On topic, has anyone ever heard of Alexander Stafford before ?
Yes, he was PPS to Boris Johnson.
Just wiki’d him. Seems a right prat.
Well he’s an Oxford man, what do you expect ?
Indeed. .. Stafford described himself as belonging to the political tribe of David Cameron and was a supporter of Cameron's Big Society policy "as things like Free Schools give power to local bodies. People know best how to run their own lives." One of Stafford's contributions at Prime Minister's Questions in 2021 was described as that "of a proper old-school Law and Order Tory: tough on crime and anti-social behaviour."..
And a fan of hydrogen.
An oddity.
I'll stick with the oxygen, thanks.
You, we all are about 10% hydrogen by mass…. But 65% oxygen.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
We (a local council ) are looking into this and it seems to be proble
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
As a new councillor. This has been a thing for me. I will go with resources: frameworks, funding, capability, ambition, infrastructure.
We can lay out a framework of standards for local provision but if it isn't saleable with 17% profit it isn't considered viable. His Majesty's Planning Inspectorate will tell us to do it again but cheaper.
Electricity is in short supply. There is sewage spilling into our rivers. We don't want to make it worse and we can't get Severn Trent to take any interest in improving the service they manage. They are not our friends.
As for DIY. I am told we would need £11m per year on top of all the available government grants to produce 250 affordable homes a year, and then we wouldn't have anyone to sell them to. We need land but we are not allowed to compulsorily purchase and definitely not below a fair price. Our projects are not ones we want to contemplate without meeting quality standards that the private sector isn't bothering with. Which makes us uncompetitive.
its annoying. I'm aware that a change of government is immanent, and I want to be ready to take full advantage of opportunities but I cannot deal with the required infrastructure shortfall
Labour have for some time floated the idea of giving LAs broader powers to compulsorily acquire land without paying ‘planning gain’, so ‘fair price’ might mean something very different indeed in a year’s time.
How about just abolishing 'planning gain' in the first place, in which case everyone could build at an affordable price and not just politicians who answer to NIMBY electorates?
How do you ‘just abolish planning gain’ ?
What's the trigger that causes planning gain? Abolish that.
Planning gain comes because there's a differential between the value of land with consent and land without it.
Make planning automatic, go to a coded system, so that nobody requires to get consent anymore and the planning gain associated with getting consent vanishes.
Nations that have done this have seen stable house prices rather than surging ones, because there's no artificial constraints on construction and no planning windfalls that cause gains - also reform taxation so that sitting on land is less than worthless because its taxed automatically all along whether its built on or not just the same.
We’re talking about what might be be Labour policy, though. There’s pretty well no chance of your idea, whatever its merits, being adopted by either party. Certainly not the Tories.
Why can't Labour do that?
Other governments in other countries have - and Labour claim to acknowledge that housing costs are a great barrier to inequality and claim to be in favour of improving opportunities for all, so why not remove that barrier?
There's no divine reason for planning consent, prior to its introduction England was building sufficient houses and the cost of land was only about 2% of the cost of housing - and the cost of housing was not the largest part of people's budgets.
Since the introduction of planning regimes there have never been sufficient new houses built, and our housing crisis has got worse and worse.
What's stopping Labour from embracing serious root and branch reform and fixing the problem at source?
Sure it will piss off landlords who want to extract rent from tenants and see their wealth go up, but that's neither relevant nor Labour's target market for votes.
Abolish planning gain and the housing crisis would be rapidly resolved. With house costs down, the cost of living crisis would be resolved, the inequalities between the well off and poor would rapidly shrink, and the cost to the Exchequer of housing support etc would plummet.
What's Labour's problem with any of that?
They will be gaining MPs in areas where GreenNimbyHouseProtection is a major political force.
Announcing such policies would guarantee AnybodyButLabour as the next MP
Probably not.
In countries where this has been done, governments have been re-elected.
The problem with NIMBYism is its like many things, the exaggerated fear of a non-existent problem. By making permission political, it means people are constantly pitchforks at the ready to fight against developments, even if they're the right thing to do.
And if they're not the right thing to do, they won't be happening, so there's no problems anyway.
Take away the politics and NIMBYism ceases to be as potent a force. Developments are either happening, or not, but there's no great political debate about it as its no longer politicised. It loses its currency. And as its no longer politicised, competition can spring up and we cease to see monolithic Barratt-style developments and instead more organic consumer-led developments of what people want and need, where they want it and need it.
But if Labour's too afraid of doing the right thing, because they're worried about the election after next, then they're no better and no more fit for office than the Tories.
On topic, has anyone ever heard of Alexander Stafford before ?
Yes, he was PPS to Boris Johnson.
Just wiki’d him. Seems a right prat.
Well he’s an Oxford man, what do you expect ?
Indeed. .. Stafford described himself as belonging to the political tribe of David Cameron and was a supporter of Cameron's Big Society policy "as things like Free Schools give power to local bodies. People know best how to run their own lives." One of Stafford's contributions at Prime Minister's Questions in 2021 was described as that "of a proper old-school Law and Order Tory: tough on crime and anti-social behaviour."..
And a fan of hydrogen.
An oddity.
He likes hot air?
No. Somebody told him that hydrogen was reaaaaly green and without a moment's rational thought decided to support it despite being the stupidest stupidest stupidy-stupidest idea on God's green Earth.
See the Economist Christmas double issue for a different take (great uncertainty but not impossible, and there's trillions of tons of the stuff lying underground that no-one noticed and maybe Australia both has lots and isn't run by dictators).
The anti-hydrogen people are as stupid as the hydrogen-in-everything people. Hydrogen has a place; in fact, it might have several niches. Work on it should therefore continue. But it won't be in (say) cars at any large scale.
That's a significant issue for 'green' issues: many people are so keen on their own 'solution' that they denigrate other people's. In reality we are likely to have a very mixed green economy.
The problem with hydrogen is that it was seen as the correct “political” solution, for a number of reasons.
The briefing papers on this from government I saw, when working for an oil company that was big on going Green, were fascinating. Hydrogen was the right solution because of tax, legacy industry (oil companies would become hydrogen producers) etc etc
The problem was that hydrogen is unsuitable for a number of things for technical reasons. 5 minutes with the handling and hazards rules for hydrogen will tell you a lot.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
We (a local council ) are looking into this and it seems to be proble
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
As a new councillor. This has been a thing for me. I will go with resources: frameworks, funding, capability, ambition, infrastructure.
We can lay out a framework of standards for local provision but if it isn't saleable with 17% profit it isn't considered viable. His Majesty's Planning Inspectorate will tell us to do it again but cheaper.
Electricity is in short supply. There is sewage spilling into our rivers. We don't want to make it worse and we can't get Severn Trent to take any interest in improving the service they manage. They are not our friends.
As for DIY. I am told we would need £11m per year on top of all the available government grants to produce 250 affordable homes a year, and then we wouldn't have anyone to sell them to. We need land but we are not allowed to compulsorily purchase and definitely not below a fair price. Our projects are not ones we want to contemplate without meeting quality standards that the private sector isn't bothering with. Which makes us uncompetitive.
its annoying. I'm aware that a change of government is immanent, and I want to be ready to take full advantage of opportunities but I cannot deal with the required infrastructure shortfall
Labour have for some time floated the idea of giving LAs broader powers to compulsorily acquire land without paying ‘planning gain’, so ‘fair price’ might mean something very different indeed in a year’s time.
How about just abolishing 'planning gain' in the first place, in which case everyone could build at an affordable price and not just politicians who answer to NIMBY electorates?
How do you ‘just abolish planning gain’ ?
What's the trigger that causes planning gain? Abolish that.
Planning gain comes because there's a differential between the value of land with consent and land without it.
Make planning automatic, go to a coded system, so that nobody requires to get consent anymore and the planning gain associated with getting consent vanishes.
Nations that have done this have seen stable house prices rather than surging ones, because there's no artificial constraints on construction and no planning windfalls that cause gains - also reform taxation so that sitting on land is less than worthless because its taxed automatically all along whether its built on or not just the same.
We’re talking about what might be be Labour policy, though. There’s pretty well no chance of your idea, whatever its merits, being adopted by either party. Certainly not the Tories.
Why can't Labour do that?
Other governments in other countries have - and Labour claim to acknowledge that housing costs are a great barrier to inequality and claim to be in favour of improving opportunities for all, so why not remove that barrier?
There's no divine reason for planning consent, prior to its introduction England was building sufficient houses and the cost of land was only about 2% of the cost of housing - and the cost of housing was not the largest part of people's budgets.
Since the introduction of planning regimes there have never been sufficient new houses built, and our housing crisis has got worse and worse.
What's stopping Labour from embracing serious root and branch reform and fixing the problem at source?
Sure it will piss off landlords who want to extract rent from tenants and see their wealth go up, but that's neither relevant nor Labour's target market for votes.
Abolish planning gain and the housing crisis would be rapidly resolved. With house costs down, the cost of living crisis would be resolved, the inequalities between the well off and poor would rapidly shrink, and the cost to the Exchequer of housing support etc would plummet.
What's Labour's problem with any of that?
They will be gaining MPs in areas where GreenNimbyHouseProtection is a major political force.
Announcing such policies would guarantee AnybodyButLabour as the next MP
Probably not.
In countries where this has been done, governments have been re-elected.
The problem with NIMBYism is its like many things, the exaggerated fear of a non-existent problem. By making permission political, it means people are constantly pitchforks at the ready to fight against developments, even if they're the right thing to do.
And if they're not the right thing to do, they won't be happening, so there's no problems anyway.
Take away the politics and NIMBYism ceases to be as potent a force. Developments are either happening, or not, but there's no great political debate about it as its no longer politicised. It loses its currency. And as its no longer politicised, competition can spring up and we cease to see monolithic Barratt-style developments and instead more organic consumer-led developments of what people want and need, where they want it and need it.
But if Labour's too afraid of doing the right thing, because they're worried about the election after next, then they're no better and no more fit for office than the Tories.
On topic, has anyone ever heard of Alexander Stafford before ?
Yes, he was PPS to Boris Johnson.
Just wiki’d him. Seems a right prat.
Well he’s an Oxford man, what do you expect ?
Indeed. .. Stafford described himself as belonging to the political tribe of David Cameron and was a supporter of Cameron's Big Society policy "as things like Free Schools give power to local bodies. People know best how to run their own lives." One of Stafford's contributions at Prime Minister's Questions in 2021 was described as that "of a proper old-school Law and Order Tory: tough on crime and anti-social behaviour."..
And a fan of hydrogen.
An oddity.
He likes hot air?
No. Somebody told him that hydrogen was reaaaaly green and without a moment's rational thought decided to support it despite being the stupidest stupidest stupidy-stupidest idea on God's green Earth.
See the Economist Christmas double issue for a different take (great uncertainty but not impossible, and there's trillions of tons of the stuff lying underground that no-one noticed and maybe Australia both has lots and isn't run by dictators).
The anti-hydrogen people are as stupid as the hydrogen-in-everything people. Hydrogen has a place; in fact, it might have several niches. Work on it should therefore continue. But it won't be in (say) cars at any large scale.
That's a significant issue for 'green' issues: many people are so keen on their own 'solution' that they denigrate other people's. In reality we are likely to have a very mixed green economy.
The problem with hydrogen is that it was seen as the correct “political” solution, for a number of reasons.
The briefing papers on this from government I saw, when working for an oil company that was big on going Green, were fascinating. Hydrogen was the right solution because of tax, legacy industry (oil companies would become hydrogen producers) etc etc
The problem was that hydrogen is unsuitable for a number of things for technical reasons. 5 minutes with the handling and hazards rules for hydrogen will tell you a lot.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
We (a local council ) are looking into this and it seems to be proble
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
As a new councillor. This has been a thing for me. I will go with resources: frameworks, funding, capability, ambition, infrastructure.
We can lay out a framework of standards for local provision but if it isn't saleable with 17% profit it isn't considered viable. His Majesty's Planning Inspectorate will tell us to do it again but cheaper.
Electricity is in short supply. There is sewage spilling into our rivers. We don't want to make it worse and we can't get Severn Trent to take any interest in improving the service they manage. They are not our friends.
As for DIY. I am told we would need £11m per year on top of all the available government grants to produce 250 affordable homes a year, and then we wouldn't have anyone to sell them to. We need land but we are not allowed to compulsorily purchase and definitely not below a fair price. Our projects are not ones we want to contemplate without meeting quality standards that the private sector isn't bothering with. Which makes us uncompetitive.
its annoying. I'm aware that a change of government is immanent, and I want to be ready to take full advantage of opportunities but I cannot deal with the required infrastructure shortfall
Labour have for some time floated the idea of giving LAs broader powers to compulsorily acquire land without paying ‘planning gain’, so ‘fair price’ might mean something very different indeed in a year’s time.
How about just abolishing 'planning gain' in the first place, in which case everyone could build at an affordable price and not just politicians who answer to NIMBY electorates?
How do you ‘just abolish planning gain’ ?
What's the trigger that causes planning gain? Abolish that.
Planning gain comes because there's a differential between the value of land with consent and land without it.
Make planning automatic, go to a coded system, so that nobody requires to get consent anymore and the planning gain associated with getting consent vanishes.
Nations that have done this have seen stable house prices rather than surging ones, because there's no artificial constraints on construction and no planning windfalls that cause gains - also reform taxation so that sitting on land is less than worthless because its taxed automatically all along whether its built on or not just the same.
We’re talking about what might be be Labour policy, though. There’s pretty well no chance of your idea, whatever its merits, being adopted by either party. Certainly not the Tories.
Why can't Labour do that?
Other governments in other countries have - and Labour claim to acknowledge that housing costs are a great barrier to inequality and claim to be in favour of improving opportunities for all, so why not remove that barrier?
There's no divine reason for planning consent, prior to its introduction England was building sufficient houses and the cost of land was only about 2% of the cost of housing - and the cost of housing was not the largest part of people's budgets.
Since the introduction of planning regimes there have never been sufficient new houses built, and our housing crisis has got worse and worse.
What's stopping Labour from embracing serious root and branch reform and fixing the problem at source?
Sure it will piss off landlords who want to extract rent from tenants and see their wealth go up, but that's neither relevant nor Labour's target market for votes.
Abolish planning gain and the housing crisis would be rapidly resolved. With house costs down, the cost of living crisis would be resolved, the inequalities between the well off and poor would rapidly shrink, and the cost to the Exchequer of housing support etc would plummet.
What's Labour's problem with any of that?
They will be gaining MPs in areas where GreenNimbyHouseProtection is a major political force.
Announcing such policies would guarantee AnybodyButLabour as the next MP
Probably not.
In countries where this has been done, governments have been re-elected.
The problem with NIMBYism is its like many things, the exaggerated fear of a non-existent problem. By making permission political, it means people are constantly pitchforks at the ready to fight against developments, even if they're the right thing to do.
And if they're not the right thing to do, they won't be happening, so there's no problems anyway.
Take away the politics and NIMBYism ceases to be as potent a force. Developments are either happening, or not, but there's no great political debate about it as its no longer politicised. It loses its currency. And as its no longer politicised, competition can spring up and we cease to see monolithic Barratt-style developments and instead more organic consumer-led developments of what people want and need, where they want it and need it.
But if Labour's too afraid of doing the right thing, because they're worried about the election after next, then they're no better and no more fit for office than the Tories.
On topic, has anyone ever heard of Alexander Stafford before ?
Yes, he was PPS to Boris Johnson.
Just wiki’d him. Seems a right prat.
Well he’s an Oxford man, what do you expect ?
Indeed. .. Stafford described himself as belonging to the political tribe of David Cameron and was a supporter of Cameron's Big Society policy "as things like Free Schools give power to local bodies. People know best how to run their own lives." One of Stafford's contributions at Prime Minister's Questions in 2021 was described as that "of a proper old-school Law and Order Tory: tough on crime and anti-social behaviour."..
And a fan of hydrogen.
An oddity.
He likes hot air?
No. Somebody told him that hydrogen was reaaaaly green and without a moment's rational thought decided to support it despite being the stupidest stupidest stupidy-stupidest idea on God's green Earth.
See the Economist Christmas double issue for a different take (great uncertainty but not impossible, and there's trillions of tons of the stuff lying underground that no-one noticed and maybe Australia both has lots and isn't run by dictators).
The anti-hydrogen people are as stupid as the hydrogen-in-everything people. Hydrogen has a place; in fact, it might have several niches. Work on it should therefore continue. But it won't be in (say) cars at any large scale.
That's a significant issue for 'green' issues: many people are so keen on their own 'solution' that they denigrate other people's. In reality we are likely to have a very mixed green economy.
The problem with hydrogen is that it was seen as the correct “political” solution, for a number of reasons.
The briefing papers on this from government I saw, when working for an oil company that was big on going Green, were fascinating. Hydrogen was the right solution because of tax, legacy industry (oil companies would become hydrogen producers) etc etc
The problem was that hydrogen is unsuitable for a number of things for technical reasons. 5 minutes with the handling and hazards rules for hydrogen will tell you a lot.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
We (a local council ) are looking into this and it seems to be proble
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
As a new councillor. This has been a thing for me. I will go with resources: frameworks, funding, capability, ambition, infrastructure.
We can lay out a framework of standards for local provision but if it isn't saleable with 17% profit it isn't considered viable. His Majesty's Planning Inspectorate will tell us to do it again but cheaper.
Electricity is in short supply. There is sewage spilling into our rivers. We don't want to make it worse and we can't get Severn Trent to take any interest in improving the service they manage. They are not our friends.
As for DIY. I am told we would need £11m per year on top of all the available government grants to produce 250 affordable homes a year, and then we wouldn't have anyone to sell them to. We need land but we are not allowed to compulsorily purchase and definitely not below a fair price. Our projects are not ones we want to contemplate without meeting quality standards that the private sector isn't bothering with. Which makes us uncompetitive.
its annoying. I'm aware that a change of government is immanent, and I want to be ready to take full advantage of opportunities but I cannot deal with the required infrastructure shortfall
Labour have for some time floated the idea of giving LAs broader powers to compulsorily acquire land without paying ‘planning gain’, so ‘fair price’ might mean something very different indeed in a year’s time.
How about just abolishing 'planning gain' in the first place, in which case everyone could build at an affordable price and not just politicians who answer to NIMBY electorates?
How do you ‘just abolish planning gain’ ?
What's the trigger that causes planning gain? Abolish that.
Planning gain comes because there's a differential between the value of land with consent and land without it.
Make planning automatic, go to a coded system, so that nobody requires to get consent anymore and the planning gain associated with getting consent vanishes.
Nations that have done this have seen stable house prices rather than surging ones, because there's no artificial constraints on construction and no planning windfalls that cause gains - also reform taxation so that sitting on land is less than worthless because its taxed automatically all along whether its built on or not just the same.
We’re talking about what might be be Labour policy, though. There’s pretty well no chance of your idea, whatever its merits, being adopted by either party. Certainly not the Tories.
Why can't Labour do that?
Other governments in other countries have - and Labour claim to acknowledge that housing costs are a great barrier to inequality and claim to be in favour of improving opportunities for all, so why not remove that barrier?
There's no divine reason for planning consent, prior to its introduction England was building sufficient houses and the cost of land was only about 2% of the cost of housing - and the cost of housing was not the largest part of people's budgets.
Since the introduction of planning regimes there have never been sufficient new houses built, and our housing crisis has got worse and worse.
What's stopping Labour from embracing serious root and branch reform and fixing the problem at source?
Sure it will piss off landlords who want to extract rent from tenants and see their wealth go up, but that's neither relevant nor Labour's target market for votes.
Abolish planning gain and the housing crisis would be rapidly resolved. With house costs down, the cost of living crisis would be resolved, the inequalities between the well off and poor would rapidly shrink, and the cost to the Exchequer of housing support etc would plummet.
What's Labour's problem with any of that?
They will be gaining MPs in areas where GreenNimbyHouseProtection is a major political force.
Announcing such policies would guarantee AnybodyButLabour as the next MP
Probably not.
In countries where this has been done, governments have been re-elected.
The problem with NIMBYism is its like many things, the exaggerated fear of a non-existent problem. By making permission political, it means people are constantly pitchforks at the ready to fight against developments, even if they're the right thing to do.
And if they're not the right thing to do, they won't be happening, so there's no problems anyway.
Take away the politics and NIMBYism ceases to be as potent a force. Developments are either happening, or not, but there's no great political debate about it as its no longer politicised. It loses its currency. And as its no longer politicised, competition can spring up and we cease to see monolithic Barratt-style developments and instead more organic consumer-led developments of what people want and need, where they want it and need it.
But if Labour's too afraid of doing the right thing, because they're worried about the election after next, then they're no better and no more fit for office than the Tories.
On topic, has anyone ever heard of Alexander Stafford before ?
Yes, he was PPS to Boris Johnson.
Just wiki’d him. Seems a right prat.
Well he’s an Oxford man, what do you expect ?
Indeed. .. Stafford described himself as belonging to the political tribe of David Cameron and was a supporter of Cameron's Big Society policy "as things like Free Schools give power to local bodies. People know best how to run their own lives." One of Stafford's contributions at Prime Minister's Questions in 2021 was described as that "of a proper old-school Law and Order Tory: tough on crime and anti-social behaviour."..
And a fan of hydrogen.
An oddity.
He likes hot air?
No. Somebody told him that hydrogen was reaaaaly green and without a moment's rational thought decided to support it despite being the stupidest stupidest stupidy-stupidest idea on God's green Earth.
See the Economist Christmas double issue for a different take (great uncertainty but not impossible, and there's trillions of tons of the stuff lying underground that no-one noticed and maybe Australia both has lots and isn't run by dictators).
The anti-hydrogen people are as stupid as the hydrogen-in-everything people. Hydrogen has a place; in fact, it might have several niches. Work on it should therefore continue. But it won't be in (say) cars at any large scale.
That's a significant issue for 'green' issues: many people are so keen on their own 'solution' that they denigrate other people's. In reality we are likely to have a very mixed green economy.
The problem with hydrogen is that it was seen as the correct “political” solution, for a number of reasons.
The briefing papers on this from government I saw, when working for an oil company that was big on going Green, were fascinating. Hydrogen was the right solution because of tax, legacy industry (oil companies would become hydrogen producers) etc etc
The problem was that hydrogen is unsuitable for a number of things for technical reasons. 5 minutes with the handling and hazards rules for hydrogen will tell you a lot.
The Hindenburg says ,,Guten Tag''.
Hydrogen is a flaming nuisance.
Many more airships were destroyed by weather than hydrogen. Look at what happened to the American airship program, which was helium only.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
Former prime minister Tony Blair was keen to relocate the then Premier League side Wimbledon to Belfast in 1997, previously confidential state papers have revealed
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
That its leading intellectual is Tucker Carlson does tell you something.
I won't be surprised if internet experts will claim that the Blackpool Tower fire actually was a fire actually and was actually caused by an EV which was charging.
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Hull did indeed have the mandated lockdown from March through to July but infections were very low… they then had a big spike in the November, when schools were back open, which pre-dated the Kent variant. See chart.
Ok, having got that clarification:
1) Everywhere had a big spike in November 2020. Most schools stayed open. This was extremely difficult, not least because the money needed to keep them open and pay for supply teachers, disinfectant etc was promised but only rarely forthcoming. The disruption inside them was also extensive, particularly with classes losing members and/or whole groups. The damage of dogmatically keeping them open for all students rather than showing some flexibility on this point to keep things going as well as possible probably did more damage in the long run than full closures would have done.
2) Your own figures show a biggish spike in March in Hull. As nationally, this was likely underreported due to the inadequacy of the testing regime. I don't think you can say 'November was the first wave.'
3) It wasn't just about vaccinating teachers, as I patiently made clear at the time. In fact, although teachers were at fairly high risk of exposure they were at comparatively low risk of dying as due to our government's longstanding incompetence they tend to be quite a bit younger than the average population. The issue was with in school transmission sending it rampaging through the community. My exact words were 'it's no use having teachers vaccinated so we can reopen schools if the price of that is dead parents.'
4) Finally, since schools were actually reopened well in advance of the vaccine programme getting anywhere near most teachers, never mind children, following a decision by the drunken weirdos of the DfE to reopen on 8th March come what may (a decision which was taken at the start of February and leaked to The Times) and there was never any serious talk of closing them again, your argument on 'vaccinating early in 2021' fails anyway.
1) Money not being forthcoming is a choice - a bad choice - and money should be forthcoming for education and would have cost magnitudes less than lockdown did.
3) Using the logic that teachers are young, so not very high risk, the same is true with parents too. Parents tend to be younger adults. Parents of kids at school today are far, far more likely to be Millenials than Boomers. Far more likely is the price would be dead great-grandparents or grandparents. Grandparents and great-grandparents are to be cherished, but their grandchildren's or great-grandchildren's education is not something to be sacrificed to prolong their life.
4) 8th March 2021 was absolutely not the time to be opening schools, I completely agree. Schools should have been open - and remained open - from March 2020 onwards instead, with 2020 hindsight.
It's not about whether the time was 'right' or not. As it happened, the reopening went ahead without ill effects.
The issue was, as always through the pandemic, it was being made for all the wrong reasons.
Completely agreed.
If the right reasons were being used, we'd have never closed schools in the first place.
The first lockdown was perhaps excusable, people didn't know what was going on. But by the second lockdown onwards, we knew children weren't at any great risk themselves - so sacrificing their education in order to prolong the lives of others was a sick and twisted choice.
Some of us think that prolonging the lives of people is a good thing to do.
Under normal circumstances, yes. But I have just spent Xmas with my rellies. The missiles are on the pad as we speak.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
Plan A is 2nd May. That is now patently obvious and clear. That doesn't mean it *will* be 2nd May - he could fluff it. But if they don't announce it they will be continually hounded about the cancelled election and what are they scared of.
I won't be surprised if internet experts will claim that the Blackpool Tower fire actually was a fire actually and was actually caused by an EV which was charging.
Former prime minister Tony Blair was keen to relocate the then Premier League side Wimbledon to Belfast in 1997, previously confidential state papers have revealed
Instead they ended up going to Milton Keynes and becoming the embarrassingly named MK Dons.
Much as I despise the US "franchise" system, with team moving around the country*, I can see the advantages. The Northern Ireland Football League (NIFL) is small beer. And the biggest (Linfield) team rarely pulls in more than 4 or 5,000 spectators.
A proper team, competing in a UK (ex-Scotland) wide league would have been a big crowd puller.
* In the NBA, the Sacramento Kings began as the Rochester Royals, then became the Cincinnati Royals, moved to Kansas City and Omaha (as the Kansas City-Omaha Kings), then to Kansas City alone (as the Kansas City Kings), before finally settling in Sacramento.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
Former prime minister Tony Blair was keen to relocate the then Premier League side Wimbledon to Belfast in 1997, previously confidential state papers have revealed
Instead they ended up going to Milton Keynes and becoming the embarrassingly named MK Dons.
Much as I despise the US "franchise" system, with team moving around the country*, I can see the advantages. The Northern Ireland Football League (NIFL) is small beer. And the biggest (Linfield) team rarely pulls in more than 4 or 5,000 spectators.
A proper team, competing in a UK (ex-Scotland) wide league would have been a big crowd puller.
* In the NBA, the Sacramento Kings began as the Rochester Royals, then became the Cincinnati Royals, moved to Kansas City and Omaha (as the Kansas City-Omaha Kings), then to Kansas City alone (as the Kansas City Kings), before finally settling in Sacramento.
Some NYC die-hards still refer to your local baseball team as the Brooklyn Dodgers in the hope they'll return one day.
Former prime minister Tony Blair was keen to relocate the then Premier League side Wimbledon to Belfast in 1997, previously confidential state papers have revealed
Instead they ended up going to Milton Keynes and becoming the embarrassingly named MK Dons.
Much as I despise the US "franchise" system, with team moving around the country*, I can see the advantages. The Northern Ireland Football League (NIFL) is small beer. And the biggest (Linfield) team rarely pulls in more than 4 or 5,000 spectators.
A proper team, competing in a UK (ex-Scotland) wide league would have been a big crowd puller.
* In the NBA, the Sacramento Kings began as the Rochester Royals, then became the Cincinnati Royals, moved to Kansas City and Omaha (as the Kansas City-Omaha Kings), then to Kansas City alone (as the Kansas City Kings), before finally settling in Sacramento.
Some NYC die-hards still refer to your local baseball team as the Brooklyn Dodgers in the hope they'll return one day.
I sort of knew that.
But I'm better on NBA than MLB. And, of course, I'm best of all on MLS
AP (via Seattle Times) - Boebert switches congressional districts, avoiding a Democratic opponent who has far outraised her
DENVER (AP) — Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert announced Wednesday she is switching congressional districts, avoiding a likely rematch against a Democrat who has far outraised her and following an embarrassing moment of groping and vaping that shook even loyal supporters.
In a Facebook video Wednesday evening, Boebert announced she would enter the crowded Republican primary in retiring Rep. Ken Buck’s seat in the eastern side of the state, leaving the more competitive 3rd District seat she barely won last year — and which she was in peril of losing next year as some in her party have soured on her controversial style.
Boebert implied in the video that her departure from the district would help Republicans retain the seat, saying, “I will not allow dark money that is directed at destroying me personally to steal this seat. It’s not fair to the 3rd District and the conservatives there who have fought so hard for our victories.”
“The Aspen donors, George Soros and Hollywood actors that are trying to buy this seat, well they can go pound sand,” she said…
Granted Boebert is a deeply unpleasant, borderline unhinged personality, but in this she is entirely in line with the conventional GOP hypocrisy.
Having agitated for many years, and finally succeeded in getting their appointees on the Supreme Court to render null the majority of campaign finance laws, they now whinge in this manner on every occasion the Democrats manage to outspend them.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
There was a point in time that his foreign policy seemed reasonably successful: facing up to China and Iran, securing multiple peace agreements between Israel and various Arab states.
But that was then and this is now. Nothing can justify Jan 6 or his transparent desire to replace the Republic
AP (via Seattle Times) - Boebert switches congressional districts, avoiding a Democratic opponent who has far outraised her
DENVER (AP) — Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert announced Wednesday she is switching congressional districts, avoiding a likely rematch against a Democrat who has far outraised her and following an embarrassing moment of groping and vaping that shook even loyal supporters.
In a Facebook video Wednesday evening, Boebert announced she would enter the crowded Republican primary in retiring Rep. Ken Buck’s seat in the eastern side of the state, leaving the more competitive 3rd District seat she barely won last year — and which she was in peril of losing next year as some in her party have soured on her controversial style.
Boebert implied in the video that her departure from the district would help Republicans retain the seat, saying, “I will not allow dark money that is directed at destroying me personally to steal this seat. It’s not fair to the 3rd District and the conservatives there who have fought so hard for our victories.”
“The Aspen donors, George Soros and Hollywood actors that are trying to buy this seat, well they can go pound sand,” she said…
Granted Boebert is a deeply unpleasant, borderline unhinged personality, but in this she is entirely in line with the conventional GOP hypocrisy.
Having agitated for many years, and finally succeeded in getting their appointees on the Supreme Court to render null the majority of campaign finance laws, they now whinge in this manner on every occasion the Democrats manage to outspend them.
O/T someone here has put a number plate up for sale, Jag F-type thrown in, for £500,000. It will sell as well. I’m a capitalist, right wing, do as you like person but that is just fucking obscene that there will be someone who has so little shame that they will drive a car with a £500k number plate when there are people in traffic with them who will be no doubt be going through tough times. It’s one thing driving a very expensive car because you get the joy from it but a number plate? It’s enough to turn a man communist.
AP (via Seattle Times) - Boebert switches congressional districts, avoiding a Democratic opponent who has far outraised her
DENVER (AP) — Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert announced Wednesday she is switching congressional districts, avoiding a likely rematch against a Democrat who has far outraised her and following an embarrassing moment of groping and vaping that shook even loyal supporters.
In a Facebook video Wednesday evening, Boebert announced she would enter the crowded Republican primary in retiring Rep. Ken Buck’s seat in the eastern side of the state, leaving the more competitive 3rd District seat she barely won last year — and which she was in peril of losing next year as some in her party have soured on her controversial style.
Boebert implied in the video that her departure from the district would help Republicans retain the seat, saying, “I will not allow dark money that is directed at destroying me personally to steal this seat. It’s not fair to the 3rd District and the conservatives there who have fought so hard for our victories.”
“The Aspen donors, George Soros and Hollywood actors that are trying to buy this seat, well they can go pound sand,” she said…
Granted Boebert is a deeply unpleasant, borderline unhinged personality, but in this she is entirely in line with the conventional GOP hypocrisy.
Having agitated for many years, and finally succeeded in getting their appointees on the Supreme Court to render null the majority of campaign finance laws, they now whinge in this manner on every occasion the Democrats manage to outspend them.
I would point out that Ms Boebert's district was not particularly competitive until she beat out incumbent (and relative moderate) Scott Tipton. It then became much more competitive, with her only winning by 0.16% in the 2022 midterms.
The question, really, is whether she can win the nomination in Colorado's 4th Congressional District. Republican primary voters did get rid of Madison Cawthorne, and she will likely be seen as a carpet bagger. But in a crowded race, and with Trump's endorsement, 30% could well be enough to secure the nomination.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
There was a point in time that his foreign policy seemed reasonably successful: facing up to China and Iran, securing multiple peace agreements between Israel and various Arab states.
But that was then and this is now. Nothing can justify Jan 6 or his transparent desire to replace the Republic
There's an old saying that you should talk softly but carry a big stick. He followed the opposite strategy: yelling a lot, while being unwilling to actually risk anything.
He was also far too susceptible to flattery, and thought that personal relationships - i.e. people being friendly to him personally - would overcome entrenched national interests.
Did he actually make progress with the North Koreans? Or did they play him like a fiddle? Did he make the invasion of Ukraine more or less likely? Did his "trade war" with China achieve anything?
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
We (a local council ) are looking into this and it seems to be proble
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
As a new councillor. This has been a thing for me. I will go with resources: frameworks, funding, capability, ambition, infrastructure.
We can lay out a framework of standards for local provision but if it isn't saleable with 17% profit it isn't considered viable. His Majesty's Planning Inspectorate will tell us to do it again but cheaper.
Electricity is in short supply. There is sewage spilling into our rivers. We don't want to make it worse and we can't get Severn Trent to take any interest in improving the service they manage. They are not our friends.
As for DIY. I am told we would need £11m per year on top of all the available government grants to produce 250 affordable homes a year, and then we wouldn't have anyone to sell them to. We need land but we are not allowed to compulsorily purchase and definitely not below a fair price. Our projects are not ones we want to contemplate without meeting quality standards that the private sector isn't bothering with. Which makes us uncompetitive.
its annoying. I'm aware that a change of government is immanent, and I want to be ready to take full advantage of opportunities but I cannot deal with the required infrastructure shortfall
Labour have for some time floated the idea of giving LAs broader powers to compulsorily acquire land without paying ‘planning gain’, so ‘fair price’ might mean something very different indeed in a year’s time.
How about just abolishing 'planning gain' in the first place, in which case everyone could build at an affordable price and not just politicians who answer to NIMBY electorates?
How do you ‘just abolish planning gain’ ?
What's the trigger that causes planning gain? Abolish that.
Planning gain comes because there's a differential between the value of land with consent and land without it.
Make planning automatic, go to a coded system, so that nobody requires to get consent anymore and the planning gain associated with getting consent vanishes.
Nations that have done this have seen stable house prices rather than surging ones, because there's no artificial constraints on construction and no planning windfalls that cause gains - also reform taxation so that sitting on land is less than worthless because its taxed automatically all along whether its built on or not just the same.
We’re talking about what might be be Labour policy, though. There’s pretty well no chance of your idea, whatever its merits, being adopted by either party. Certainly not the Tories.
Why can't Labour do that?
Other governments in other countries have - and Labour claim to acknowledge that housing costs are a great barrier to inequality and claim to be in favour of improving opportunities for all, so why not remove that barrier?
There's no divine reason for planning consent, prior to its introduction England was building sufficient houses and the cost of land was only about 2% of the cost of housing - and the cost of housing was not the largest part of people's budgets.
Since the introduction of planning regimes there have never been sufficient new houses built, and our housing crisis has got worse and worse.
What's stopping Labour from embracing serious root and branch reform and fixing the problem at source?
Sure it will piss off landlords who want to extract rent from tenants and see their wealth go up, but that's neither relevant nor Labour's target market for votes.
Abolish planning gain and the housing crisis would be rapidly resolved. With house costs down, the cost of living crisis would be resolved, the inequalities between the well off and poor would rapidly shrink, and the cost to the Exchequer of housing support etc would plummet.
What's Labour's problem with any of that?
I suspect Labour's problem with it would be that it is complete and utter bullshit.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
Quite frankly @algarkirk, I just find there is little point trying to say anything vaguely positive re Trump on this site. There are several posters on here (whom I won't mention by name but who should be obvious) who quickly go low and personal if you don't sign up to the "Democrats are good, Republicans are evil" cult * Personally, I am a bit like LBJ's pig, I like wrestling in the mud but I find I waste a lot of time very quickly and I have a lot of stuff to do. So I really have to be in the mood and have some time to spare.
Re Trump, I have said my stuff before. In summary, he is a symptom, not a cause; in his Presidency, the world was certainly a lot calmer than it was now; the economy pre-Covid was doing well; there was not the same crisis at the US border at there is now; and he certainly did not pursue Hilary Clinton in the same way that his opponents seem to be pursuing him now.
Drop me a line if you want more. And re betting - I'm not putting anything on the main race at the moment but I think where the real value lies is in the 2024 Democrat nominee. I think Biden is toast, there will be a coronation at the convention and you can get some fantastic odds on some of the possible Democrat Governor candidates.
* And it is a cult. The obsession some posters have on here with posting anything about Trump is truly scary.
Have you got any data to help us answer that question?
There are quite a few contenders for the title of the nerdiest site on the internet, depending on your definition of nerdy. Here are a few that come to mind:
Slashdot: A news website that describes itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." It focuses on science, technology, and related topics.
GitHub: While primarily a platform for version control and collaborative software development, GitHub is a hub for coding enthusiasts and tech nerds. Stack Overflow: A question and answer community for programmers. It's a go-to place for developers seeking solutions to coding problems.
Wikipedia: Although not exclusively nerdy, Wikipedia caters to a wide range of interests, often attracting those with a deep passion for specific topics.
Ars Technica: A website that covers news and trends in the world of technology, science, and geek culture.
xkcd: A webcomic created by Randall Munroe, known for its humor about technology, science, mathematics, and relationships.
SpaceX Subreddit: If you're into space exploration and Elon Musk's ventures, the SpaceX subreddit can be a nerdy haven.
O/T someone here has put a number plate up for sale, Jag F-type thrown in, for £500,000. It will sell as well. I’m a capitalist, right wing, do as you like person but that is just fucking obscene that there will be someone who has so little shame that they will drive a car with a £500k number plate when there are people in traffic with them who will be no doubt be going through tough times. It’s one thing driving a very expensive car because you get the joy from it but a number plate? It’s enough to turn a man communist.
Getting a personal number plate from DVLA is voluntary taxation. After that it has rarity value and I suspect it gyrates in value a bit like bitcoin.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
Quite frankly @algarkirk, I just find there is little point trying to say anything vaguely positive re Trump on this site. There are several posters on here (whom I won't mention by name but who should be obvious) who quickly go low and personal if you don't sign up to the "Democrats are good, Republicans are evil" cult * Personally, I am a bit like LBJ's pig, I like wrestling in the mud but I find I waste a lot of time very quickly and I have a lot of stuff to do. So I really have to be in the mood and have some time to spare.
Re Trump, I have said my stuff before. In summary, he is a symptom, not a cause; in his Presidency, the world was certainly a lot calmer than it was now; the economy pre-Covid was doing well; there was not the same crisis at the US border at there is now; and he certainly did not pursue Hilary Clinton in the same way that his opponents seem to be pursuing him now.
Drop me a line if you want more. And re betting - I'm not putting anything on the main race at the moment but I think where the real value lies is in the 2024 Democrat nominee. I think Biden is toast, there will be a coronation at the convention and you can get some fantastic odds on some of the possible Democrat Governor candidates.
* And it is a cult. The obsession some posters have on here with posting anything about Trump is truly scary.
Says a poster who has accused Trump's critics of Fascism and mental illness.
While accusing the US legal system of being biased against Trump for daring to prosecute him while ignoring a load of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
That's the imposing self-awareness fail since Dominic Cummings said Boris Johnson was unfit for public office.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
There was a point in time that his foreign policy seemed reasonably successful: facing up to China and Iran, securing multiple peace agreements between Israel and various Arab states.
But that was then and this is now. Nothing can justify Jan 6 or his transparent desire to replace the Republic
There's an old saying that you should talk softly but carry a big stick.
“Old” dating, as far as the US is concerned, from 1900-01?
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
Certainly saves confusion over numbering.
I have no end of trouble exchanging forms with American clients over their numbering conventions.
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
O/T someone here has put a number plate up for sale, Jag F-type thrown in, for £500,000. It will sell as well. I’m a capitalist, right wing, do as you like person but that is just fucking obscene that there will be someone who has so little shame that they will drive a car with a £500k number plate when there are people in traffic with them who will be no doubt be going through tough times. It’s one thing driving a very expensive car because you get the joy from it but a number plate? It’s enough to turn a man communist.
Getting a personal number plate from DVLA is voluntary taxation. After that it has rarity value and I suspect it gyrates in value a bit like bitcoin.
I wouldn’t mind if the state got the benefit but it’s purely private based on someone picking up that number plate many years ago so as no capital gains tax etc it’s pure profit for no effort. Even if it was taxed at 50% it would be bearable but it’s just ego, greed and madness.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
There was a point in time that his foreign policy seemed reasonably successful: facing up to China and Iran, securing multiple peace agreements between Israel and various Arab states.
But that was then and this is now. Nothing can justify Jan 6 or his transparent desire to replace the Republic
There's an old saying that you should talk softly but carry a big stick. He followed the opposite strategy: yelling a lot, while being unwilling to actually risk anything.
He was also far too susceptible to flattery, and thought that personal relationships - i.e. people being friendly to him personally - would overcome entrenched national interests.
Did he actually make progress with the North Koreans? Or did they play him like a fiddle? Did he make the invasion of Ukraine more or less likely? Did his "trade war" with China achieve anything?
I think you are not seeing the wood for the trees here. Yes, there is the old adage re "speak softly" etc. but you only have to look at what the world was like pre-Trump and then during his Presidency to see the difference - the Russians didn't try anything on in the Ukraine as they did when Obama was President (and when Biden came in); ditto Iran; ditto Hamas; ditto, China was less belligerent. If you took what happened (certainly pre-Covid) and swapped the names of the Presidents, it would be lauded as a successful Administration in foreign policy.
A critical factor here was Trump's unpredictability. A lot of foreign leaders - and especially the autocrats - just didn't know how to play him and they did not know how far they would go. OTOH, they feel comfortable with the likes of Obama and Biden who will react in a predictable way and will never do anything "irrationally". Russia felt comfortable invading Ukraine because they knew Biden wasn't going to do a huge amount (and, if it was not for Johnson, I think Ukraine would have had to sign a deal very quickly)
AP (via Seattle Times) - Boebert switches congressional districts, avoiding a Democratic opponent who has far outraised her
DENVER (AP) — Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert announced Wednesday she is switching congressional districts, avoiding a likely rematch against a Democrat who has far outraised her and following an embarrassing moment of groping and vaping that shook even loyal supporters.
In a Facebook video Wednesday evening, Boebert announced she would enter the crowded Republican primary in retiring Rep. Ken Buck’s seat in the eastern side of the state, leaving the more competitive 3rd District seat she barely won last year — and which she was in peril of losing next year as some in her party have soured on her controversial style.
Boebert implied in the video that her departure from the district would help Republicans retain the seat, saying, “I will not allow dark money that is directed at destroying me personally to steal this seat. It’s not fair to the 3rd District and the conservatives there who have fought so hard for our victories.”
“The Aspen donors, George Soros and Hollywood actors that are trying to buy this seat, well they can go pound sand,” she said…
Granted Boebert is a deeply unpleasant, borderline unhinged personality, but in this she is entirely in line with the conventional GOP hypocrisy.
Having agitated for many years, and finally succeeded in getting their appointees on the Supreme Court to render null the majority of campaign finance laws, they now whinge in this manner on every occasion the Democrats manage to outspend them.
Some very quick thoughts (which in fair comment might be judged "jumping to conclusions") re: the chicken run by US Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Netherworld) from her current highly-marginal congressional district on Western Slope of Colorado, to running in 2024 in a different Centennial State district, on the plains of Eastern Colorado, which is bastion for MAGA-GOP and where incumbent GOPer is NOT running for re-election.
> US Constitutional requirement is that member of Congress be a resident of the STATE from which the are elected, thus state residency requirements do NOT apply.
> As a practical matter, vast majority of congressional hopefuls are at in fact local residents, and NOT being such IS a hurdle for out-landers who can be labeled as carpetbaggers; even truer of those actually getting elected.
> However, there ARE exceptions, also difference in impact of localism depending on whether district is rural, urban, suburban, exurban or tutti-frutti, with rurals generally being least inclined to vote for outsiders, while in many cities & burbs voters don't much know OR care where district lines are drawn, particularly when these are gerrymandered or just taking account of population patterns (THAT line being just as debatable as district boundaries themselves).
> in Boebert's case, will be interesting to see IF other Republican hopefuls leave OR perhaps join the race due to her search for a safer chicken coop? AND how do June 25, 2024 Republican primary voters respond, and vote? Followed of course by general electorate in the fall?
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
O/T someone here has put a number plate up for sale, Jag F-type thrown in, for £500,000. It will sell as well. I’m a capitalist, right wing, do as you like person but that is just fucking obscene that there will be someone who has so little shame that they will drive a car with a £500k number plate when there are people in traffic with them who will be no doubt be going through tough times. It’s one thing driving a very expensive car because you get the joy from it but a number plate? It’s enough to turn a man communist.
Getting a personal number plate from DVLA is voluntary taxation. After that it has rarity value and I suspect it gyrates in value a bit like bitcoin.
I wouldn’t mind if the state got the benefit but it’s purely private based on someone picking up that number plate many years ago so as no capital gains tax etc it’s pure profit for no effort. Even if it was taxed at 50% it would be bearable but it’s just ego, greed and madness.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
It's not possible to give a reasoned defence of Trump. He's out for himself completely - that's it. He doesn't mind who gets ripped off, ruined or killed. Those on here inclined to support him will most likely attack Biden instead.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
Quite frankly @algarkirk, I just find there is little point trying to say anything vaguely positive re Trump on this site. There are several posters on here (whom I won't mention by name but who should be obvious) who quickly go low and personal if you don't sign up to the "Democrats are good, Republicans are evil" cult * Personally, I am a bit like LBJ's pig, I like wrestling in the mud but I find I waste a lot of time very quickly and I have a lot of stuff to do. So I really have to be in the mood and have some time to spare.
Re Trump, I have said my stuff before. In summary, he is a symptom, not a cause; in his Presidency, the world was certainly a lot calmer than it was now; the economy pre-Covid was doing well; there was not the same crisis at the US border at there is now; and he certainly did not pursue Hilary Clinton in the same way that his opponents seem to be pursuing him now.
Drop me a line if you want more. And re betting - I'm not putting anything on the main race at the moment but I think where the real value lies is in the 2024 Democrat nominee. I think Biden is toast, there will be a coronation at the convention and you can get some fantastic odds on some of the possible Democrat Governor candidates.
* And it is a cult. The obsession some posters have on here with posting anything about Trump is truly scary.
Says a poster who has accused Trump's critics of Fascism and mental illness.
While accusing the US legal system of being biased against Trump for daring to prosecute him while ignoring a load of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
That's the imposing self-awareness fail since Dominic Cummings said Boris Johnson was unfit for public office.
I think you will find @ydoethur - and since you have replied, I am quite happy to say you are one of the worst examples on this site - that I will never fire the first shot but, if someone descends into personal vitriol, I am quite happy to dish it back. Which is exactly what you got with your posts when you got nasty very quickly.
O/T someone here has put a number plate up for sale, Jag F-type thrown in, for £500,000. It will sell as well. I’m a capitalist, right wing, do as you like person but that is just fucking obscene that there will be someone who has so little shame that they will drive a car with a £500k number plate when there are people in traffic with them who will be no doubt be going through tough times. It’s one thing driving a very expensive car because you get the joy from it but a number plate? It’s enough to turn a man communist.
Getting a personal number plate from DVLA is voluntary taxation. After that it has rarity value and I suspect it gyrates in value a bit like bitcoin.
I wouldn’t mind if the state got the benefit but it’s purely private based on someone picking up that number plate many years ago so as no capital gains tax etc it’s pure profit for no effort. Even if it was taxed at 50% it would be bearable but it’s just ego, greed and madness.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Commonly that’s the way that American WP editors enter dates to avoid admitting that DMY is logically the most sensible.
O/T someone here has put a number plate up for sale, Jag F-type thrown in, for £500,000. It will sell as well. I’m a capitalist, right wing, do as you like person but that is just fucking obscene that there will be someone who has so little shame that they will drive a car with a £500k number plate when there are people in traffic with them who will be no doubt be going through tough times. It’s one thing driving a very expensive car because you get the joy from it but a number plate? It’s enough to turn a man communist.
Getting a personal number plate from DVLA is voluntary taxation. After that it has rarity value and I suspect it gyrates in value a bit like bitcoin.
I wouldn’t mind if the state got the benefit but it’s purely private based on someone picking up that number plate many years ago so as no capital gains tax etc it’s pure profit for no effort. Even if it was taxed at 50% it would be bearable but it’s just ego, greed and madness.
Why no CGT? Am I missing something?
We only have income tax, no CGT or IHT.
Black or white, rich or poor, we’ll cut prices at a straw. God bless Hooky Street!
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Only because the day is AFTER the 12th of the month.
2024-01-02 is another kettle of fish; for UKer it's 1st of Feb, while for USer it's 2nd of Jan.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
Quite frankly @algarkirk, I just find there is little point trying to say anything vaguely positive re Trump on this site. There are several posters on here (whom I won't mention by name but who should be obvious) who quickly go low and personal if you don't sign up to the "Democrats are good, Republicans are evil" cult * Personally, I am a bit like LBJ's pig, I like wrestling in the mud but I find I waste a lot of time very quickly and I have a lot of stuff to do. So I really have to be in the mood and have some time to spare.
Re Trump, I have said my stuff before. In summary, he is a symptom, not a cause; in his Presidency, the world was certainly a lot calmer than it was now; the economy pre-Covid was doing well; there was not the same crisis at the US border at there is now; and he certainly did not pursue Hilary Clinton in the same way that his opponents seem to be pursuing him now.
Drop me a line if you want more. And re betting - I'm not putting anything on the main race at the moment but I think where the real value lies is in the 2024 Democrat nominee. I think Biden is toast, there will be a coronation at the convention and you can get some fantastic odds on some of the possible Democrat Governor candidates.
* And it is a cult. The obsession some posters have on here with posting anything about Trump is truly scary.
Says a poster who has accused Trump's critics of Fascism and mental illness.
While accusing the US legal system of being biased against Trump for daring to prosecute him while ignoring a load of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
That's the imposing self-awareness fail since Dominic Cummings said Boris Johnson was unfit for public office.
I think you will find @ydoethur - and since you have replied, I am quite happy to say you are one of the worst examples on this site - that I will never fire the first shot but, if someone descends into personal vitriol, I am quite happy to dish it back. Which is exactly what you got with your posts when you got nasty very quickly.
This is a discussion forum. If you're not prepared to defend your views, particularly views based on bizarre ideas, don't post them. As for personal vitriol, I use it only when it used against me. Which you always do, I think because you don't like being challenged.
I can see why you like Trump. You are, after all, very similar people. But I'll keep calling you out on your lies about Trump and so will the rest of us. If you think the world was more stable when he was threatening nuclear war on Twitter or violently abusing the Australian prime Minister, or that he deserves to get away with his many crimes because you like him, or obsessively repost conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, or make false statements about the progress of Trump's legal woes, well, be prepared to be criticised.
You are right, that said, to the extent that in 2016 he was as much a symptom of as a cause of America's problems. The disaffection with mainstream politics, the economic system that rewards a few at the expense of the many, the cleavage between the rural and coastal states. That changed rather dramatically when he staged an abortive coup to stay in power. Now, he's channelled all those problems into himself. If the US re-elect him as a planet we're headed for a dark place.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Only because the day is AFTER the 12th of the month.
2024-01-02 is another kettle of fish; for UKer it's 1st of Feb, while for USer it's 2nd of Jan.
Almost as bad as playing "football" with your hands
People are saying that’s orange tarpaulin flapping in the wind…looks like it & doesn’t seem to be much smoke… But there are fire engines so must be I suppose
Loads of reporters are asking to use that footage. My money is on it being a wind up
Fire/flames are one of the tougher tasks any movie encoder has to do: so much so, such videos were a significant component of the test suites we had back when I was doing STBs. What we see there might be a tarpaulin, or it might just be artificats of the MPEG encoding of a heavily-zoomed image. Need better images to tell.
Loads of fire engines there now, and the Fire brigade account is talking about it, so must surely be a legitimate fire.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Only because the day is AFTER the 12th of the month.
2024-01-02 is another kettle of fish; for UKer it's 1st of Feb, while for USer it's 2nd of Jan.
It really isn't.
There is no YYYY-DD-MM order. It's always YYYY-MM-DD.
O/T someone here has put a number plate up for sale, Jag F-type thrown in, for £500,000. It will sell as well. I’m a capitalist, right wing, do as you like person but that is just fucking obscene that there will be someone who has so little shame that they will drive a car with a £500k number plate when there are people in traffic with them who will be no doubt be going through tough times. It’s one thing driving a very expensive car because you get the joy from it but a number plate? It’s enough to turn a man communist.
Getting a personal number plate from DVLA is voluntary taxation. After that it has rarity value and I suspect it gyrates in value a bit like bitcoin.
I wouldn’t mind if the state got the benefit but it’s purely private based on someone picking up that number plate many years ago so as no capital gains tax etc it’s pure profit for no effort. Even if it was taxed at 50% it would be bearable but it’s just ego, greed and madness.
'A public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal at the Post Office has produced enough evidence for police to investigate senior staff, according to lawyers for postmasters who were wrongly convicted of crimes including theft and fraud.
[...] Paul Marshall, a barrister who is representing post office operators in their continuing fight for compensation, said he believed that enough evidence had emerged for police to consider prosecuting former Post Office executives.
“On the face of it, the material is sufficient for the police to investigate whether, over a substantial period of time, the Post Office was engaged in perverting the course of justice or a conspiracy to pervert the courses of justice,” he told the Guardian.
“In my view, the Post Office was engaged in a sustained attack on the rule of law itself.”
Lawyers for the post office owner-managers reportedly want Sir Wyn Williams, chairman of the public inquiry into the scandal, to pass files to the director of public prosecutions once the inquiry is completed next year.'
Now to be clear, those are the people who are *caught* crossing. So it's entirely possible higher numbers being caught represent more border guards or a more efficient service.
But it is worth noting that in 2019 the number of illegal crossings registered was double that of any year during the Obama tenure except 2014 (486,651).
It declined a bit in 2020, largely due to Covid inhibiting the migrant flows, and has far more than rebounded since, again very possibly due to Covid although multiple other factors are probably involved.
But it's difficult to suggest on a purely statistical basis that Trump's border strategy was anything other than a failure even if Biden's is also clearly a failure.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
The latter approach also lets you sort in date order by sorting the dates lexicographically, which can be helpful occasionally.
Now to be clear, those are the people who are *caught* crossing. So it's entirely possible higher numbers being caught represent more border guards or a more efficient service.
But it is worth noting that in 2019 the number of illegal crossings registered was double that of any year during the Obama tenure except 2014 (486,651).
It declined a bit in 2020, largely due to Covid inhibiting the migrant flows, and has far more than rebounded since, again very possibly due to Covid although multiple other factors are probably involved.
But it's difficult to suggest on a purely statistical basis that Trump's border strategy was anything other than a failure even if Biden's is also clearly a failure.
Hot take - there ain't going to be a General Election in May. Instead budget is early so that people will feel the benefits of it in their pay packets for longer. It's the Conservative way - the quicker we can get money back to the people the better! https://twitter.com/Alex_Stafford/status/1739991409565028456
This is surely complete nonsense.
Any changes to income tax will take effect from 6th April, whatever date the budget is.
I guess changes to other taxes like IHT could take effect from budget day but we are only talking approx a couple of weeks difference from the latest realistic budget date - so if there is an October GE IHT changes could be in effect for say 29 weeks instead of 27 weeks.
But the tweet is talking about "pay packets" so must mean IT or NI. And given NI is being reduced in January, they would surely choose a cut to IT next time.
I agree an autumn GE is still the most likely but the argument in the tweet doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Now to be clear, those are the people who are *caught* crossing. So it's entirely possible higher numbers being caught represent more border guards or a more efficient service.
But it is worth noting that in 2019 the number of illegal crossings registered was double that of any year during the Obama tenure except 2014 (486,651).
It declined a bit in 2020, largely due to Covid inhibiting the migrant flows, and has far more than rebounded since, again very possibly due to Covid although multiple other factors are probably involved.
But it's difficult to suggest on a purely statistical basis that Trump's border strategy was anything other than a failure even if Biden's is also clearly a failure.
Is Biden’s policy really a failure or is it something he’s quite happy to turn a blind eye to while pretending to oppose it. A little like U.K. politicians on migration since, about, 2000
Hot take - there ain't going to be a General Election in May. Instead budget is early so that people will feel the benefits of it in their pay packets for longer. It's the Conservative way - the quicker we can get money back to the people the better! https://twitter.com/Alex_Stafford/status/1739991409565028456
This is surely complete nonsense.
Any changes to income tax will take effect from 6th April, whatever date the budget is.
I guess changes to other taxes like IHT could take effect from budget day but we are only talking approx a couple of weeks difference from the latest realistic budget date - so if there is an October GE IHT changes could be in effect for say 29 weeks instead of 27 weeks.
But the tweet is talking about "pay packets" so must mean IT or NI. And given NI is being reduced in January, they would surely choose a cut to IT next time.
I agree an autumn GE is still the most likely but the argument in the tweet doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
I don't think that locals will come into the reasoning this time as it's mostly a set of locals with labour at a high bar. the only thing they have to lose of any value is Andy Street as WM mayor
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
The latter approach also lets you sort in date order by sorting the dates lexicographically, which can be helpful occasionally.
On my humble and (like yours truly) semi-superannuated PC, have a folder containing voter registration records requested & obtained over the years.
Best way to keep them in proper order is by naming files for each records requests in YYYY-MM-DD format.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Only because the day is AFTER the 12th of the month.
2024-01-02 is another kettle of fish; for UKer it's 1st of Feb, while for USer it's 2nd of Jan.
It really isn't.
There is no YYYY-DD-MM order. It's always YYYY-MM-DD.
Well, YYYY-MM-DD is format I use to keep files in particular folders in proper (& clear) chronological order.
I was reading earlier about driverless cars being legal in the UK in the next year or two, and it suddenly struck me that whenever I imagined a driverless car until that point, when the article talked about drivers being ‘passengers’ who could be writing emails etc, all I had in mind was an empty car driving about
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
The latter approach also lets you sort in date order by sorting the dates lexicographically, which can be helpful occasionally.
On my humble and (like yours truly) semi-superannuated PC, have a folder containing voter registration records requested & obtained over the years.
Best way to keep them in proper order is by naming files for each records requests in YYYY-MM-DD format.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Only because the day is AFTER the 12th of the month.
2024-01-02 is another kettle of fish; for UKer it's 1st of Feb, while for USer it's 2nd of Jan.
It really isn't.
There is no YYYY-DD-MM order. It's always YYYY-MM-DD.
Well, YYYY-MM-DD is format I use to keep files in particular folders in proper (& clear) chronological order.
Now to be clear, those are the people who are *caught* crossing. So it's entirely possible higher numbers being caught represent more border guards or a more efficient service.
But it is worth noting that in 2019 the number of illegal crossings registered was double that of any year during the Obama tenure except 2014 (486,651).
It declined a bit in 2020, largely due to Covid inhibiting the migrant flows, and has far more than rebounded since, again very possibly due to Covid although multiple other factors are probably involved.
But it's difficult to suggest on a purely statistical basis that Trump's border strategy was anything other than a failure even if Biden's is also clearly a failure.
Is Biden’s policy really a failure or is it something he’s quite happy to turn a blind eye to while pretending to oppose it. A little like U.K. politicians on migration since, about, 2000
I have no idea.
One of the perversities of that data set is that (a bit like lockdown) the better things get the worse it looks. If you arrest and remove 2 million of 4 million illegal immigrants that's obviously better than only removing 300,000 of 3.5 million.
But in general, all other things being equal, you would expect them to track the number of border crossings.
The fact that so many are getting caught does suggest that something is radically wrong somewhere. But that was true under every president except George W. Bush and Obama, and if I were feeling cynical I would wonder how much of that was due to budget cuts under Bush and a stagnant economy under Obama.
So these are defamatory lies. I do not earn £45,000 per year. She infers that I don’t actually ‘work’ I have never trolled her, just sent back the 60+abuse she sent our way that day, no words of my own. I have kept every tweet sent to her, never once calling her a dog
Now to be clear, those are the people who are *caught* crossing. So it's entirely possible higher numbers being caught represent more border guards or a more efficient service.
But it is worth noting that in 2019 the number of illegal crossings registered was double that of any year during the Obama tenure except 2014 (486,651).
It declined a bit in 2020, largely due to Covid inhibiting the migrant flows, and has far more than rebounded since, again very possibly due to Covid although multiple other factors are probably involved.
But it's difficult to suggest on a purely statistical basis that Trump's border strategy was anything other than a failure even if Biden's is also clearly a failure.
Is Biden’s policy really a failure or is it something he’s quite happy to turn a blind eye to while pretending to oppose it. A little like U.K. politicians on migration since, about, 2000
I have no idea.
One of the perversities of that data set is that (a bit like lockdown) the better things get the worse it looks. If you arrest and remove 2 million of 4 million illegal immigrants that's obviously better than only removing 300,000 of 3.5 million.
But in general, all other things being equal, you would expect them to track the number of border crossings.
The fact that so many are getting caught does suggest that something is radically wrong somewhere. But that was true under every president except George W. Bush and Obama, and if I were feeling cynical I would wonder how much of that was due to budget cuts under Bush and a stagnant economy under Obama.
It’s more a function of chaos in Mexico and further south.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
The latter approach also lets you sort in date order by sorting the dates lexicographically, which can be helpful occasionally.
On my humble and (like yours truly) semi-superannuated PC, have a folder containing voter registration records requested & obtained over the years.
Best way to keep them in proper order is by naming files for each records requests in YYYY-MM-DD format.
Off topic (but some will find this amusing): Las Vegas is looking forward to a huge number of weddings on the 31st. Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I've taken to writing dates as 2023-12-31, because it is impossible to misinterpret.
Only because the day is AFTER the 12th of the month.
2024-01-02 is another kettle of fish; for UKer it's 1st of Feb, while for USer it's 2nd of Jan.
It really isn't.
There is no YYYY-DD-MM order. It's always YYYY-MM-DD.
Well, YYYY-MM-DD is format I use to keep files in particular folders in proper (& clear) chronological order.
Now to be clear, those are the people who are *caught* crossing. So it's entirely possible higher numbers being caught represent more border guards or a more efficient service.
But it is worth noting that in 2019 the number of illegal crossings registered was double that of any year during the Obama tenure except 2014 (486,651).
It declined a bit in 2020, largely due to Covid inhibiting the migrant flows, and has far more than rebounded since, again very possibly due to Covid although multiple other factors are probably involved.
But it's difficult to suggest on a purely statistical basis that Trump's border strategy was anything other than a failure even if Biden's is also clearly a failure.
Is Biden’s policy really a failure or is it something he’s quite happy to turn a blind eye to while pretending to oppose it. A little like U.K. politicians on migration since, about, 2000
I have no idea.
One of the perversities of that data set is that (a bit like lockdown) the better things get the worse it looks. If you arrest and remove 2 million of 4 million illegal immigrants that's obviously better than only removing 300,000 of 3.5 million.
But in general, all other things being equal, you would expect them to track the number of border crossings.
The fact that so many are getting caught does suggest that something is radically wrong somewhere. But that was true under every president except George W. Bush and Obama, and if I were feeling cynical I would wonder how much of that was due to budget cuts under Bush and a stagnant economy under Obama.
It’s more a function of chaos in Mexico and further south.
Re: Lauren Boebert switching districts, should have also noted that it's possible>likely that she will change her voting, and maybe actual, residence in Colorado from CO CD3 to CD4 before June primary.
Even IF she does not, she & her backers can make a good argument, that her current locale in the mountains of Western Slope is not as divergent from the high plains of Eastern Colorado.
This is especially true IF you put aside Rep. Boebert's (in)famous personal/political activities/antics.
For she is definitely NOT representative of Aspen, even though it's in her (current) district.
Instead of Rocky Mountain High Colorado of enviros, libtards & similar Woke-folk, she's kickin' her heals and kickin' ass for what you might call Shit-Kicker Colorado where economy is mainly based on agriculture, oil & gas & related.
Re: Lauren Boebert switching districts, should have also noted that it's possible>likely that she will change her voting, and maybe actual, residence in Colorado from CO CD3 to CD4 before June primary.
Even IF she does not, she & her backers can make a good argument, that her current locale in the mountains of Western Slope is not as divergent from the high plains of Eastern Colorado.
This is especially true IF you put aside Rep. Boebert's (in)famous personal/political activities/antics.
For she is definitely NOT representative of Aspen, even though it's in her (current) district.
Instead of Rocky Mountain High Colorado of enviros, libtards & similar Woke-folk, she's kickin' her heals and kickin' ass for what you might call Shit-Kicker Colorado where economy is mainly based on agriculture, oil & gas & related.
May help the Reps in her old District. Whether the Reps in her new district will be inclined to take her on seems less obvious than her mostives for the 'chicken run'.
Off topic, but important for anyone who bets on American politics: "A new study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. . . . . When the first iteration of the study came out over 50 years ago, 35.5% of respondents said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. The percentage that call themselves Democrats or independents have bounced around over the years, with the proportion of Democrats reaching a high of 44.1% in 1992." source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-3-4-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=41d2edafd0ec40a09c509a2a259194a1&ei=175
Humans being what we are, you should not expect unbiased coverage of American politics from most American journalists.
(As it happens, our local monopoly newspaper, the Seattle Times, provides many good examples of this problem. From time to time I see pieces in the newspaper that read like satires, they are so far into current leftist thinking.)
Well, this is the long echo of the 40-year strategy to wage war on modernity and anything resembling intellectualism. If the woke Democrats are ever as successful, I'm sure a similar backlash would follow in the long term too, but when your party tries to make schools praise the benefits of slavery while banning discussions of homosexuality, you will pay a price among people who think differently.
The most interesting thing about Trumpism, the current dominant philosophy in the GOP, is that there's no thinking man's case for it. I can't think of that ever being the situation for one of the two big parties in a major Western democracy.
I don't know whether in any sense PB is a barometer, but IIRC there isn't a single person commenting here who will defend or support Trumpism.
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
Quite frankly @algarkirk, I just find there is little point trying to say anything vaguely positive re Trump on this site. There are several posters on here (whom I won't mention by name but who should be obvious) who quickly go low and personal if you don't sign up to the "Democrats are good, Republicans are evil" cult * Personally, I am a bit like LBJ's pig, I like wrestling in the mud but I find I waste a lot of time very quickly and I have a lot of stuff to do. So I really have to be in the mood and have some time to spare.
Re Trump, I have said my stuff before. In summary, he is a symptom, not a cause; in his Presidency, the world was certainly a lot calmer than it was now; the economy pre-Covid was doing well; there was not the same crisis at the US border at there is now; and he certainly did not pursue Hilary Clinton in the same way that his opponents seem to be pursuing him now.
Drop me a line if you want more. And re betting - I'm not putting anything on the main race at the moment but I think where the real value lies is in the 2024 Democrat nominee. I think Biden is toast, there will be a coronation at the convention and you can get some fantastic odds on some of the possible Democrat Governor candidates.
* And it is a cult. The obsession some posters have on here with posting anything about Trump is truly scary.
Says a poster who has accused Trump's critics of Fascism and mental illness.
While accusing the US legal system of being biased against Trump for daring to prosecute him while ignoring a load of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
That's the imposing self-awareness fail since Dominic Cummings said Boris Johnson was unfit for public office.
I think you will find @ydoethur - and since you have replied, I am quite happy to say you are one of the worst examples on this site - that I will never fire the first shot but, if someone descends into personal vitriol, I am quite happy to dish it back. Which is exactly what you got with your posts when you got nasty very quickly.
This is a discussion forum. If you're not prepared to defend your views, particularly views based on bizarre ideas, don't post them. As for personal vitriol, I use it only when it used against me. Which you always do, I think because you don't like being challenged.
I can see why you like Trump. You are, after all, very similar people. But I'll keep calling you out on your lies about Trump and so will the rest of us. If you think the world was more stable when he was threatening nuclear war on Twitter or violently abusing the Australian prime Minister, or that he deserves to get away with his many crimes because you like him, or obsessively repost conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, or make false statements about the progress of Trump's legal woes, well, be prepared to be criticised.
You are right, that said, to the extent that in 2016 he was as much a symptom of as a cause of America's problems. The disaffection with mainstream politics, the economic system that rewards a few at the expense of the many, the cleavage between the rural and coastal states. That changed rather dramatically when he staged an abortive coup to stay in power. Now, he's channelled all those problems into himself. If the US re-elect him as a planet we're headed for a dark place.
There is certainly a 'thinking mans case for Trump'; it is as a sort of last roll of the dice against the prevailing dictatorship of progressivism. If you think that society is only headed for catastrophe and disaster at a personal / structural level then Trumpism is a coherant alternative. It is what a lot of people think, reflected in over 50% support for Trump amongst Americans. If no journalists vote republican and no one on PB admits this, this just shows that the profession of journalism and the readership of this website have been dragged in to a progressive echo chamber. As dark as it would be if Trump is elected in 2024, for many people, the darkness started already, so it is just another phase.
'A public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal at the Post Office has produced enough evidence for police to investigate senior staff, according to lawyers for postmasters who were wrongly convicted of crimes including theft and fraud.
[...] Paul Marshall, a barrister who is representing post office operators in their continuing fight for compensation, said he believed that enough evidence had emerged for police to consider prosecuting former Post Office executives.
“On the face of it, the material is sufficient for the police to investigate whether, over a substantial period of time, the Post Office was engaged in perverting the course of justice or a conspiracy to pervert the courses of justice,” he told the Guardian.
“In my view, the Post Office was engaged in a sustained attack on the rule of law itself.”
Lawyers for the post office owner-managers reportedly want Sir Wyn Williams, chairman of the public inquiry into the scandal, to pass files to the director of public prosecutions once the inquiry is completed next year.'
The Times article I posted earlier gives more details.
"The Times can reveal that the Crown Prosecution Service has appointed Tom Little KC to oversee the case. He is one of six specialist barristers described as the “brightest and the best” who prosecute the most serious and complex cases. Sources said Little would be the “point man” in deciding who was investigated and prosecuted."
The police are getting the same evidence the inquiry is, along with the witness statements and the answers they give to the inquiry. Set against that is the fact that any conspiracy charge has to meet a high bar.
But here's hoping.
There are some days though when I feel that everyone involved, from Ministers down, should just be thrown in jail and have to show why they should be let out.
So these are defamatory lies. I do not earn £45,000 per year. She infers that I don’t actually ‘work’ I have never trolled her, just sent back the 60+abuse she sent our way that day, no words of my own. I have kept every tweet sent to her, never once calling her a dog
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-8H5u4YzuY
In marked contrast to the infamous supposed terrorist GLasgow City corporation refuse wagon.
I think this was the latest formulation from Fruity.
*need a definition of accuracy
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/24015391.brandon-lewis-yarmouth-mp-denies-paying-facebook-likes/
And, maybe I'm sheltered, but I don't where where I would go for a reasoned defence of Trump, what he has done or what he stands for. (Of course there are people who can give a reasoned explanation, but they are always giving a explanation of why people are acting wrongly or badly).
Obviously.
Much as I despise the US "franchise" system, with team moving around the country*, I can see the advantages. The Northern Ireland Football League (NIFL) is small beer. And the biggest (Linfield) team rarely pulls in more than 4 or 5,000 spectators.
A proper team, competing in a UK (ex-Scotland) wide league would have been a big crowd puller.
* In the NBA, the Sacramento Kings began as the Rochester Royals, then became the Cincinnati Royals, moved to Kansas City and Omaha (as the Kansas City-Omaha Kings), then to Kansas City alone (as the Kansas City Kings), before finally settling in Sacramento.
@williamglenn and @TheKitchenCabinet
But I'm better on NBA than MLB. And, of course, I'm best of all on MLS
Having agitated for many years, and finally succeeded in getting their appointees on the Supreme Court to render null the majority of campaign finance laws, they now whinge in this manner on every occasion the Democrats manage to outspend them.
There was a point in time that his foreign policy seemed reasonably successful: facing up to China and Iran, securing multiple peace agreements between Israel and various Arab states.
But that was then and this is now. Nothing can justify Jan 6 or his transparent desire to replace the Republic
And her recent performances (and related lying) are unlikely to have endeared her more to voters.
The question, really, is whether she can win the nomination in Colorado's 4th Congressional District. Republican primary voters did get rid of Madison Cawthorne, and she will likely be seen as a carpet bagger. But in a crowded race, and with Trump's endorsement, 30% could well be enough to secure the nomination.
We shall see.
He was also far too susceptible to flattery, and thought that personal relationships - i.e. people being friendly to him personally - would overcome entrenched national interests.
Did he actually make progress with the North Koreans? Or did they play him like a fiddle? Did he make the invasion of Ukraine more or less likely? Did his "trade war" with China achieve anything?
Re Trump, I have said my stuff before. In summary, he is a symptom, not a cause; in his Presidency, the world was certainly a lot calmer than it was now; the economy pre-Covid was doing well; there was not the same crisis at the US border at there is now; and he certainly did not pursue Hilary Clinton in the same way that his opponents seem to be pursuing him now.
Drop me a line if you want more. And re betting - I'm not putting anything on the main race at the moment but I think where the real value lies is in the 2024 Democrat nominee. I think Biden is toast, there will be a coronation at the convention and you can get some fantastic odds on some of the possible Democrat Governor candidates.
* And it is a cult. The obsession some posters have on here with posting anything about Trump is truly scary.
Slashdot: A news website that describes itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." It focuses on science, technology, and related topics.
GitHub: While primarily a platform for version control and collaborative software development, GitHub is a hub for coding enthusiasts and tech nerds.
Stack Overflow: A question and answer community for programmers. It's a go-to place for developers seeking solutions to coding problems.
Wikipedia: Although not exclusively nerdy, Wikipedia caters to a wide range of interests, often attracting those with a deep passion for specific topics.
Ars Technica: A website that covers news and trends in the world of technology, science, and geek culture.
xkcd: A webcomic created by Randall Munroe, known for its humor about technology, science, mathematics, and relationships.
SpaceX Subreddit: If you're into space exploration and Elon Musk's ventures, the SpaceX subreddit can be a nerdy haven.
After that it has rarity value and I suspect it gyrates in value a bit like bitcoin.
While accusing the US legal system of being biased against Trump for daring to prosecute him while ignoring a load of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
That's the imposing self-awareness fail since Dominic Cummings said Boris Johnson was unfit for public office.
Why? Because, using the American convention, the date can be written 123123. Which should be easy for even the most forgetful husband to remember.
(Strunk and White say this is an excellent way of writing a date: 31 December 2023. And that's what I have been doing, whenever possible.)
I have no end of trouble exchanging forms with American clients over their numbering conventions.
A critical factor here was Trump's unpredictability. A lot of foreign leaders - and especially the autocrats - just didn't know how to play him and they did not know how far they would go. OTOH, they feel comfortable with the likes of Obama and Biden who will react in a predictable way and will never do anything "irrationally". Russia felt comfortable invading Ukraine because they knew Biden wasn't going to do a huge amount (and, if it was not for Johnson, I think Ukraine would have had to sign a deal very quickly)
> First, here are links to wiki blurbs about Boebert's current district (perhaps) future CD:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado's_3rd_congressional_district
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado's_4th_congressional_district
> US Constitutional requirement is that member of Congress be a resident of the STATE from which the are elected, thus state residency requirements do NOT apply.
> As a practical matter, vast majority of congressional hopefuls are at in fact local residents, and NOT being such IS a hurdle for out-landers who can be labeled as carpetbaggers; even truer of those actually getting elected.
> However, there ARE exceptions, also difference in impact of localism depending on whether district is rural, urban, suburban, exurban or tutti-frutti, with rurals generally being least inclined to vote for outsiders, while in many cities & burbs voters don't much know OR care where district lines are drawn, particularly when these are gerrymandered or just taking account of population patterns (THAT line being just as debatable as district boundaries themselves).
> in Boebert's case, will be interesting to see IF other Republican hopefuls leave OR perhaps join the race due to her search for a safer chicken coop? AND how do June 25, 2024 Republican primary voters respond, and vote? Followed of course by general electorate in the fall?
>Note that source below lists SIX announced Republican candidates NOT including Lauren Boebert; IF field is sizable would expect that help Boebert due to her celebrity PLUS highly-likely endorsement of You-Know-Who.
https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado's_4th_Congressional_District_election,_2024
He's out for himself completely - that's it. He doesn't mind who gets ripped off, ruined or killed.
Those on here inclined to support him will most likely attack Biden instead.
God bless Hooky Street!
2024-01-02 is another kettle of fish; for UKer it's 1st of Feb, while for USer it's 2nd of Jan.
I can see why you like Trump. You are, after all, very similar people. But I'll keep calling you out on your lies about Trump and so will the rest of us. If you think the world was more stable when he was threatening nuclear war on Twitter or violently abusing the Australian prime Minister, or that he deserves to get away with his many crimes because you like him, or obsessively repost conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, or make false statements about the progress of Trump's legal woes, well, be prepared to be criticised.
You are right, that said, to the extent that in 2016 he was as much a symptom of as a cause of America's problems. The disaffection with mainstream politics, the economic system that rewards a few at the expense of the many, the cleavage between the rural and coastal states. That changed rather dramatically when he staged an abortive coup to stay in power. Now, he's channelled all those problems into himself. If the US re-elect him as a planet we're headed for a dark place.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0h146g6
There is no YYYY-DD-MM order. It's always YYYY-MM-DD.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/28/post-office-horizon-inquiry-enough-evidence-for-police-investigation
'A public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal at the Post Office has produced enough evidence for police to investigate senior staff, according to lawyers for postmasters who were wrongly convicted of crimes including theft and fraud.
[...]
Paul Marshall, a barrister who is representing post office operators in their continuing fight for compensation, said he believed that enough evidence had emerged for police to consider prosecuting former Post Office executives.
“On the face of it, the material is sufficient for the police to investigate whether, over a substantial period of time, the Post Office was engaged in perverting the course of justice or a conspiracy to pervert the courses of justice,” he told the Guardian.
“In my view, the Post Office was engaged in a sustained attack on the rule of law itself.”
Lawyers for the post office owner-managers reportedly want Sir Wyn Williams, chairman of the public inquiry into the scandal, to pass files to the director of public prosecutions once the inquiry is completed next year.'
2015 337,117
2016 415,815
2017 310,531
2018 404,142
2019 859,501
2020 405,036
2021 1,662,167
2022 2,214,652
Now to be clear, those are the people who are *caught* crossing. So it's entirely possible higher numbers being caught represent more border guards or a more efficient service.
But it is worth noting that in 2019 the number of illegal crossings registered was double that of any year during the Obama tenure except 2014 (486,651).
It declined a bit in 2020, largely due to Covid inhibiting the migrant flows, and has far more than rebounded since, again very possibly due to Covid although multiple other factors are probably involved.
But it's difficult to suggest on a purely statistical basis that Trump's border strategy was anything other than a failure even if Biden's is also clearly a failure.
Any changes to income tax will take effect from 6th April, whatever date the budget is.
I guess changes to other taxes like IHT could take effect from budget day but we are only talking approx a couple of weeks difference from the latest realistic budget date - so if there is an October GE IHT changes could be in effect for say 29 weeks instead of 27 weeks.
But the tweet is talking about "pay packets" so must mean IT or NI. And given NI is being reduced in January, they would surely choose a cut to IT next time.
I agree an autumn GE is still the most likely but the argument in the tweet doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Best way to keep them in proper order is by naming files for each records requests in YYYY-MM-DD format. Well, YYYY-MM-DD is format I use to keep files in particular folders in proper (& clear) chronological order.
One of the perversities of that data set is that (a bit like lockdown) the better things get the worse it looks. If you arrest and remove 2 million of 4 million illegal immigrants that's obviously better than only removing 300,000 of 3.5 million.
But in general, all other things being equal, you would expect them to track the number of border crossings.
The fact that so many are getting caught does suggest that something is radically wrong somewhere. But that was true under every president except George W. Bush and Obama, and if I were feeling cynical I would wonder how much of that was due to budget cuts under Bush and a stagnant economy under Obama.
So these are defamatory lies.
I do not earn £45,000 per year.
She infers that I don’t actually ‘work’
I have never trolled her, just sent back the 60+abuse she sent our way that day, no words of my own.
I have kept every tweet sent to her, never once calling her a dog
https://x.com/mercer_felicity/status/1740444916067840033?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Even IF she does not, she & her backers can make a good argument, that her current locale in the mountains of Western Slope is not as divergent from the high plains of Eastern Colorado.
This is especially true IF you put aside Rep. Boebert's (in)famous personal/political activities/antics.
For she is definitely NOT representative of Aspen, even though it's in her (current) district.
Instead of Rocky Mountain High Colorado of enviros, libtards & similar Woke-folk, she's kickin' her heals and kickin' ass for what you might call Shit-Kicker Colorado where economy is mainly based on agriculture, oil & gas & related.
"The Times can reveal that the Crown Prosecution Service has appointed Tom Little KC to oversee the case. He is one of six specialist barristers described as the “brightest and the best” who prosecute the most serious and complex cases. Sources said Little would be the “point man” in deciding who was investigated and prosecuted."
The police are getting the same evidence the inquiry is, along with the witness statements and the answers they give to the inquiry. Set against that is the fact that any conspiracy charge has to meet a high bar.
But here's hoping.
There are some days though when I feel that everyone involved, from Ministers down, should just be thrown in jail and have to show why they should be let out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html
Felicity Cornelius-Mercer Principal Secretary Full Time Yes £40,000.00 to £44,999.99
https://www.theipsa.org.uk/mp-staffing-business-costs/your-mp/johnny-mercer/4485