language bill that the Unionists have stalled for years at Stormont is now being pushed by Westminster.
hehe well I discovered I actually have a half sister living in belfast about 4 years ago and we are in touch but while I like and enjoy political discussion have never actually asked her about whether she is union or republican as seems too hairy a subject over there. I did buy her a flag though as every house where she lives seems to have a flag pole
Er, how did you know which fleg to buy? Or did you get one of each?
Interestimg, though, as dinosaur = coeval with people is a standard creationist view, and some of the Unionists don't like geological time. So there is a curious inverted dilemma there - either interpretation is going to be unacceptable ...
Will send you a private message as no need to burden the board
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
Imperial units made about as much sense as Brexit itself. Brexit has hit this country financially, using Imperial units should continue that direction. Does anyone believe it will give Boris a boost?
Not sure that this premise is entirely correct, but it may not be entirely off base - a lot of things get very small details scrutinised, while big things go through on the nod, see many budgets for many authorities. People focus on what seems manageable.
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure. https://twitter.com/polanskydj/status/1530242120778383360?cxt=HHwWgICw1b3GwbwqAAAA
Well Cressida Dick is a prime example of zero accountability the more she fucks up the more she gets promoted
Being pedantic, she is an example (one of many) of negative accountability. As you say, the worse she performs the higher sh rises.
I believe the reason for gun crime down is the plod / security services across europe bust the major suppliers of weapons to the uk (i think another encrochat victim). Not sure encrochat getting hacked is much to do with Cressida Dick.
Knife crime on the other hand....nobody thinks that is going well in London.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
A gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water. Celsius is 1/100 of the temperature change between the freezing point and boiling point of water. A litre is 1kg of water.
These things make perfect sense
actually no they dont because you left out a lot of stuff
a gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water under standard temperature and pressure. Reduce the water temperature to 1% celsius for example and 1 cm^3 of water will weigh more
same with a litre of water weighing 1kg depends on the temperatur and pressure
Celsius the same water boils at a lot lower temperature at the top of everest than at ground level by several tens of degrees.
A man with a team of ox's however ploughs the same amount of land where at 10000 metres or 0 metres
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
Or it could, at least, be used to heavily disguise inflation by confusing people hopelessly. If a penny retained its current value then every new-old pound would be worth 240 existing pence instead of 100. Mr & Mrs Average would then have to be content with having 2.4x fewer pounds in the bank, but each one would be worth 2.4x more.
Attempting constantly to compare wages and prices between current values and those after de-decimalisation would be so exhausting, for compilers of relevant statistics and ordinary households alike, that they might well simply give up and fail fully to notice inflation at all.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
If carpet is £3/14/2d a square yard how much will it cost to purchase thirteen and five eighths square yards before and after you have agreed a discount of two seventeenths of the price.
A generation older then me (my dad for example) did that sort of thing in their heads.
If you were very good you got a job as a bookie's settler, too. But now we don't.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
I've worked in adult numeracy. A shockingly high number of the population can't add two double digit numbers together. Let alone convert from kilos to pounds. I don't care about metric. I am sick of the kneejerk predictability of the bollocks they come out with though. Must be at least 5 times we've discussed metric on here after an announcement like this.
Why on earth would anyone want to convert between pounds and kilograms? Just use one or the other, then all you need to know is that 4 weighs more than 3 weighs more than 2.
Exporting from Brexitland to the rest of thr world. Which does like its rolls of e.g. tweed in nice metric dimensions, so we will have to learn things like how to multiply and divide 25.4 very, very many times.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
Or it could, at least, be used to heavily disguise inflation by confusing people hopelessly. If a penny retained its current value then every new-old pound would be worth 240 existing pence instead of 100. Mr & Mrs Average would then have to be content with having 2.4x fewer pounds in the bank, but each one would be worth 2.4x more.
Attempting constantly to compare wages and prices between current values and those after de-decimalisation would be so exhausting, for compilers of relevant statistics and ordinary households alike, that they might well simply give up and fail fully to notice inflation at all.
There might be something to this idea...
Quite. The people a little older than me were absolutely convinced it was a Labour conspiracy to hide the effect of inflation, or a Tory one for the capitalists to rob the public blind, or both at the same time, as I recall.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I understand them just fine as I do metric and I didn't even go to university, are you really saying its hard to convert in your head?
I've worked in adult numeracy. A shockingly high number of the population can't add two double digit numbers together. Let alone convert from kilos to pounds. I don't care about metric. I am sick of the kneejerk predictability of the bollocks they come out with though. Must be at least 5 times we've discussed metric on here after an announcement like this.
Why on earth would anyone want to convert between pounds and kilograms? Just use one or the other, then all you need to know is that 4 weighs more than 3 weighs more than 2.
Actually dont think ever discussed it as really dont care that much. I can convert back and forth quite easily. Maybe you are thinking of someone else and only reason I am talking about it now is someone brought it up
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
A gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water. Celsius is 1/100 of the temperature change between the freezing point and boiling point of water. A litre is 1kg of water.
These things make perfect sense
actually no they dont because you left out a lot of stuff
a gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water under standard temperature and pressure. Reduce the water temperature to 1% celsius for example and 1 cm^3 of water will weigh more
same with a litre of water weighing 1kg depends on the temperatur and pressure
Celsius the same water boils at a lot lower temperature at the top of everest than at ground level by several tens of degrees.
A man with a team of ox's however ploughs the same amount of land where at 10000 metres or 0 metres
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
A gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water. Celsius is 1/100 of the temperature change between the freezing point and boiling point of water. A litre is 1kg of water.
These things make perfect sense
actually no they dont because you left out a lot of stuff
a gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water under standard temperature and pressure. Reduce the water temperature to 1% celsius for example and 1 cm^3 of water will weigh more
same with a litre of water weighing 1kg depends on the temperatur and pressure
Celsius the same water boils at a lot lower temperature at the top of everest than at ground level by several tens of degrees.
A man with a team of ox's however ploughs the same amount of land where at 10000 metres or 0 metres
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
You'd think the Americans would have the sense to restrict the 2nd Amendment to weapons that were in use at the time when it was passed. That is, single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols. Now that would really even the balance.
Isn't there a group on the Supreme Court who are "constitutionalists" (I think that is the term), who argue that the Founding Fathers meant every word and it should be interpreted exactly as written as per the time. So they should be in favour of flintlocks all round.
A sane view of the 2nd amendment for today's world, whatever was intended, is that it means that countries need armies, sadly, and that therefore any pacifists and Quakers around the place are free to think there shouldn't be a state militia, but but the state can't compel everyone to think so. Read it not as a pro-gun provision but an anti-pacifist one. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
If there is a negotiated peace do you think it will stop ukranians being killed, I don't believe so, the ukranians don't believe so. I don't think many western governements believe so though some like germany are willing to turn a blind eye
I am not sure there are good options for Ukraine, there are just different shades of bad options.
The least bad option, is for the Russians to feck off back to Russia with their tails between their legs, their army completely destroyed by Western weapons. Let’s all work together to make that happen.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
Except to the ten-digited among us
Are you implying that the Tories are appealing to the, erm, inbred? The ones with 12 fingers?
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Total bollocks, russian forces have form for this long before ukraine, if someone is a serial rapist we take there protestation they are innocent with huge pinches of salt and thats before we look at the fact that a lot of those bodies in mass graves have been shown to have predated the russian retreats.....stop making excuses for evil
Yes they do - they are brutal, destructive, ignorant invaders. However, there have also been false allegations. It's a horrible situation, but when a Government lies in order to inveigle my country into a potential nuclear conflict, my sympathy evaporates fairly fast.
There is no evidence ukraine has lied
Yeah, that Jack Russell really has dug up 200 mines.
Sure… and Russia hasn’t levelled a couple of major cities and several dozen towns.
@Luckyguy1983 ’s both sides-ism is a load of baloney.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
A gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water. Celsius is 1/100 of the temperature change between the freezing point and boiling point of water. A litre is 1kg of water.
These things make perfect sense
actually no they dont because you left out a lot of stuff
a gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water under standard temperature and pressure. Reduce the water temperature to 1% celsius for example and 1 cm^3 of water will weigh more
same with a litre of water weighing 1kg depends on the temperatur and pressure
Celsius the same water boils at a lot lower temperature at the top of everest than at ground level by several tens of degrees.
A man with a team of ox's however ploughs the same amount of land where at 10000 metres or 0 metres
Hang on. All men with oxen are equally capable of ploughing exactly the same area in a day? That would be remarkable, as it applies in no other human endeavour. It's like saying a yard is the length of your arm. It isn't at all.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
We'll know they're getting really desperate/crazed/both when they decide to bring back the old money as well.
The people just a very few years older tham me (ie OAPs) never understood decimal money. They blaned it for the 1970s inflation. So, abolish it and we won't have inflation ...
Or it could, at least, be used to heavily disguise inflation by confusing people hopelessly. If a penny retained its current value then every new-old pound would be worth 240 existing pence instead of 100. Mr & Mrs Average would then have to be content with having 2.4x fewer pounds in the bank, but each one would be worth 2.4x more.
Attempting constantly to compare wages and prices between current values and those after de-decimalisation would be so exhausting, for compilers of relevant statistics and ordinary households alike, that they might well simply give up and fail fully to notice inflation at all.
There might be something to this idea...
Quite. The people a little older than me were absolutely convinced it was a Labour conspiracy to hide the effect of inflation, or a Tory one for the capitalists to rob the public blind, or both at the same time, as I recall.
One of the complaints when the euro came in was businesses using it to hike prices where for examp something cost 12000 lira and it was 10000 lira to a euro the new price would be 1.5 euros. (figures are illustrative I have no idea what they were at the time)
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
You got to remember Pagan, for those born after 1969 (yes I know it’s Heath and 71 but aged 2 your haven’t been thought much else) under 53 don’t know anything else especially in terms of money, so policy like this is not to be taken lightly and joking around like you are doing - rather than give Tories a poll boost they are thinking Boris is a nut for suggesting this. And desperate. A desperate nutcase.
But to answer your question, metric is base ten so very straightforward, what base is imperial using for you to say it’s got clear reasoning and easy to work out?
Really interesting piece on the parallels between slave owning oligarchs in US a couple of hundred years ago and the way the GOP is imposing a heavily armed society on a majority who don't want one. Unreformed Senate is major part of problem.
Its almost too late for meaningful gun control anyway. With torrents of physibles no more than a few clicks away, the manufacture of 3d printed ghost guns gets easier all the time.
Baby steps. It is not guns that are the problem but people. Specifically people with semi-automatic assault rifles that can't (yet) be 3d-printed. As President Biden said, it is not as if deer are running through the forest in kevlar body armour.
And within a decade, batteries and capacitors will be up to the job of coilguns with rapid fire.
No parts that need special work - no hammerforged barrels. Ammunition can be a ball bearing. Silent. The whole thing will be 3D printed. No explosives.
All this focus on the type of gun, particularly scary "assault rifles" and "AR-15s" misses the crucial point that, if all you want to do is shoot kids at close range, then ANY gun will do. So trying to stop school shootings by restricting ownership of certain ill-defined types of firearms is pointless.
Not really. Limit people to 5 in the magazine, have to work the bolt between shots, sporting rifles, and that really slows you down compared to 100 round AR drums unless possibly you have a sack of prefilled magazines and have practised a fuck of a lot. Which the arse at Uvalde prolly hadn't.
Plenty of stats showing that AR15 type sprees are I think 6x as deadly as their competitors.
I read on Twitter (disclaimer of responsibility for veracity etc) that the cops in Uvalde found 53 magazines in the school; being able to buy all that without alarm bells going off seems almost as heinous as buying the weapons.
He must have been a strong little fcuker to hump that around.
You'd think the Americans would have the sense to restrict the 2nd Amendment to weapons that were in use at the time when it was passed. That is, single-shot flintlock muskets and pistols. Now that would really even the balance.
Isn't there a group on the Supreme Court who are "constitutionalists" (I think that is the term), who argue that the Founding Fathers meant every word and it should be interpreted exactly as written as per the time. So they should be in favour of flintlocks all round.
A sane view of the 2nd amendment for today's world, whatever was intended, is that it means that countries need armies, sadly, and that therefore any pacifists and Quakers around the place are free to think there shouldn't be a state militia, but but the state can't compel everyone to think so. Read it not as a pro-gun provision but an anti-pacifist one. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
Yeah. You may be struggling to pay your bills but you're going to vote Tory because you can now buy a firkin of ale - or could if you had any money.
I suspect for CHB it would need to be a firkin of shandy and we would still end up carrying him home
How many rods, poles, perches, chains or furlongs would that be?
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Total bollocks, russian forces have form for this long before ukraine, if someone is a serial rapist we take there protestation they are innocent with huge pinches of salt and thats before we look at the fact that a lot of those bodies in mass graves have been shown to have predated the russian retreats.....stop making excuses for evil
Yes they do - they are brutal, destructive, ignorant invaders. However, there have also been false allegations. It's a horrible situation, but when a Government lies in order to inveigle my country into a potential nuclear conflict, my sympathy evaporates fairly fast.
There is no evidence ukraine has lied
Yeah, that Jack Russell really has dug up 200 mines.
I was talking of course about atrocities not silly propaganda stories like Jack russells or the ghost of kyiv.
So they'd make up 'silly propaganda stories', but definitely not make up big things that could actually command the news agenda and push the overton window?
We had the maternity hospital attack, in which in transpired that (tragically) three people lost their lives.
We had the theatre attack where there were alleged to be over a thousand buried in the rubble, then it got very vague and mealy mouthed….
Have you been watching what has happened to Mariupol ?
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
If there is a negotiated peace do you think it will stop ukranians being killed, I don't believe so, the ukranians don't believe so. I don't think many western governements believe so though some like germany are willing to turn a blind eye
I wonder what the advocates of peace now, will make of the inevitable Revanche movement in Ukraine? Inevitable once a peace which involves Russia taking territory, is established.
Will they demand that Ukraine shouldn’t be armed so as not to upset Russia?
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
Except to the ten-digited among us
Are you implying that the Tories are appealing to the, erm, inbred? The ones with 12 fingers?
... and 14, 16 or 20 toes?
Going right back to the earliest land vertebrates in the Devonian? The use of gills would certainly be consistent with that.
Not sure that this premise is entirely correct, but it may not be entirely off base - a lot of things get very small details scrutinised, while big things go through on the nod, see many budgets for many authorities. People focus on what seems manageable.
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure. https://twitter.com/polanskydj/status/1530242120778383360?cxt=HHwWgICw1b3GwbwqAAAA
Well Cressida Dick is a prime example of zero accountability the more she fucks up the more she gets promoted
Being pedantic, she is an example (one of many) of negative accountability. As you say, the worse she performs the higher sh rises.
I believe the reason for gun crime down is the plod / security services across europe bust the major suppliers of weapons to the uk (i think another encrochat victim). Not sure encrochat getting hacked is much to do with Cressida Dick.
Knife crime on the other hand....nobody thinks that is going well in London.
At a discussion on crime I went to some years ago, a police representative said that the major criminal gangs were fairly well armed, but that they’d kept supply to general criminals down by making it clear they would your anti-terrorism legislation, if required, against people bringing “serious” weapons into the country… things like real AKs from the Balkans.
We can go back to imperial measures. Marvellous. And warm beer. Mmmm. Will match the rationing that people are already having to do to pay their leccy bills.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
You got to remember Pagan, for those born after 1969 (yes I know it’s Heath and 71 but aged 2 your haven’t been thought much else) under 53 don’t know anything else especially in terms of money, so policy like this is not to be taken lightly and joking around like you are doing - rather than give Tories a poll boost they are thinking Boris is a nut for suggesting this. And desperate. A desperate nutcase.
But to answer your question, metric is base ten so very straightforward, what base is imperial using for you to say it’s got clear reasoning and easy to work out?
Old money for example used base 12
1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pence.
The advantage of this is you got a bill and you could split it easily between 2,3,4,6,8 people
in base ten you can split a bill easily only betwen 2,4,5,10 people
One advantage too it for a start.
Plus not all people exclusively work normally with base 10. Thats just what you have been taught. Children handled old money just fine and possibly were better for it because they didn't think base 10 arithmetic was the be all and end all of life.
In addition I find for example when I goto a checkout a lot of younger people can't even handle base 10. The bill comes to for example 9.87 I hand them 10.37 they dont seem to get they just give me 50 pence back
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
You got to remember Pagan, for those born after 1969 (yes I know it’s Heath and 71 but aged 2 your haven’t been thought much else) under 53 don’t know anything else especially in terms of money, so policy like this is not to be taken lightly and joking around like you are doing - rather than give Tories a poll boost they are thinking Boris is a nut for suggesting this. And desperate. A desperate nutcase.
But to answer your question, metric is base ten so very straightforward, what base is imperial using for you to say it’s got clear reasoning and easy to work out?
My dear lagomorphous colleague, what election audience/cosntituency is Mr Johnson going to be most dependent on, very, very soon? The Tory Party members. That's what. Not you (I presume). Or me. Or CHB, who is quite understandably completely bewildered by it.
And many of them are older than I, and absolutely convinced that decimal currency and the metric system started the rot
I’m not sure I’ve been to a more immediately appealing city
Did you take a midnight train to get there?
Midnight plane from Athens. Arrived dawn. Am knackered but consoling myself with delicious cold Georgian wine at £2 a glass
It’s also absurdly easy to get in. Show your vax status - takes 30 seconds - no visa required. Nothing. You’re in. And you can stay for a year
Also, they are REALLY grateful for our help with Ukraine. There are probably more England flags than Ukrainian
It's no coincidence that those closest to Russia best understand what's at stake in this war.
Best for the entire world that it ends as quickly as possible, in a Russian defeat.
Whilst that is correct, there is no way of reaching that endpoint swiftly.
It is a bit like saying we need to eliminate world hunger swiftly by making sure everyone is fed. Well, no-one disputes it, but without a practical means of achieving it, then it is just vapour.
So, as in most problems, it is a trade-off. There is huge damage that is done by the ongoing war (to Ukraine and the wider world, some poor countries will soon be in real food difficulties) and there is huge damage that is done by finding an unpalatable compromise and rewarding the original violence.
The war was far worse than conceding the original plebiscites under Minsk. If Ukraine had lost the plebiscites (arguable, in fact, as @rcs1000 has pointed out), it would at most have lost the whole of the Donbas.
The war will unfortunately end with Ukraine losing all the Donbas and a swathe of southern Ukraine. There is no way that Putin (or any likely successor) will give up the water supply to the Crimea, or the land corridor to the Crimea, or the Crimea itself.
Wars often end with the bad guys winning. Violence is often rewarded. The recent histories of Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland & Tibet show exactly that.
The script for the Ukraine War was not written in Hollywood ...
As @Dura_Ace predicted, the Russian army will grind out a slow, remorseless, destructive victory of sorts.
It ends with a de facto annexation of some of East Ukraine, and destabilisation of the rest of Ukraine.
Our very own Jeremy Corbyn said on day one that the only certainty was that this war -if it happens -is going to end in a negotiated settlement. 'Why not save thousands of lives and have the negotiation now without the war'. It might sound simplistic but if the Russians prevail it will sound like the most sane thing he has ever said.
Because, you stupid appeasing c*nt, wherever Russia has taken territory it has raped the women wholesale, tortured and slaughtered many civilians, dragged thousands off to Siberia, and liquidated the intelligentsia.
You cannot ‘negotiate’ with this. You fight
I am sure atrocities have been committed by the Russian side, but at this point it's impossible to verify most what we're hearing, as it comes from a Ukrainian side desperate for greater Western intervention, reported unquestioningly by a Western media anxious to be supportive.
Total bollocks, russian forces have form for this long before ukraine, if someone is a serial rapist we take there protestation they are innocent with huge pinches of salt and thats before we look at the fact that a lot of those bodies in mass graves have been shown to have predated the russian retreats.....stop making excuses for evil
Yes they do - they are brutal, destructive, ignorant invaders. However, there have also been false allegations. It's a horrible situation, but when a Government lies in order to inveigle my country into a potential nuclear conflict, my sympathy evaporates fairly fast.
There is no evidence ukraine has lied
Yeah, that Jack Russell really has dug up 200 mines.
Sure… and Russia hasn’t levelled a couple of major cities and several dozen towns.
@Luckyguy1983 ’s both sides-ism is a load of baloney.
Asymmetrical innit? Invaders always atrocify more than invadees for obv reasons. Plus, They started it is sometimes portrayed as a playground argument but it seems spot on to me, happy to give the Ukes any amount of leeway.
But nobody is immune from savagery, and we have a good example from the Russians about When invadees become invaders.
I’m frankly outraged by the accusation that instead of ‘drinking beer in Greece and having sex’ I should ‘fuck off to Donbass and fight’
1. I’m on the wine 2. I’m in Georgia (the one next to Russia) 3. I’m not getting much sex 4. I’m merely pointing out that, given the Russian army’s propensity to rape, torture, kidnap, loot, abduct, and generally lay waste, asking the Ukrainians to negotiate a peace by ceding territory is like asking someone, who is being brutally assaulted, to ‘just let the assault go on for a couple more hours, stop resisting, then everything will be fine once he’s broken a few more bones’
The Ukrainians are going to fight for every inch, so the PB admirers of Russian rape-war hoping - @Luckyguy1983 and @Dura_Ace and @Roger etc - might as well accept they will be disappointed in their hopes for instant Russian victory
You forgot @YBarddCwsc who was the one actually accusing you!
I think he doesn’t care about Russia or Ukraine. He’s just got a sad case of thinking Wales should be independent therefore everything the UK government is bad.
The pro Russia pimps are a weird bunch. From old lefties like @roger and NPXMP (tho Nick ascribes his carefully curated ambivalence to Russian ancestry) to Welsh Nats and rightwing eccentrics
We have an unexpected couple in our extended family. A hardcore right winger of advanced years who just loves Russian culture to a middle aged conspiracy theorist who simply likes being contrary (I think); as a family we have stopped debating it. Gets too heated
Actually, all I have done is point out that Russia is grinding out a victory of sorts.
You seem to conflate what I think is going to happen with what I actually want to happen.
Still, let's discuss in 6 months time.
We'll know then who called this right -- and if I am proved wrong, I am sure you will remind me.
What do you want to happen in Ukraine?
In an ideal world, the fates of these territories would be decided by free and fair plebiscites, not by guns.
Russia has invaded & there is a bloody war & lots of killing. There are Russians and Ukrainians being killed, probably in roughly equal measure. It is a great tragedy for both Russia and Ukraine (for which Putin bears most of the blame).
The best outcome is for Putin to be deposed and Russia to withdraw.
However, that does not seem to me remotely likely. Even if Putin is deposed, I am pretty unconvinced any successor will withdraw from the conquered territory. Putin is much more likely to be deposed because he has been ineffective in subduing Ukraine, and his successor will be tougher.
Eventually, when enough people have been killed, the two countries will stop fighting.
I want that to happen earlier rather than later. So, I think Corbyn (and NPXMP) are right. We need to think about what final negotiated settlement might actually be possible.
Ultimately, the economic effects of the war will drive everyone to the negotiating table.
And there will be a compromise, because that is how most wars end.
As to the progress of the War, Ukraine have done better than I originally thought. But they are still slowly losing territory, that they are unlikely to get back, IMO.
(As regards Welsh nationalism and Ukraine, I am just amazed at the double standards of most of pb.com. They routinely dismiss the concerns of Welsh language speakers, yet now they now regard the rights of Ukrainian language speakers as something they are willing to die for in the Donbas. Or more accurately ... others to die for while they get drunk and have sex in Georgia).
If there is a negotiated peace do you think it will stop ukranians being killed, I don't believe so, the ukranians don't believe so. I don't think many western governements believe so though some like germany are willing to turn a blind eye
I am not sure there are good options for Ukraine, there are just different shades of bad options.
For ukranians the worst option is to stop resisting in their minds I suspect. They don't want to surrender to a regime that will rape their mothers and daughters, murder sons and husbands and abduct their children on a whim. I wouldn't want to surrender to such a regime either I suspect neither would you.
YBarrdcwsc thinks it's all about the rights of the Ukrainian language - hence his comparison with Wales.
It is Y Bardd Cwsc not Y Barrd Cwsc
I am sure you get Chicken Kyiv right, thus neatly proving my point.
(Cwsc is archaic for Cwsg, I have been sleeping for a long time )
Not sure that this premise is entirely correct, but it may not be entirely off base - a lot of things get very small details scrutinised, while big things go through on the nod, see many budgets for many authorities. People focus on what seems manageable.
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure. https://twitter.com/polanskydj/status/1530242120778383360?cxt=HHwWgICw1b3GwbwqAAAA
Well Cressida Dick is a prime example of zero accountability the more she fucks up the more she gets promoted
Being pedantic, she is an example (one of many) of negative accountability. As you say, the worse she performs the higher sh rises.
I believe the reason for gun crime down is the plod / security services across europe bust the major suppliers of weapons to the uk (i think another encrochat victim). Not sure encrochat getting hacked is much to do with Cressida Dick.
Knife crime on the other hand....nobody thinks that is going well in London.
At a discussion on crime I went to some years ago, a police representative said that the major criminal gangs were fairly well armed, but that they’d kept supply to general criminals down by making it clear they would your anti-terrorism legislation, if required, against people bringing “serious” weapons into the country… things like real AKs from the Balkans.
The UK authorities have always been much stronger in regards to guns, but the encrochat hack has been a huge disruptor though....this just a sample of the past 2 years, and just the British end. Encrochat (and the other 2-3 comprised systems) obviously gave the authorities worldwide a good window into the organised crime and their gun connections.
This looks like a case of Marxism Derangement Syndrome. Does anyone have any deeper insight as to why so many "outstanding" teacher training courses are failing the new accreditation scheme?
Because although they are the most effective way of training teachers they're also expensive. So the government wants to replace them with on the job training in schools instead which is (a) considerably cheaper and (b) for all their bleatings, masks the fact that rather a lot of vacancies are proving difficult to fill at the moment.
It's the same reason they're grading all schools designed to help those with really complex SEND as 4 so they get closed and the pupils transferred to mainstream schools.
Which is, to reduce it to its essentials, why I literally had to get a child off the roof yesterday afternoon.
I am always curious about teaching Physics, but stories of paperwork, low pay, cheap babysitting and riot control do tend to put you off sharing the wonders of Ohm’s law.
There's plenty of Brownian, well, brown motion involved in teaching right now.
More so than usual? Teachers have always had a raw deal.
The pay is criminally low compared to the impact, responsibility and qualifications required. 24k to teach Physics, doesn’t look quite so generous when you have to pay 9k fees.
The average full time equivalent salary for teachers is £40k, compared to the UK average salary of £31k
So what? If you want to attract experienced professionals to Physics teachers you need to pay more than 24k minus fees. Anyway, £40k is not a lot compared to what they have to do. Teachers are professionals equivalent to lawyers and doctors.
The average lawyer and doctor went to a Russell Group university, the average state school teacher did not unless they teach in a top private school or grammar school or absolutely top comprehensive or academy or free school.
Alternatively you could have performance related pay so the teachers who could the best exam results in the school get the most and bonuses and the teachers who get the worst results get a pay cut
Several questions.
1 As conservatives, we believe in the free market, right? If recruitment is a problem, you have to improve pay and conditions. You may begrudge that, you may think you shouldn't have to pay more for teachers to work in classrooms, but you can't buck the market.
2 Shouldn't we want more highly educated people in schools, where there's a huge multiplier effect?
3 The Aaron Bell question. People who go to top universities, then go and teach in bog standard comps. There are more of them than you think. Are they mugs?
Why should teachers be paid more for doing no extra when most of them did not have as good grades as doctors and lawyers did at school outside the absolutely top schools?
If they want to be paid more they can have performance related pay
Because if the government doesn't do something about the pay/conditions balance for teachers, there won't be enough teachers left to stand in front of classes. They will go and do other things instead. Supply and demand. It's really not difficult.
And to repeat the Aaron Bell question. Are well-qualified teachers mugs? It feels like it sometimes.
And pay shouldn’t under any circumstances be related to one’s A level grades.
OK then, if you really want top private sector level pay for teachers then you can have performance related pay, plus an end to the long holidays teachers get and an end to final salary pensions and also a system which makes it easier to sack poorly performing teachers too
I expect you say that to every teacher in Epping. And about the Epping teachers to everyone else in Epping, of whom there are enough fools to believe you.
If you work for Goldman Sachs say yes you earn a lot and if you perform well you get big bonuses.
However if you are in the bottom 10% or so each year you get sacked. If you really want high salaries for the best teachers you could have a similar system
You’re now descending (further) into self satire. That’s not even a decent model for banking.
It is a model for high pay for top performers, which was the point
A bad one. Which is the point you don’t get.
So teachers can't complain about not being very highly paid then. They will stick to pay largely based on seniority not performance and bonuses for the best and pay cuts and sackings for the worst
Is it a tricky question or no brainier for West to supply the sort of range heavy guns that can go 300 miles and allow them to blast Russia territory, towns and cities?
If you care about stopping Putin winning his colonial war, care and properly stand with the innocent Ukrainians you surely have no choice but to give Ukraine the weapons to strike deep and hard inside Russia?
If you want 300 miles of range, that’s ballistic missiles (or cruise missiles), not guns.
The West doesn’t go for short range ballistic missiles, in general.
How about some other traditions like the workhouse and reintroducing feudal lords? I think Bonzo has already being doing research on that one, the lordly right to shag whatever you want.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
You got to remember Pagan, for those born after 1969 (yes I know it’s Heath and 71 but aged 2 your haven’t been thought much else) under 53 don’t know anything else especially in terms of money, so policy like this is not to be taken lightly and joking around like you are doing - rather than give Tories a poll boost they are thinking Boris is a nut for suggesting this. And desperate. A desperate nutcase.
But to answer your question, metric is base ten so very straightforward, what base is imperial using for you to say it’s got clear reasoning and easy to work out?
Old money for example used base 12
1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pence.
The advantage of this is you got a bill and you could split it easily between 2,3,4,6,8 people
in base ten you can split a bill easily only betwen 2,4,5,10 people
One advantage too it for a start.
Plus not all people exclusively work normally with base 10. Thats just what you have been taught. Children handled old money just fine and possibly were better for it because they didn't think base 10 arithmetic was the be all and end all of life.
In addition I find for example when I goto a checkout a lot of younger people can't even handle base 10. The bill comes to for example 9.87 I hand them 10.37 they dont seem to get they just give me 50 pence back
You hand the person on the checkout £10.37.
So you're the f#cker holding everyone up. How long does it take to count that out and who has £10.37 on them these days anyway.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
I can tell you straight off it's dead easy.
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
Of course have to remember an acre made sense as it was the measure of how much land a man could plow in a day when it came about
With a horse or ox team, yes!
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Say what you like about old measurements they did have a certain reason behind them whereas metric measurements are largely arbitrary
You got to remember Pagan, for those born after 1969 (yes I know it’s Heath and 71 but aged 2 your haven’t been thought much else) under 53 don’t know anything else especially in terms of money, so policy like this is not to be taken lightly and joking around like you are doing - rather than give Tories a poll boost they are thinking Boris is a nut for suggesting this. And desperate. A desperate nutcase.
But to answer your question, metric is base ten so very straightforward, what base is imperial using for you to say it’s got clear reasoning and easy to work out?
Old money for example used base 12
1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pence.
The advantage of this is you got a bill and you could split it easily between 2,3,4,6,8 people
in base ten you can split a bill easily only betwen 2,4,5,10 people
One advantage too it for a start.
Plus not all people exclusively work normally with base 10. Thats just what you have been taught. Children handled old money just fine and possibly were better for it because they didn't think base 10 arithmetic was the be all and end all of life.
In addition I find for example when I goto a checkout a lot of younger people can't even handle base 10. The bill comes to for example 9.87 I hand them 10.37 they dont seem to get they just give me 50 pence back
You hand the person on the checkout £10.37.
So you're the f#cker holding everyone up. How long does it take to count that out and who has £10.37 on them these days.
I have a 10£ note and some loose change the bill is 9.87....regardless of what I proffer they are going to have to add it up on the till and yes I pay cash at supermarkets sorry not sorry
How about some other traditions like the workhouse and reintroducing feudal lords? I think Bonzo has already being doing research on that one, the lordly right to shag whatever you want.
Droit de seigneur is the one you want.
Also Speenhamland System, for what you were talking about earlier today; that was a bit later, but not so much later if one believes T. Hardy on Dorset rustic life, e.g. Tess of the d'Us.
[Useless trivia of the day: the d'Urberville farm is the fine place next to the river bridge over the Piddle as one walks from the railway station at Wool to the Tank Museum.]
*goes off to finish the extremely tedious decluttering I am supposed to be doing, after checking there is some white in the fridge*
Comments
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure.
https://twitter.com/polanskydj/status/1530242120778383360?cxt=HHwWgICw1b3GwbwqAAAA
And voted for him
Done.
https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1530565729988366337
And if they can't? Well Putin may not be around for much longer. Russia has completely destroyed its relations with its fellow Slavic countries. How will it ever be able to repair those whilst Ukraine feels (rightly) that Russia is occupying its territory. Here the west ought to be clear in its desire for a ceasefire NOT support for Russia's claim to territory. It should be made clear to Russia that theft of its neighbour's territory, resources even children(!) is inexcusable and they have a choice. Withdraw their troops or face continuing sanctions, frozen assets and a future as China's lapdog. It's up to them which they would prefer.
Simply put wages =
value of work = money brought in vs hours worked = productivity * % for wages
in the last 20 years money brought in has increased....productivity has largely stayed the same and %age for wages has at best lagged cost of living if not downright been degraded due to a near infinite labour pool. What you are really complaining about with wage rises is the wages they would have got if wages had kept up with inflation.
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson bids for Jubilee boost with return of imperial measurements
Downing Street will hope it shores up support among key Brexiteer voters in battleground seats which Tories are currently in danger of losing
Really got their fingers on public opinion. I don't even understand imperial measurements
What food delicacies/recipes should I seek out? Georgian cuisine is so unusual I don’t know where to start
So far the red wines are great….
1 acre = 4840 square yards = 1 chain x 10 chains = 1 x 10 cricket pitches.
Can't get any more Brexistentialist, with a nod to John Major and the crack of leather on willow as the maiden aunt cycles past the village green on the way to Evensong (strictly C of E only).
So really one acre is 1 furrow long before the horses get kackered and you have to turn, x 1 cricket pitch. See. @CorrectHorseBattery , it's dead easy!
Also that Boris would not have been in the frame if Parliament had done its job of dealing with the post Brexit referendum realities in a grown up, cross party and collaborative way.
I don't care about metric. I am sick of the kneejerk predictability of the bollocks they come out with though. Must be at least 5 times we've discussed metric on here after an announcement like this.
Typography joke.
But it was Corbyn that delivered him an 80 seat majority
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/25/no-london-shooting-deaths-in-six-months-as-police-stifle-gun-trade
Metrological imperial joke.
A generation older then me (my dad for example) did that sort of thing in their heads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_reckoner
Brexit has hit this country financially, using Imperial units should continue that direction.
Does anyone believe it will give Boris a boost?
Knife crime on the other hand....nobody thinks that is going well in London.
a gram is the weight of 1cm^3 of water under standard temperature and pressure. Reduce the water temperature to 1% celsius for example and 1 cm^3 of water will weigh more
same with a litre of water weighing 1kg depends on the temperatur and pressure
Celsius the same water boils at a lot lower temperature at the top of everest than at ground level by several tens of degrees.
A man with a team of ox's however ploughs the same amount of land where at 10000 metres or 0 metres
Attempting constantly to compare wages and prices between current values and those after de-decimalisation would be so exhausting, for compilers of relevant statistics and ordinary households alike, that they might well simply give up and fail fully to notice inflation at all.
There might be something to this idea...
But now we don't.
No he doesn't, not without supplementary oxygen
@Luckyguy1983 ’s both sides-ism is a load of baloney.
That would be remarkable, as it applies in no other human endeavour.
It's like saying a yard is the length of your arm.
It isn't at all.
Bill Gates gives a masterclass in how to not answer questions
But to answer your question, metric is base ten so very straightforward, what base is imperial using for you to say it’s got clear reasoning and easy to work out?
This is alone why metric is clearly superior
Will they demand that Ukraine shouldn’t be armed so as not to upset Russia?
1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pence.
The advantage of this is you got a bill and you could split it easily between 2,3,4,6,8 people
in base ten you can split a bill easily only betwen 2,4,5,10 people
One advantage too it for a start.
Plus not all people exclusively work normally with base 10. Thats just what you have been taught. Children handled old money just fine and possibly were better for it because they didn't think base 10 arithmetic was the be all and end all of life.
In addition I find for example when I goto a checkout a lot of younger people can't even handle base 10. The bill comes to for example 9.87 I hand them 10.37 they dont seem to get they just give me 50 pence back
And many of them are older than I, and absolutely convinced that decimal currency and the metric system started the rot
But nobody is immune from savagery, and we have a good example from the Russians about When invadees become invaders.
I am sure you get Chicken Kyiv right, thus neatly proving my point.
(Cwsc is archaic for Cwsg, I have been sleeping for a long time
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/merseysides-underworld-gun-factories-brought-18612559
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/seven-men-jailed-after-military-grade-weapons-recovered-in-encrochat-probe
https://news.sky.com/story/encrochat-man-charged-with-drugs-and-firearms-offences-after-massive-criminal-network-bust-12020717
https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/news/19783881.encrochat-pair-jailed-29-years-gun-drugs-offences/
what am I missing they look the same?
Also
Two and a quarter pounds of ham
Weighs about a kilogram
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M270_Multiple_Launch_Rocket_System
Which strike the balance between sufficient range to counter and outrange Russian batteries, and not too much to directly threaten Russia.
(unless you are ed milibrand in which case it has a value of facepalm)
So you're the f#cker holding everyone up. How long does it take to count that out and who has £10.37 on them these days anyway.
and yes I pay cash at supermarkets sorry not sorry
Also Speenhamland System, for what you were talking about earlier today; that was a bit later, but not so much later if one believes T. Hardy on Dorset rustic life, e.g. Tess of the d'Us.
[Useless trivia of the day: the d'Urberville farm is the fine place next to the river bridge over the Piddle as one walks from the railway station at Wool to the Tank Museum.]
*goes off to finish the extremely tedious decluttering I am supposed to be doing, after checking there is some white in the fridge*
Apple Pay all the way
Advocates for lower taxes?
Conservative Party 19%
Labour Party 36%
Both 8%
Neither 18%
ROFL