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Perhaps the government will not get the blame – politicalbetting.com

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  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 126,594

    TOPPING said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?


    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    Prayer is about communication and self-reflection. It’s not about asking for things and ticking off a list.

    It’s often in prayer than the “still small voice of calm” speaks and helps you resolve your issues. It’s a vocalisation of your subconscious, of course, but prayer (or
    meditation) creates the space for it to be heard.
    So if prayer is self-reflection, then god presumably becomes irrelevant.
    No. Many people find it helpful to have an external focal point be that an icon or God Himself.

    Faith is just that: faith. What do you get out of aggressively trying to diminish what others want to believe?
    Yes it is this aggressive left liberal secular atheism that will likely lead to a backlash in an election or 2, perhaps with uber conservative Catholic Rees Mogg becoming Tory leader
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 37,657
    HYUFD said:

    Trump voters live in the Midwest and South, primarily want more US factories supplying the US market and will only buy American if they can.

    Few of them care about the rest of the world

    Except that's not true

    They will only buy cheap if they can
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 126,594
    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    I shall enjoy informing my friends later today that I have been dubbed a “left liberal”.

    In the culture wars you certainly are
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 24,057
    vik said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    If his objective is to grow manufacturing jobs, then why is he imposing tariffs on raw materials, which are needed to build new factories ?

    The 50% tariffs on Lesotho, for example, have been imposed because Lesotho has a trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus exists because Lesotho exports a lot of diamonds to the US. How will restricting cheap diamonds from Lesotho help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?

    Trump complains a lot about Canada's trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus only exists because of Canada's oil exports to the US & if you exclude oil, then Canada has a trade deficit. How will restricting cheap oil from Canada help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?
    Trying to find logic in Trump is best left to the dimmer idealogues and those who want their truths flexible. There is no logic behind this.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 126,594

    TOPPING said:

    As for the Trumpaclysm there is nevertheless something amusing about people bemoaning the fall in stock prices when "middle America" won't even have a 401k let alone any direct investments in the market. It echoes the "whose GDP" issue in the UK. And when I say "middle America" I mean those people who voted for Trump. This might be what they wanted.

    About 66% of Republicans own stocks. Slightly more than Dems and more than Indies.

    https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx
    Those are traditional Republicans ie the ones who also voted for the Bushes, Dole, McCain and Romney, not the former Clinton and Obama voting rustbelt Democrats who switched to Trump
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 75,996
    TOPPING said:

    As for the Trumpaclysm there is nevertheless something amusing about people bemoaning the fall in stock prices when "middle America" won't even have a 401k let alone any direct investments in the market. It echoes the "whose GDP" issue in the UK. And when I say "middle America" I mean those people who voted for Trump. This might be what they wanted.

    And it might not.

    Trump approval slips to lowest point in second term
    https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5230291-trump-approval-rating-dip-poll/

    Wait until it really starts to bite.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 14,394
    Morning all :)

    I have refrained from annoying you with my tedious bletherings as I've been too busy enjoying the delights of Plumpton (on course yesterday) and Aintree (vicrariously via the big screen at the aforementioned Plumpton).

    Today's Aintree no hopers as follows:

    1.45: CALDWELL POTTER
    2.55: TRIPOLI FLYER
    3.30: EL FABIOLO
    4.40: MOON ROCKET (each way)

    As for tomorrow's race - a little backstory. When I was at the equivalent Plumpton meeting in 2014, they got Brendan Powell to do the pre-race preview and he tipped up PINEAU DE RE and I went in each way at 40s which paid for a few steak dinners for Mrs Stodge. This year, Mike Cattermole did the preview and he thinks INTENSE RAFFLES is the one and fancies THREEUNDERTHRUFIVE each way so I'm on the former at 14s and the latter each way at 50s.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 44,009

    DavidL said:

    On topic, I think the finishing sentence is the correct one - people expect the government to be able to stop it.

    We have lived through two extraordinary events in the past few years - Covid and Ukraine - and in both the government stepped in to mitigate the issues through furlough and the energy payments. I am fairly convinced that a lot of people now think the government is able to do this any time there are negative economic outcomes. This has not been helped by the very poor coverage of what all this spending meant long term - the media were poor at questioning it; and the opposition at the time wanted more of it.

    Agree completely. Our complete overreaction in respect of energy bills with the government running in terror of that idiot Martin Lewis in particular did very serious lasting harm to the country and our future wealth. The poor need protected with targeted benefits. The rest of us should have been left to get on with it.
    I disagree.

    There is far too much emphasis on 'protecting the poor' at the expense of the average person.

    Its often said that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes.

    Well they're wrong, there's another, the poor.

    No matter how much money is given to them, no matter how many freebies are donated to them, no matter how many opportunities are created for them the poor keep on increasing in numbers.

    Here are the next generation of 'the poor':

    More than half a million young people who are not working or studying have never had a job, an analysis has found.

    Most of those not in education, employment or training (Neet) are also not looking for a job and an increasing number report sickness as the main reason.


    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/young-people-work-training-benefits-fgdg998tk

    After them will follow most of the SEND kids currently bankrupting local councils.
    What an absolutely crass post.

    What is your remedy? A cull.

    I agree too many people are reliant on benefits, and that is a culture that needs to be changed, but until that culture is changed, morality suggests we can't let these people starve. That is one of my issues over the cruelty of "Austerity 2.0".
    You think the poor are starving ?

    Obesity is highest among the poor.

    Grotty takeaways abound in deprived areas.

    Talk to a school dinner lady about how much free food is given to the poor and you'll be surprised.

    The poor have more in common with Mr Creosote than they do with any 'hungry thirties' stereotype.
    Could you have added any more stereotypes to your post?

    Oh wait, they are not spending their Giros on bread for their children but White Lightening and fags. If they can't afford fresh fruit and vegetables for their children they should cancel Netflix.

    I seem to recall you were a big fan of a Prime Minister known for egregious freeloading. It looks like he overdid it on the Aldi value sliced bread.
    Unfortunately he was speaking reality even if you don't believe it.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 75,996
    edited April 4
    .

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    Exactly. The people who voted for him, largely, couldn't give a Tinker's cuss for the stock market.

    "Economic inequality has increased drastically across advanced industrial democracies and, with it, the range of economic experiences. These changes present a challenge for political economy which gauges the health of the economy with aggregate economic statistics like growth and jobs. Motivated by this challenge, we ask how new economic realities in advanced capitalism matters for how citizens evaluate the national economy. We argue that individuals seek out and apply information on those indicators of economic heath that affect their own lives while discounting those that do not. Applying our reasoning to the case of poverty and poverty risk, we assert that among the working poor, poverty rates provide a more meaningful signal of economic conditions than do conventional macroeconomic indicators. We show that poverty risk exerts a strong effect on economic evaluations. Individuals at high risk of poverty are less informed about standard macroeconomic indicators but better informed about national poverty rates. When evaluating macroeconomic performance, they are more likely to discount conventional economic indicators and base assessments on national poverty rates instead. Results indicate that political economy must depart from familiar but partial indicators and account for the layered economies structuring political behavior."

    https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2b29bd82-ee7f-49b2-b58b-dae5002a85ac/
    Their fathers worked in steel factories and car factories, they don't now on the whole and few hold stocks
    You can't turn the clock back.

    Even if more manufacturing jobs are created in the US as a result of the tariffs, they're going to be supplying primarily the domestic market because what they produce will be more expensive / worse quality than what's internationally available (otherwise they'd already be making it), and retaliatory tariffs will block US manufacture even more, even where they are marginally competitive - not to mention people, companies and governments making strategic risk / national security choices not to buy American.

    And while that's moderately good for those with the jobs, it's pretty crap for everyone forced to buy the stuff, who greatly outnumber them.

    Trump is basically bringing back British Leyland and expecting people to be grateful.
    It's likely to cost a lot of jobs some time before it brings any "back".
    Swingeing tariffs on components from Mexico and raw materials from Canada will see to that.

    A couple of US car manufacturers have already laid workers off, for example.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 13,844
    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?

    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    To answer your question really is a book; but very briefly: Unless you are a complete determinist (old fashioned Calvinists, some modern scientists and philosophers) then the universe is open to at least some divergent possibilities, and determinist naturalism does not exhaust reality.

    Human action (eg prayer) is one of the means by which a different fork in the future road is taken. Divine providential action is yet another, and ultimately divine action and will determines the outcome of all things (hence the well known problem of evil, which I shall not try to solve here). Thus prayer, which is a form of action, is one of multiplicity of means by which divine ends are achieved.

    By the way, Jesus's teaching on prayer is that it should be short and to the point. I wish that was adhered to more often by the long winded pious.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    edited April 4

    TOPPING said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?


    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    Prayer is about communication and self-reflection. It’s not about asking for things and ticking off a list.

    It’s often in prayer than the “still small voice of calm” speaks and helps you resolve your issues. It’s a vocalisation of your subconscious, of course, but prayer (or
    meditation) creates the space for it to be heard.
    So if prayer is self-reflection, then god presumably becomes irrelevant.
    No. Many people find it helpful to have an external focal point be that an icon or God Himself.

    Faith is just that: faith. What do you get out of aggressively trying to diminish what others want to believe?
    Please define further "external focal point". Must it have judgmental qualities (God, presumably), or be inert (icon, presumably).

    What do I get? I find the whole idea of religion and belief in some kind of icon god so extraordinary I can't help myself but try to understand peoples' thinking.

    tia
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 9,621
    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?


    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    Prayer is about communication and self-reflection. It’s not about asking for things and ticking off a list.

    It’s often in prayer than the “still small voice of calm” speaks and helps you resolve your issues. It’s a vocalisation of your subconscious, of course, but prayer (or
    meditation) creates the space for it to be heard.
    So if prayer is self-reflection, then god presumably becomes irrelevant.
    No. Many people find it helpful to have an external focal point be that an icon or God Himself.

    Faith is just that: faith. What do you get out of aggressively trying to diminish what
    others want to believe?
    Yes it is this aggressive left liberal secular atheism that will likely lead to a backlash in an election or 2, perhaps with uber conservative Catholic Rees Mogg becoming Tory leader
    That’s not happening
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    You seem to expect that people should be morally and legally responsible for their voluntarily assumed moral and legal responsibilities.
    Of all things.
  • boulayboulay Posts: 6,060
    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    I shall enjoy informing my friends later today that I have been dubbed a “left liberal”.

    In the culture wars you certainly are
    I was going to argue with you about this (as you are totally wrong) but then I saw your post about JRM and realised you are on one of your very funny dry humour rolls today so realise you are just taking the piss. Good stuff.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    vik said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    If his objective is to grow manufacturing jobs, then why is he imposing tariffs on raw materials, which are needed to build new factories ?

    The 50% tariffs on Lesotho, for example, have been imposed because Lesotho has a trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus exists because Lesotho exports a lot of diamonds to the US. How will restricting cheap diamonds from Lesotho help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?

    Trump complains a lot about Canada's trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus only exists because of Canada's oil exports to the US & if you exclude oil, then Canada has a trade deficit. How will restricting cheap oil from Canada help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?
    Well diamonds should be banned for a start. Not because of how they were mined, but because it's absolutely bonkers that people should desire for no good reason some mined substance just because there might not be a lot of it.

    God and expensive diamonds - both bonkers ideas.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    Exactly. The people who voted for him, largely, couldn't give a Tinker's cuss for the stock market.

    "Economic inequality has increased drastically across advanced industrial democracies and, with it, the range of economic experiences. These changes present a challenge for political economy which gauges the health of the economy with aggregate economic statistics like growth and jobs. Motivated by this challenge, we ask how new economic realities in advanced capitalism matters for how citizens evaluate the national economy. We argue that individuals seek out and apply information on those indicators of economic heath that affect their own lives while discounting those that do not. Applying our reasoning to the case of poverty and poverty risk, we assert that among the working poor, poverty rates provide a more meaningful signal of economic conditions than do conventional macroeconomic indicators. We show that poverty risk exerts a strong effect on economic evaluations. Individuals at high risk of poverty are less informed about standard macroeconomic indicators but better informed about national poverty rates. When evaluating macroeconomic performance, they are more likely to discount conventional economic indicators and base assessments on national poverty rates instead. Results indicate that political economy must depart from familiar but partial indicators and account for the layered economies structuring political behavior."

    https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2b29bd82-ee7f-49b2-b58b-dae5002a85ac/
    Their fathers worked in steel factories and car factories, they don't now on the whole and few hold stocks
    You can't turn the clock back.

    Even if more manufacturing jobs are created in the US as a result of the tariffs, they're going to be supplying primarily the domestic market because what they produce will be more expensive / worse quality than what's internationally available (otherwise they'd already be making it), and retaliatory tariffs will block US manufacture even more, even where they are marginally competitive - not to mention people, companies and governments making strategic risk / national security choices not to buy American.

    And while that's moderately good for those with the jobs, it's pretty crap for everyone forced to buy the stuff, who greatly outnumber them.

    Trump is basically bringing back British Leyland and expecting people to be grateful.
    As long as they've got that mustard-ish colour that Allegras used to be, I'm in.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 53,866
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    Exactly. The people who voted for him, largely, couldn't give a Tinker's cuss for the stock market.

    "Economic inequality has increased drastically across advanced industrial democracies and, with it, the range of economic experiences. These changes present a challenge for political economy which gauges the health of the economy with aggregate economic statistics like growth and jobs. Motivated by this challenge, we ask how new economic realities in advanced capitalism matters for how citizens evaluate the national economy. We argue that individuals seek out and apply information on those indicators of economic heath that affect their own lives while discounting those that do not. Applying our reasoning to the case of poverty and poverty risk, we assert that among the working poor, poverty rates provide a more meaningful signal of economic conditions than do conventional macroeconomic indicators. We show that poverty risk exerts a strong effect on economic evaluations. Individuals at high risk of poverty are less informed about standard macroeconomic indicators but better informed about national poverty rates. When evaluating macroeconomic performance, they are more likely to discount conventional economic indicators and base assessments on national poverty rates instead. Results indicate that political economy must depart from familiar but partial indicators and account for the layered economies structuring political behavior."

    https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2b29bd82-ee7f-49b2-b58b-dae5002a85ac/
    Their fathers worked in steel factories and car factories, they don't now on the whole and few hold stocks
    You can't turn the clock back.

    Even if more manufacturing jobs are created in the US as a result of the tariffs, they're going to be supplying primarily the domestic market because what they produce will be more expensive / worse quality than what's internationally available (otherwise they'd already be making it), and retaliatory tariffs will block US manufacture even more, even where they are marginally competitive - not to mention people, companies and governments making strategic risk / national security choices not to buy American.

    And while that's moderately good for those with the jobs, it's pretty crap for everyone forced to buy the stuff, who greatly outnumber them.

    Trump is basically bringing back British Leyland and expecting people to be grateful.
    Trump voters live in the Midwest and South, primarily want more US factories supplying the US market and will only buy American if they can.

    Few of them care about the rest of the world
    When everything doubles in the Walmart, they will riot.
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 9,621
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?


    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    Prayer is about communication and self-reflection. It’s not about asking for things and ticking off a list.

    It’s often in prayer than the “still small voice of calm” speaks and helps you resolve your issues. It’s a vocalisation of your subconscious, of course, but prayer (or
    meditation) creates the space for it to be heard.
    So if prayer is self-reflection, then god presumably becomes irrelevant.
    No. Many people find it helpful to have an external focal point be that an icon or God Himself.

    Faith is just that: faith. What do you get out of aggressively trying to diminish what others want to believe?
    Please define further "external focal point". Must it have judgmental qualities (God, presumably), or be inert (icon, presumably
    ).

    What do I get? I find the whole idea of religion and belief in some kind of icon god so extraordinary I can't help myself by trying to understand peoples' thinking.

    tia
    It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s a way of framing thought as a dialogue.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    algarkirk said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?

    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    To answer your question really is a book; but very briefly: Unless you are a complete determinist (old fashioned Calvinists, some modern scientists and philosophers) then the universe is open to at least some divergent possibilities, and determinist naturalism does not exhaust reality.

    Human action (eg prayer) is one of the means by which a different fork in the future road is taken. Divine providential action is yet another, and ultimately divine action and will determines the outcome of all things (hence the well known problem of evil, which I shall not try to solve here). Thus prayer, which is a form of action, is one of multiplicity of means by which divine ends are achieved.

    By the way, Jesus's teaching on prayer is that it should be short and to the point. I wish that was adhered to more often by the long winded pious.
    All well and good, just as long as you accept that "divine providential action" is simply a creation of man's imagination. Then we are aligned.

    And for someone who wants something to be short and to the point you don't half use a lot of long, fancy words.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 18,195

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    Exactly. The people who voted for him, largely, couldn't give a Tinker's cuss for the stock market.

    "Economic inequality has increased drastically across advanced industrial democracies and, with it, the range of economic experiences. These changes present a challenge for political economy which gauges the health of the economy with aggregate economic statistics like growth and jobs. Motivated by this challenge, we ask how new economic realities in advanced capitalism matters for how citizens evaluate the national economy. We argue that individuals seek out and apply information on those indicators of economic heath that affect their own lives while discounting those that do not. Applying our reasoning to the case of poverty and poverty risk, we assert that among the working poor, poverty rates provide a more meaningful signal of economic conditions than do conventional macroeconomic indicators. We show that poverty risk exerts a strong effect on economic evaluations. Individuals at high risk of poverty are less informed about standard macroeconomic indicators but better informed about national poverty rates. When evaluating macroeconomic performance, they are more likely to discount conventional economic indicators and base assessments on national poverty rates instead. Results indicate that political economy must depart from familiar but partial indicators and account for the layered economies structuring political behavior."

    https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2b29bd82-ee7f-49b2-b58b-dae5002a85ac/
    Their fathers worked in steel factories and car factories, they don't now on the whole and few hold stocks
    You can't turn the clock back.

    Even if more manufacturing jobs are created in the US as a result of the tariffs, they're going to be supplying primarily the domestic market because what they produce will be more expensive / worse quality than what's internationally available (otherwise they'd already be making it), and retaliatory tariffs will block US manufacture even more, even where they are marginally competitive - not to mention people, companies and governments making strategic risk / national security choices not to buy American.

    And while that's moderately good for those with the jobs, it's pretty crap for everyone forced to buy the stuff, who greatly outnumber them.

    Trump is basically bringing back British Leyland and expecting people to be grateful.
    Trump voters live in the Midwest and South, primarily want more US factories supplying the US market and will only buy American if they can.

    Few of them care about the rest of the world
    When everything doubles in the Walmart, they will riot.
    Question is- what does the Administration do then? Broadly, there are two approaches. One is to reverse ferret (having claimed to have got whatever the hell they wanted). The other is to lock up the rioters, who are obviously unpatriotic wreckers in the pay of George Soros... (continued at MAGAPatriot94 on TwiX.)

    One of them is sensible, the other is going to be bloomng tempting.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 14,394
    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 53,866

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    Exactly. The people who voted for him, largely, couldn't give a Tinker's cuss for the stock market.

    "Economic inequality has increased drastically across advanced industrial democracies and, with it, the range of economic experiences. These changes present a challenge for political economy which gauges the health of the economy with aggregate economic statistics like growth and jobs. Motivated by this challenge, we ask how new economic realities in advanced capitalism matters for how citizens evaluate the national economy. We argue that individuals seek out and apply information on those indicators of economic heath that affect their own lives while discounting those that do not. Applying our reasoning to the case of poverty and poverty risk, we assert that among the working poor, poverty rates provide a more meaningful signal of economic conditions than do conventional macroeconomic indicators. We show that poverty risk exerts a strong effect on economic evaluations. Individuals at high risk of poverty are less informed about standard macroeconomic indicators but better informed about national poverty rates. When evaluating macroeconomic performance, they are more likely to discount conventional economic indicators and base assessments on national poverty rates instead. Results indicate that political economy must depart from familiar but partial indicators and account for the layered economies structuring political behavior."

    https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2b29bd82-ee7f-49b2-b58b-dae5002a85ac/
    Their fathers worked in steel factories and car factories, they don't now on the whole and few hold stocks
    You can't turn the clock back.

    Even if more manufacturing jobs are created in the US as a result of the tariffs, they're going to be supplying primarily the domestic market because what they produce will be more expensive / worse quality than what's internationally available (otherwise they'd already be making it), and retaliatory tariffs will block US manufacture even more, even where they are marginally competitive - not to mention people, companies and governments making strategic risk / national security choices not to buy American.

    And while that's moderately good for those with the jobs, it's pretty crap for everyone forced to buy the stuff, who greatly outnumber them.

    Trump is basically bringing back British Leyland and expecting people to be grateful.
    Trump voters live in the Midwest and South, primarily want more US factories supplying the US market and will only buy American if they can.

    Few of them care about the rest of the world
    When everything doubles in the Walmart, they will riot.
    Question is- what does the Administration do then? Broadly, there are two approaches. One is to reverse ferret (having claimed to have got whatever the hell they wanted). The other is to lock up the rioters, who are obviously unpatriotic wreckers in the pay of George Soros... (continued at MAGAPatriot94 on TwiX.)

    One of them is sensible, the other is going to be bloomng tempting.
    More metaphorical rioting than actual rock throwing, I think.

    But yes. Obviously the insane response is the one that will be picked.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 75,996

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    I think "Cromwell's England" is potentially very relevant. Over the last week or two I've been dipping in the Trumpvangelical / Nat Con pond, and there is a significant elevation of political aims to be alongside religious doctrine - a serious category error that makes persuasion very difficult, since reason is often not applicable.

    An example is "woke" and "deep state" being characterised as an alternative religion that must be destroyed because it is "evil", including in prayers. There is similar stuff around abortion. That type of attitude makes the collateral damage being done by Musk's random cuts seem acceptable.

    It's one comparison I have been reflecting on. Another is Trump as one of those 13 year old Medieval Kings who just randomly demand things because he can and it is about their power not the consequences, that devastate ordinary people.

    That happens less afaics amongst the Catholic-Right or Jewish wings of Trump's support coalition.
    "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong, faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late."

    The separation of church and state was a deliberate act, based on historical examples.
    Yes - but there was also a parallel tradition trying to combine church and state. That's what a lot of Trump-supporters want back. See also the Oath of Allegiance, or "In God we Trust" on the currency.

    That latter replaced "E Pluribus Unum" in the 1950s.
    The separation of church and state was only ever intended to prevent any one Christian sect from achieving (or attempting) dominance over others on a national scale. Hardly anyone doubted that the US was, and should be, a Christian country, or that for practical purposes, denominations could establish areas of their own primacy.

    But that was then. Most of the West moved on from that thinking; the US hasn't.
    Some were very clear indeed on the matter:

    Jefferson:
    “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should `make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”

  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?


    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    Prayer is about communication and self-reflection. It’s not about asking for things and ticking off a list.

    It’s often in prayer than the “still small voice of calm” speaks and helps you resolve your issues. It’s a vocalisation of your subconscious, of course, but prayer (or
    meditation) creates the space for it to be heard.
    So if prayer is self-reflection, then god presumably becomes irrelevant.
    No. Many people find it helpful to have an external focal point be that an icon or God Himself.

    Faith is just that: faith. What do you get out of aggressively trying to diminish what others want to believe?
    Please define further "external focal point". Must it have judgmental qualities (God, presumably), or be inert (icon, presumably
    ).

    What do I get? I find the whole idea of religion and belief in some kind of icon god so extraordinary I can't help myself by trying to understand peoples' thinking.

    tia
    It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s a way of framing thought as a dialogue.
    You said icon. You are saying that people are having a dialogue with a piece of wood.

    That is how you see faith?
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 13,844
    TOPPING said:

    algarkirk said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?

    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    To answer your question really is a book; but very briefly: Unless you are a complete determinist (old fashioned Calvinists, some modern scientists and philosophers) then the universe is open to at least some divergent possibilities, and determinist naturalism does not exhaust reality.

    Human action (eg prayer) is one of the means by which a different fork in the future road is taken. Divine providential action is yet another, and ultimately divine action and will determines the outcome of all things (hence the well known problem of evil, which I shall not try to solve here). Thus prayer, which is a form of action, is one of multiplicity of means by which divine ends are achieved.

    By the way, Jesus's teaching on prayer is that it should be short and to the point. I wish that was adhered to more often by the long winded pious.
    All well and good, just as long as you accept that "divine providential action" is simply a creation of man's imagination. Then we are aligned.

    And for someone who wants something to be short and to the point you don't half use a lot of long, fancy words.
    Mostly agree. Whether god exists or not is not a knowable item. So whether 'divine providential action' is real is also not a knowable item. The list of not knowable items is not short. Like everyone on the planet I am agnostic.

    As to 'short and to the point', that was a few words in place of a book. I had to use words exactly, because, this being PB, if I left the tiniest room for intellectual objection or misunderstanding, someone would have let me know.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 64,935
    Terrible result for Labour and Plaid in Neath Port Talbot last night.

    Congratulations to the Lib dems and labour in 4th place

    Next year Senedd election may well see Labour lose their grip on power in Wales

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1907937030191067365?t=AkScdWC2KNuNmxOI5IZXsg&s=19
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 24,057
    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 53,866
    TOPPING said:

    vik said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    If his objective is to grow manufacturing jobs, then why is he imposing tariffs on raw materials, which are needed to build new factories ?

    The 50% tariffs on Lesotho, for example, have been imposed because Lesotho has a trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus exists because Lesotho exports a lot of diamonds to the US. How will restricting cheap diamonds from Lesotho help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?

    Trump complains a lot about Canada's trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus only exists because of Canada's oil exports to the US & if you exclude oil, then Canada has a trade deficit. How will restricting cheap oil from Canada help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?
    Well diamonds should be banned for a start. Not because of how they were mined, but because it's absolutely bonkers that people should desire for no good reason some mined substance just because there might not be a lot of it.

    God and expensive diamonds - both bonkers ideas.
    Manufactured diamonds are getting better and falling in price all the time.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 37,657
    stodge said:

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    Exactly thus

    MAGA voters willing to pay $10 for a hat, will not pay $20 for the same hat made in Murica, whatever Trumpski says
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 37,657
    @peterfrankopan

    Some thoughts on the tariff disaster:

    1. Tech bros took pride of place at Trump's inauguration two months ago
    2. They showed up in the expectation that the new administration would help their companies soar even higher

    3. They figured that Trump would push Europe to loosen regulation - and put pressure on China.
    4. To show fealty, some dropped DEI policies (Meta), others interfered with editorial policy (WaPo) and others prepared to serve (DOGE)

    5. That has turned out to be one of the worst bets in history. The values of their companies went down by c.$1tr yesterday in one day. Apple alone lost more than $300bn.
    6. Finally, Trump has done the impossible: to join Liz Truss in the Economic Mismanagement Hall of Shame

    https://x.com/peterfrankopan/status/1908082410278866981
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 24,057
    Scott_xP said:

    stodge said:

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    Exactly thus

    MAGA voters willing to pay $10 for a hat, will not pay $20 for the same hat made in Murica, whatever Trumpski says
    They can't produce them for $20, at least not without employing illegal immigrants with no recourse to unions or the law.
  • oniscoidoniscoid Posts: 18
    algarkirk said:

    TOPPING said:

    algarkirk said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?

    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    To answer your question really is a book; but very briefly: Unless you are a complete determinist (old fashioned Calvinists, some modern scientists and philosophers) then the universe is open to at least some divergent possibilities, and determinist naturalism does not exhaust reality.

    Human action (eg prayer) is one of the means by which a different fork in the future road is taken. Divine providential action is yet another, and ultimately divine action and will determines the outcome of all things (hence the well known problem of evil, which I shall not try to solve here). Thus prayer, which is a form of action, is one of multiplicity of means by which divine ends are achieved.

    By the way, Jesus's teaching on prayer is that it should be short and to the point. I wish that was adhered to more often by the long winded pious.
    All well and good, just as long as you accept that "divine providential action" is simply a creation of man's imagination. Then we are aligned.

    And for someone who wants something to be short and to the point you don't half use a lot of long, fancy words.
    Mostly agree. Whether god exists or not is not a knowable item. So whether 'divine providential action' is real is also not a knowable item. The list of not knowable items is not short. Like everyone on the planet I am agnostic.

    As to 'short and to the point', that was a few words in place of a book. I had to use words exactly, because, this being PB, if I left the tiniest room for intellectual objection or misunderstanding, someone would have let me know.
    irresistible - do you have any proof that "Whether god exists or not is not a knowable item."? or is that a belief?
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 23,969

    Terrible result for Labour and Plaid in Neath Port Talbot last night.

    Congratulations to the Lib dems and labour in 4th place

    Next year Senedd election may well see Labour lose their grip on power in Wales

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1907937030191067365?t=AkScdWC2KNuNmxOI5IZXsg&s=19

    I have to say of all the places to go Lib, Neath and Port Talbot are not one of them. They're Proper Labour, and if Lab lose them, they'll lose everywhere.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    Let's of course all not forget that imports/exports are currently 10-15% of the US economy.

    vs UK (30-35%), Germany (45%), China (17-20%).
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 34,417
    Good morning one and all. And a fine bright morning it is here, although I gather the wind is still E/ENE, which can be, if brisk, a 'lazy wind' i.e. goes right through you!

    I agree with the correspondents who say that Trump is playing to his base; seems good, and perhaps in the short term it is, but in the long term it won't be.

  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 18,195
    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    It's fantastic that people are praying. What did Justin Welby pray for, I wonder, as he was finding the allegations of child sexual abuse in the church he lead to be "overwhelming".
    Guidance I imagine but Lambeth of course did report the Smyth allegations to police in 2013, even if they could have been followed up it was the police who did not investigate them further
    Do you think the guys from my old school were praying for Smyth to carry on abusing them or praying for him to stop whilst at those religious camps?

    Were some praying for “stop”and others “carry on”? If so why did God listen to the “carry on” chaps?


    And if god has left it for man to act with free will then what is the point in prayer?
    Prayer is about communication and self-reflection. It’s not about asking for things and ticking off a list.

    It’s often in prayer than the “still small voice of calm” speaks and helps you resolve your issues. It’s a vocalisation of your subconscious, of course, but prayer (or
    meditation) creates the space for it to be heard.
    So if prayer is self-reflection, then god presumably becomes irrelevant.
    No. Many people find it helpful to have an external focal point be that an icon or God Himself.

    Faith is just that: faith. What do you get out of aggressively trying to diminish what others want to believe?
    Please define further "external focal point". Must it have judgmental qualities (God, presumably), or be inert (icon, presumably).

    What do I get? I find the whole idea of religion and belief in some kind of icon god so extraordinary I can't help myself but try to understand peoples' thinking.

    tia
    Two different questions- "is it true?" and "is it helpful?" By the second, I'm asking if religious practice generally makes people better versions of themselves. Not necessarily good people, but better than they would be otherwise.

    Yes, it's really easy to point to terrible things that people have done in the name of religion. But that could be because they were terrible people, who would have easily found another excuse to act terribly. And it's possible that the framework of religion put some (insufficient) constraints on their actions.

    Can something be helpful without being true? It's not where we are as a society, and C S Lewis wouldn't have approved, but perhaps. Can you get the helpful without worrying about the questionable truth? Sunday Assembly (for example) is still a thing, but the niche of society it works for doesn't seem to be huge.
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275
    TOPPING said:

    Let's of course all not forget that imports/exports are currently 10-15% of the US economy.

    vs UK (30-35%), Germany (45%), China (17-20%).

    Indeed. I vehemently oppose the policy but people suggesting its going to lead to rioting etc are seriously overegging the pudding. Its a tax rise, a bad tax rise, but tax rises happen from time to time.

    The net, overall impact on inflation in the USA is going to be comparable to whenever the government in the UK have raised VAT.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 64,935
    Scott_xP said:

    @peterfrankopan

    Some thoughts on the tariff disaster:

    1. Tech bros took pride of place at Trump's inauguration two months ago
    2. They showed up in the expectation that the new administration would help their companies soar even higher

    3. They figured that Trump would push Europe to loosen regulation - and put pressure on China.
    4. To show fealty, some dropped DEI policies (Meta), others interfered with editorial policy (WaPo) and others prepared to serve (DOGE)

    5. That has turned out to be one of the worst bets in history. The values of their companies went down by c.$1tr yesterday in one day. Apple alone lost more than $300bn.
    6. Finally, Trump has done the impossible: to join Liz Truss in the Economic Mismanagement Hall of Shame

    https://x.com/peterfrankopan/status/1908082410278866981

    Truss was only 6 weeks

    Trump is 4 more years and then who knows how much longer beyond

  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 54,525
    https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1908086617698394571

    Westminster Voting Intention:

    RFM: 28% (+2)
    LAB: 22% (-1)
    CON: 20% (-2)
    LDM: 13% (+1)
    GRN: 11% (=)
    SNP: 3% (=)

    Via @FindoutnowUK, 2 Apr.
    Changes w/ 26 Mar.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 53,866

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    You can get a T-Shirt (supposedly, cloth spun in the UK) for £25. For that, you'd be getting a pack of 5 on Amazon....
  • ManOfGwentManOfGwent Posts: 150
    edited April 4

    Terrible result for Labour and Plaid in Neath Port Talbot last night.

    Congratulations to the Lib dems and labour in 4th place

    Next year Senedd election may well see Labour lose their grip on power in Wales

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1907937030191067365?t=AkScdWC2KNuNmxOI5IZXsg&s=19

    For someone, anyone, to be in government in the assembly other than Labour and the nationalists will be a great day. A good test of devolution too, if everyone else is equally crap we can pack the whole thing in and get rid of it.
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275

    Scott_xP said:

    @peterfrankopan

    Some thoughts on the tariff disaster:

    1. Tech bros took pride of place at Trump's inauguration two months ago
    2. They showed up in the expectation that the new administration would help their companies soar even higher

    3. They figured that Trump would push Europe to loosen regulation - and put pressure on China.
    4. To show fealty, some dropped DEI policies (Meta), others interfered with editorial policy (WaPo) and others prepared to serve (DOGE)

    5. That has turned out to be one of the worst bets in history. The values of their companies went down by c.$1tr yesterday in one day. Apple alone lost more than $300bn.
    6. Finally, Trump has done the impossible: to join Liz Truss in the Economic Mismanagement Hall of Shame

    https://x.com/peterfrankopan/status/1908082410278866981

    Truss was only 6 weeks

    Trump is 4 more years and then who knows how much longer beyond

    1387 days to go.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 14,394
    Globalisation has social and cultural consequences as much if not more than economic.

    When economies are running hard to stand still and the mood music is downbeat, people look for someone to blame - they always have.

    It's happened many times before - people will always go to where the money is whether it's from the fields to the factories or to look for a rich husband in the west as we saw with the flight of young single women from East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    Indigenous communities come to resent the "influx" of new arrivals and indeed established communities resent the arrival of those from the same point of origin (the recent problems in Bangla Town being one example). Whether you want to attribute a racist undercurrent is up to you but there's an old adage "people like people like themselves" and people naturally gravitate toward and create communities of those with the same language, clothes, beliefs, ways, morals, whatever...

    The problem is economic globalisation - the global single market - runs far ahead of cultural and social globalisation so you can have a European Single Currency but we're still a long way from a European Federation. That's where the problem starts - you might argue were it still a Common Market rather than a European Union, we'd be happy to be part of it. Trading goods and services on a level playing field is one thing - we've always done it - and there's no problem with fair competition but globalisation combined with technological progress changed all that. To be fair, it has brought a level of prosperity to people who basically had nothing but it's never been a zero sum game.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 24,057

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
  • CJohnCJohn Posts: 78
    viewcode said:

    Terrible result for Labour and Plaid in Neath Port Talbot last night.

    Congratulations to the Lib dems and labour in 4th place

    Next year Senedd election may well see Labour lose their grip on power in Wales

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1907937030191067365?t=AkScdWC2KNuNmxOI5IZXsg&s=19

    I have to say of all the places to go Lib, Neath and Port Talbot are not one of them. They're Proper Labour, and if Lab lose them, they'll lose everywhere.
    That part of Neath and Port Talbot was added to the Brecon parliamentary seat, in boundary changes before the 2024 GE.

    The LDs took Brecon, so now have an incentive to push into that particular part of Neath and Port Talbot.

    Wouldn't draw general conclusions.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 75,996
    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 64,935
    edited April 4
    viewcode said:

    Terrible result for Labour and Plaid in Neath Port Talbot last night.

    Congratulations to the Lib dems and labour in 4th place

    Next year Senedd election may well see Labour lose their grip on power in Wales

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1907937030191067365?t=AkScdWC2KNuNmxOI5IZXsg&s=19

    I have to say of all the places to go Lib, Neath and Port Talbot are not one of them. They're Proper Labour, and if Lab lose them, they'll lose everywhere.
    It is a shocking result in Labour's heartlands and locals in Wales since the election have been terrible for the party

    Also what does this say for Reform taking Frodsham on the 1st May

    Indeed 'find out now' this morning has Reform 6 points ahead of Labour and no signs yet that they are suffering because of Farage's association with Trump

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1908086617698394571?t=63WBXXnHZlktcJvpOrPEDw&s=19
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 23,969

    https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1908086617698394571

    Westminster Voting Intention:

    RFM: 28% (+2)
    LAB: 22% (-1)
    CON: 20% (-2)
    LDM: 13% (+1)
    GRN: 11% (=)
    SNP: 3% (=)

    Via @FindoutnowUK, 2 Apr.
    Changes w/ 26 Mar.

    Go on Kemi you can do it! Less than 20%! I have faith in you!
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 9,983
    Scott_xP said:

    @peterfrankopan

    Some thoughts on the tariff disaster:

    1. Tech bros took pride of place at Trump's inauguration two months ago
    2. They showed up in the expectation that the new administration would help their companies soar even higher

    3. They figured that Trump would push Europe to loosen regulation - and put pressure on China.
    4. To show fealty, some dropped DEI policies (Meta), others interfered with editorial policy (WaPo) and others prepared to serve (DOGE)

    5. That has turned out to be one of the worst bets in history. The values of their companies went down by c.$1tr yesterday in one day. Apple alone lost more than $300bn.
    6. Finally, Trump has done the impossible: to join Liz Truss in the Economic Mismanagement Hall of Shame

    https://x.com/peterfrankopan/status/1908082410278866981

    It's similar to the last few episodes of Succession, with the new President turning out to be much crazier than they expected.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    The biggest shock for HYUFD is to have been told today, by Algakirk, that he is an agnostic.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 24,057

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
    Definitely the case here, don't know about the hollowed out post industrial communities in the US. They have seen a lot of people leave.
  • RogerRoger Posts: 20,304
    edited April 4
    Scott_xP said:

    TOPPING said:

    As for the Trumpaclysm there is nevertheless something amusing about people bemoaning the fall in stock prices when "middle America" won't even have a 401k let alone any direct investments in the market. It echoes the "whose GDP" issue in the UK. And when I say "middle America" I mean those people who voted for Trump. This might be what they wanted.

    Two major US manufacturers announced layoffs directly as a result of the announcement.

    I guess that is not what they voted for...
    Well they've always got Bamfords performing tractors to look forward to.....

    (shouldn't that be a stars and stripes ed?)

    https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=jcb+tractor+show#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:a492afb0,vid:8cLt5m0cbws,st:0
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    edited April 4

    viewcode said:

    Terrible result for Labour and Plaid in Neath Port Talbot last night.

    Congratulations to the Lib dems and labour in 4th place

    Next year Senedd election may well see Labour lose their grip on power in Wales

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1907937030191067365?t=AkScdWC2KNuNmxOI5IZXsg&s=19

    I have to say of all the places to go Lib, Neath and Port Talbot are not one of them. They're Proper Labour, and if Lab lose them, they'll lose everywhere.
    It is a shocking result in Labour's heartlands and locals in Wales since the election have been terrible for the party

    Also what does this say for Reform taking Frodsham on the 1st May

    Indeed 'find out now' this morning has Reform 6 points ahead of Labour and no signs yet that they are suffering because of Farage's association with Trump

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1908086617698394571?t=63WBXXnHZlktcJvpOrPEDw&s=19
    Frodsham is a fantastic place name. Like Snoddington. Edit: and Snodland for that matter.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 79,096
    viewcode said:

    https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1908086617698394571

    Westminster Voting Intention:

    RFM: 28% (+2)
    LAB: 22% (-1)
    CON: 20% (-2)
    LDM: 13% (+1)
    GRN: 11% (=)
    SNP: 3% (=)

    Via @FindoutnowUK, 2 Apr.
    Changes w/ 26 Mar.

    Go on Kemi you can do it! Less than 20%! I have faith in you!
    So come 2029 we'll be heading into the madhouse just as the US is leaving it.
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275
    TOPPING said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    The biggest shock for HYUFD is to have been told today, by Algakirk, that he is an agnostic.
    Algarkirk is operating from the logical basis that its impossible to know, thus everyone is agnostic.

    But he's not counting for the fact that HYUFD is, like his God, omnipotent. He knows everything. Even the stuff he's wrong on, he knows that he is right, even if he's not.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 126,594
    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    I never said they were the opinion of the majority, certainly not in the UK however there is an arrogance about secular liberals in the UK which assumes theirs are the only views now held on cultural issues in this nation and which dismiss religion as an anachronism held by the backward abroad but not here. Same as they also look down their noses at Brexit voters as ignorant oiks often
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647

    TOPPING said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    The biggest shock for HYUFD is to have been told today, by Algakirk, that he is an agnostic.
    Algarkirk is operating from the logical basis that its impossible to know, thus everyone is agnostic.

    But he's not counting for the fact that HYUFD is, like his God, omnipotent. He knows everything. Even the stuff he's wrong on, he knows that he is right, even if he's not.
    Almost. All that plus he (HYUFD) knows everything thing about YOU. Argument is futile.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 14,719
    On thread - electorates can be pretty forgiving when a shock is clearly external (see: covid). Although once the cause of a shock needs only a tiny amount of thinking to understand (e.g. inflation following lockdown) sympathy tends to evaporate. We're very much still in the first stage, and I think we'll stay there for some time - not least because we have a comic book bogeyman responsible who is constantly reminding the world that he is the comic book bogeyman responsible.




  • CookieCookie Posts: 14,719
    edited April 4
    Off thread - I've just been to my youngest's Easter assembly. I will favour you all with a few thoughts:

    Again, a religious theme for Easter. I am mildly uncomfortable with this: I would imagine the large proportion of the school with a non-Christian heritage (I've mentioned before: from about 2% English-as-a-foreign-language 5 or 6 years ago, we are now at about 40%, with the bulk being Asian - along with of course a lot of Asians born here who speak English perfectly well but do not have a Christian heritage) are also rather uncomfortable with it. It's not like the Christmas story - which is part of our culture almost aside from the religious element - it's the actual stating-that-Jesus-came-back-to-life bit. Feels a bit uncomfortable getting Muslims and Hindus doing that. Also, it's rather harder to deliver the Easter story than the Christmas story in a primary school setting: a birth in difficult circumstances is believable and relatable; a man getting tortured to death is not relatable and a man coming back from the dead is not believable.
    Anyway, it was - because this is how primary school assemblies go - a retelling of the Christian Easter story, from the point of view of the trees which provided the wood for the manger, a fishing boat, and the cross, together with some twee and unnecessarily drawn out songs and one surprisingly jaunty and enjoyable one. Of its sort, it was actually quite good, though unfortunately the child who delivered the moral at the end delivered it so quietly that it was lost (possibly that we can all overcome disappointments and succeed in our dreams despite setbacks?). Happy to report my rather unfocused daughter delivered her couple of lines as Mary quite capably, before, unfortunately, going to sit behind the fat girl* behind whom she was lost from sight thereafter. Though enjoyably, for a primary school performance, the star of the show was tree #2, who with a few words and actions and a confident manner managed to be the centre of attention and managed somehow to knowingly catch the eye of everyone in the audience.

    So: uncomfortably religious, not really primary-school=appropriate, trite, some tedious songs with too many choruses - and yet from the efforts of kids and staff, actually rather charming. Realised with a jolt coming out that there's only a couple of these left, and the long kids-at-primary-school stage of my life, which has lasted almost a quarter of a lifetime, is - well the end of it is almost in sight. Feeling a little wistful about that.

    *the fat girl has all the hallmarks of one in my day who would have been socially shunned. I'm happy to report that this is not the case and she is as included in whatever it is 10 year old girls do as the rest of them and that they judge her purely by her personality. Also happy to report that she is surprisingly brilliant on stage. I hope this keeps up for her at secondary school.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 126,594
    edited April 4

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
    Which is not going to happen unless we return to one earner families with the other partner staying home with the children as was more often the case last century, even if we built masses of new homes and slashed immigration the average home would still cost what a 2 earner couple were willing to pay for it not a 1 earner
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 34,159
    Warwickshire are playing champions Surrey. Starts in about 5 mins.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJyji8WGlTM
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 75,996

    TOPPING said:

    vik said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    If his objective is to grow manufacturing jobs, then why is he imposing tariffs on raw materials, which are needed to build new factories ?

    The 50% tariffs on Lesotho, for example, have been imposed because Lesotho has a trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus exists because Lesotho exports a lot of diamonds to the US. How will restricting cheap diamonds from Lesotho help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?

    Trump complains a lot about Canada's trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus only exists because of Canada's oil exports to the US & if you exclude oil, then Canada has a trade deficit. How will restricting cheap oil from Canada help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?
    Well diamonds should be banned for a start. Not because of how they were mined, but because it's absolutely bonkers that people should desire for no good reason some mined substance just because there might not be a lot of it.

    God and expensive diamonds - both bonkers ideas.
    Manufactured diamonds are getting better and falling in price all the time.
    Epitaxial diamond is utilised in some of the military lasers now being deployed.
    Are we to ban those too ?
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 38,370

    viewcode said:

    Terrible result for Labour and Plaid in Neath Port Talbot last night.

    Congratulations to the Lib dems and labour in 4th place

    Next year Senedd election may well see Labour lose their grip on power in Wales

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1907937030191067365?t=AkScdWC2KNuNmxOI5IZXsg&s=19

    I have to say of all the places to go Lib, Neath and Port Talbot are not one of them. They're Proper Labour, and if Lab lose them, they'll lose everywhere.
    It is a shocking result in Labour's heartlands and locals in Wales since the election have been terrible for the party

    Also what does this say for Reform taking Frodsham on the 1st May

    Indeed 'find out now' this morning has Reform 6 points ahead of Labour and no signs yet that they are suffering because of Farage's association with Trump

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1908086617698394571?t=63WBXXnHZlktcJvpOrPEDw&s=19
    Techne has Lab 24%, Reform 24%, Con 23%.

    Electoral Calculus has a MRP for the local elections, but I’ve lost the details.

    IIRC it was Con 26%, Reform 25%, Labour 19%, and Lib Dem 18%.

    Reform were projected to win Derbyshire, Doncaster, and Durham outright.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 24,057
    HYUFD said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    I never said they were the opinion of the majority, certainly not in the UK however there is an arrogance about secular liberals in the UK which assumes theirs are the only views now held on cultural issues in this nation and which dismiss religion as an anachronism held by the backward abroad but not here. Same as they also look down their noses at Brexit voters as ignorant oiks often
    I accept that a lot of the Brexit voters are actually ignorant poshos, not ignorant oiks.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    Eabhal said:

    Scott_xP said:

    @peterfrankopan

    Some thoughts on the tariff disaster:

    1. Tech bros took pride of place at Trump's inauguration two months ago
    2. They showed up in the expectation that the new administration would help their companies soar even higher

    3. They figured that Trump would push Europe to loosen regulation - and put pressure on China.
    4. To show fealty, some dropped DEI policies (Meta), others interfered with editorial policy (WaPo) and others prepared to serve (DOGE)

    5. That has turned out to be one of the worst bets in history. The values of their companies went down by c.$1tr yesterday in one day. Apple alone lost more than $300bn.
    6. Finally, Trump has done the impossible: to join Liz Truss in the Economic Mismanagement Hall of Shame

    https://x.com/peterfrankopan/status/1908082410278866981

    It's similar to the last few episodes of Succession, with the new President turning out to be much crazier than they expected.
    So we're rooting for the tech bros now, are we. They aren't idiots and of course turned up to the inauguration. But Trump had explicitly (in that much-viewed Dave Chapelle clip for example) said that he wanted to blow apart the cosy world of the tech bros and tax avoiders.
  • oniscoidoniscoid Posts: 18
    TOPPING said:

    vik said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    If his objective is to grow manufacturing jobs, then why is he imposing tariffs on raw materials, which are needed to build new factories ?

    The 50% tariffs on Lesotho, for example, have been imposed because Lesotho has a trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus exists because Lesotho exports a lot of diamonds to the US. How will restricting cheap diamonds from Lesotho help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?

    Trump complains a lot about Canada's trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus only exists because of Canada's oil exports to the US & if you exclude oil, then Canada has a trade deficit. How will restricting cheap oil from Canada help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?
    Well diamonds should be banned for a start. Not because of how they were mined, but because it's absolutely bonkers that people should desire for no good reason some mined substance just because there might not be a lot of it.

    God and expensive diamonds - both bonkers ideas.
    i think the history of the diamond market in the mid-C20th shows that it is partly an artificial one, with supply of gem quality stones strictly controlled by mining companies such as de Beers
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 126,594

    https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1908086617698394571

    Westminster Voting Intention:

    RFM: 28% (+2)
    LAB: 22% (-1)
    CON: 20% (-2)
    LDM: 13% (+1)
    GRN: 11% (=)
    SNP: 3% (=)

    Via @FindoutnowUK, 2 Apr.
    Changes w/ 26 Mar.

    Big difference between FON and MiC, the latter had the Tories ahead in their latest poll
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    edited April 4
    oniscoid said:

    TOPPING said:

    vik said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    If his objective is to grow manufacturing jobs, then why is he imposing tariffs on raw materials, which are needed to build new factories ?

    The 50% tariffs on Lesotho, for example, have been imposed because Lesotho has a trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus exists because Lesotho exports a lot of diamonds to the US. How will restricting cheap diamonds from Lesotho help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?

    Trump complains a lot about Canada's trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus only exists because of Canada's oil exports to the US & if you exclude oil, then Canada has a trade deficit. How will restricting cheap oil from Canada help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?
    Well diamonds should be banned for a start. Not because of how they were mined, but because it's absolutely bonkers that people should desire for no good reason some mined substance just because there might not be a lot of it.

    God and expensive diamonds - both bonkers ideas.
    i think the history of the diamond market in the mid-C20th shows that it is partly an artificial one, with supply of gem quality stones strictly controlled by mining companies such as de Beers
    And brides still crave them. Absolutely bonkers. Even "gem quality" is an artificial creation.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 14,394
    viewcode said:

    Terrible result for Labour and Plaid in Neath Port Talbot last night.

    Congratulations to the Lib dems and labour in 4th place

    Next year Senedd election may well see Labour lose their grip on power in Wales

    https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1907937030191067365?t=AkScdWC2KNuNmxOI5IZXsg&s=19

    I have to say of all the places to go Lib, Neath and Port Talbot are not one of them. They're Proper Labour, and if Lab lose them, they'll lose everywhere.
    Just to point out, the Cwmllynfell and Ystalyfera Ward is in the Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe Constituency which the LDs won last year so it's a good sign for the defence of the constituency next time. As for the 2026 Senedd elections, it's part of the new Brycheiniog Tawe Nedd multi-member constituency (six in all). Perhaps the LDs think they can win two or three seats there.
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275
    HYUFD said:

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
    Which is not going to happen unless we return to one earner families with the other partner staying home with the children as was more often the case last century, even if we built masses of new homes and slashed immigration the average home would still cost what a 2 earner couple were willing to pay for it not a 1 earner
    Only if there's no competition.

    Liberate planning back to what it was like in the 1930s and it would be cheaper to build a new house next door to a too expensive one, which would drive the prices of too expensive ones down.

    Competition works. There's no reason why competition can't be made to apply to housing just as it does for other sectors.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 75,996
    viewcode said:

    https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1908086617698394571

    Westminster Voting Intention:

    RFM: 28% (+2)
    LAB: 22% (-1)
    CON: 20% (-2)
    LDM: 13% (+1)
    GRN: 11% (=)
    SNP: 3% (=)

    Via @FindoutnowUK, 2 Apr.
    Changes w/ 26 Mar.

    Go on Kemi you can do it! Less than 20%! I have faith in you!
    Along with FindoutnowUK, in all fairness, there really ought to be a pollster called FuckaroundUK.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 126,594

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    TOPPING said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    Exactly. The people who voted for him, largely, couldn't give a Tinker's cuss for the stock market.

    "Economic inequality has increased drastically across advanced industrial democracies and, with it, the range of economic experiences. These changes present a challenge for political economy which gauges the health of the economy with aggregate economic statistics like growth and jobs. Motivated by this challenge, we ask how new economic realities in advanced capitalism matters for how citizens evaluate the national economy. We argue that individuals seek out and apply information on those indicators of economic heath that affect their own lives while discounting those that do not. Applying our reasoning to the case of poverty and poverty risk, we assert that among the working poor, poverty rates provide a more meaningful signal of economic conditions than do conventional macroeconomic indicators. We show that poverty risk exerts a strong effect on economic evaluations. Individuals at high risk of poverty are less informed about standard macroeconomic indicators but better informed about national poverty rates. When evaluating macroeconomic performance, they are more likely to discount conventional economic indicators and base assessments on national poverty rates instead. Results indicate that political economy must depart from familiar but partial indicators and account for the layered economies structuring political behavior."

    https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2b29bd82-ee7f-49b2-b58b-dae5002a85ac/
    Their fathers worked in steel factories and car factories, they don't now on the whole and few hold stocks
    You can't turn the clock back.

    Even if more manufacturing jobs are created in the US as a result of the tariffs, they're going to be supplying primarily the domestic market because what they produce will be more expensive / worse quality than what's internationally available (otherwise they'd already be making it), and retaliatory tariffs will block US manufacture even more, even where they are marginally competitive - not to mention people, companies and governments making strategic risk / national security choices not to buy American.

    And while that's moderately good for those with the jobs, it's pretty crap for everyone forced to buy the stuff, who greatly outnumber them.

    Trump is basically bringing back British Leyland and expecting people to be grateful.
    Trump voters live in the Midwest and South, primarily want more US factories supplying the US market and will only buy American if they can.

    Few of them care about the rest of the world
    When everything doubles in the Walmart, they will riot.
    Depends if they are buying with wages from new manufacturing jobs and as long as they buy only American in Walmart less of a problem
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 13,844

    TOPPING said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    The biggest shock for HYUFD is to have been told today, by Algakirk, that he is an agnostic.
    Algarkirk is operating from the logical basis that its impossible to know, thus everyone is agnostic.

    But he's not counting for the fact that HYUFD is, like his God, omnipotent. He knows everything. Even the stuff he's wrong on, he knows that he is right, even if he's not.
    Quite correct. I am happy to be opposed on this issue, but whether or not we 'know' something is not entirely in our own gift to decide. Assuming with Plato, if I may, that knowledge is 'justified, true, belief' I have no problem with faith in God being 'belief' (mental assent) and 'justified' (there are loads of excellent grounds and reasons, which I cheerfully uphold) but as to whether it also has that meritorious quality of being 'true' I am not bold enough, along with Kant, to claim.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    edited April 4
    Cookie said:

    Off thread - I've just been to my youngest's Easter assembly. I will favour you all with a few thoughts:

    Again, a religious theme for Easter. I am mildly uncomfortable with this: I would imagine the large proportion of the school with a non-Christian heritage (I've mentioned before: from about 2% English-as-a-foreign-language 5 or 6 years ago, we are now at about 40%, with the bulk being Asian - along with of course a lot of Asians born here who speak English perfectly well but do not have a Christian heritage) are also rather uncomfortable with it. It's not like the Christmas story - which is part of our culture almost aside from the religious element - it's the actual stating-that-Jesus-came-back-to-life bit. Feels a bit uncomfortable getting Muslims and Hindus doing that. Also, it's rather harder to deliver the Easter story than the Christmas story in a primary school setting: a birth in difficult circumstances is believable and relatable; a man getting tortured to death is not relatable and a man coming back from the dead is not believable.
    Anyway, it was - because this is how primary school assemblies go - a retelling of the Christian Easter story, from the point of view of the trees which provided the wood for the manger, a fishing boat, and the cross, together with some twee and unnecessarily drawn out songs and one surprisingly jaunty and enjoyable one. Of its sort, it was actually quite good, though unfortunately the child who delivered the moral at the end delivered it so quietly that it was lost (possibly that we can all overcome disappointments and succeed in our dreams despite setbacks?). Happy to report my rather unfocused daughter delivered her couple of lines as Mary quite capably, before, unfortunately, going to sit behind the fat girl* behind whom she was lost from sight thereafter. Though enjoyably, for a primary school performance, the star of the show was tree #2, who with a few words and actions and a confident manner managed to be the centre of attention and managed somehow to knowingly catch the eye of everyone in the audience.

    So: uncomfortably religious, not really primary-school=appropriate, trite, some tedious songs with too many choruses - and yet from the efforts of kids and staff, actually rather charming. Realised with a jolt coming out that there's only a couple of these left, and the long kids-at-primary-school stage of my life, which has lasted almost a quarter of a lifetime, is - well the end of it is almost in sight. Feeling a little wistful about that.

    *the fat girl has all the hallmarks of one in my day who would have been socially shunned. I'm happy to report that this is not the case and she is as included in whatever it is 10 year old girls do as the rest of them and that they judge her purely by her personality. Also happy to report that she is surprisingly brilliant on stage. I hope this keeps up for her at secondary school.

    Nah, we're a Christian country and much as I find that bizarre no one is about to vote to change that. It is part of our fabric.

    And I'm glad that the "fat girl" is accepted by her peers.

    It is quite sad that she was performing in front of the parents who were, likely like you, thinking "look at the fat girl".
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 14,766

    HYUFD said:

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
    Which is not going to happen unless we return to one earner families with the other partner staying home with the children as was more often the case last century, even if we built masses of new homes and slashed immigration the average home would still cost what a 2 earner couple were willing to pay for it not a 1 earner
    Only if there's no competition.

    Liberate planning back to what it was like in the 1930s and it would be cheaper to build a new house next door to a too expensive one, which would drive the prices of too expensive ones down.

    Competition works. There's no reason why competition can't be made to apply to housing just as it does for other sectors.
    Lol. Barty's version of Trumpian economics (designed by simpletons). "It's sooo not fair that I can't have a big house boohoo."
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 75,996

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    Or indeed in the US.
    Though this price point will likely change now that Trump has tariffed cotton imports.

    How a $12.98 T-Shirt Is Made in America—at a Profit
    American Giant invested in machinery and made design changes to produce inexpensive T-shirts for Walmart
    https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/america-made-shirts-american-giant-6fb4ae70
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 34,417

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
    Or you build enough council houses.

    Just saying.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 6,293
    vik said:

    HYUFD said:

    Cicero said:

    The stunned silence on the US right after Trump´s Tariff of Misfortune game show performance has been quite remarkable. I think the backlash will take a little while to come, since the scale of the disaster is so immense that it takes a while to grasp it, especially for the knuckle draggers n the GOP congressional delegation.

    However, after the absolute rout across global markets it is pretty clear that Trump is facing a choice: walk back from this disaster or own it.

    He is doing what he was elected to do, whether it ends in disaster or not depends on whether prices and cost of living rise more than US manufacturing jobs grow as a result of these tariffs
    If his objective is to grow manufacturing jobs, then why is he imposing tariffs on raw materials, which are needed to build new factories ?

    The 50% tariffs on Lesotho, for example, have been imposed because Lesotho has a trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus exists because Lesotho exports a lot of diamonds to the US. How will restricting cheap diamonds from Lesotho help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?

    Trump complains a lot about Canada's trade surplus with the US. The trade surplus only exists because of Canada's oil exports to the US & if you exclude oil, then Canada has a trade deficit. How will restricting cheap oil from Canada help to grow US manufacturing jobs ?
    Artifical diamonds are made in the US! Lesotho is ripping America off!
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275

    HYUFD said:

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
    Which is not going to happen unless we return to one earner families with the other partner staying home with the children as was more often the case last century, even if we built masses of new homes and slashed immigration the average home would still cost what a 2 earner couple were willing to pay for it not a 1 earner
    Only if there's no competition.

    Liberate planning back to what it was like in the 1930s and it would be cheaper to build a new house next door to a too expensive one, which would drive the prices of too expensive ones down.

    Competition works. There's no reason why competition can't be made to apply to housing just as it does for other sectors.
    Lol. Barty's version of Trumpian economics (designed by simpletons). "It's sooo not fair that I can't have a big house boohoo."
    Believing in a free market and liberalisation of laws, and the reversal of socialist 1940s policies implemented under the Attlee government is the polar opposite of Trumpian economics, or simpleton.

    Its what the Conservatives used to believe in and did well in the 1980s, just a shame it wasn't done with housing.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 34,417
    Andy_JS said:

    Warwickshire are playing champions Surrey. Starts in about 5 mins.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJyji8WGlTM


    Surrey are playing Essex at Chelmsford.

    Would that I were fit enough, and able enough, to go!
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
    Or you build enough council houses.

    Just saying.
    Even post-war, with the country bombed out and the rise of Council housing, we have never proportionately built as many houses as we did in the 1930s under a free market before Attlee's disastrous planning reforms.

    The free market works, when given space to do so.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 75,996
    HYUFD said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    I never said they were the opinion of the majority, certainly not in the UK however there is an arrogance about secular liberals in the UK which assumes theirs are the only views now held on cultural issues in this nation and which dismiss religion as an anachronism held by the backward abroad but not here. Same as they also look down their noses at Brexit voters as ignorant oiks often
    It's always amusing when you detect arrogance in others.

    And you don't appear to comprehend "imply".
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 43,647
    algarkirk said:

    TOPPING said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    The biggest shock for HYUFD is to have been told today, by Algakirk, that he is an agnostic.
    Algarkirk is operating from the logical basis that its impossible to know, thus everyone is agnostic.

    But he's not counting for the fact that HYUFD is, like his God, omnipotent. He knows everything. Even the stuff he's wrong on, he knows that he is right, even if he's not.
    Quite correct. I am happy to be opposed on this issue, but whether or not we 'know' something is not entirely in our own gift to decide. Assuming with Plato, if I may, that knowledge is 'justified, true, belief' I have no problem with faith in God being 'belief' (mental assent) and 'justified' (there are loads of excellent grounds and reasons, which I cheerfully uphold) but as to whether it also has that meritorious quality of being 'true' I am not bold enough, along with Kant, to claim.
    Absolutely. Strictly. But I think we have to rub along as we can. We cannot say with absolute certainty that Tooth fairies, Santa, and god (the holy triumvirate) exist.

    But I am happy to enlist an amalgam of philosophical giants and operate under the assumption that none of them do.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 14,719

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    The people making the t-shirts here don't get £4k per month. The Trump voters are not being promised min wage jobs, but good jobs, the kind that existed for their grandparents, with one earner able to support a family.
    The best way to enable one earner to be able to support a family would be to crater house prices back to what they were in the 80s and early 90s.

    Housing costs is a primary reason we've gone from the mad situation where one earner could buy and own a home of their own and support their family, to two earners are paying rent but struggling to make ends meet.
    Or you build enough council houses.

    Just saying.
    Both are part of the mix. But if you give people the option to own their own homes affordably, most of them will take it. Which proves to me that in most cases ownership is preferable.
    I would want a council house to be available to my daughters should they need it when they are older. But government-owned housing is certainly not what I would aspire to for them.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 24,057
    edited April 4
    Nigelb said:

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    Or indeed in the US.
    Though this price point will likely change now that Trump has tariffed cotton imports.

    How a $12.98 T-Shirt Is Made in America—at a Profit
    American Giant invested in machinery and made design changes to produce inexpensive T-shirts for Walmart
    https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/america-made-shirts-american-giant-6fb4ae70
    Can't see the article but is this creating many thousands of US well paid jobs for low skilled workers? I somehow doubt it - this is the reason behind the tariffs, not investment in machinery.
  • FossFoss Posts: 1,352
    Nigelb said:

    stodge said:

    Now on to the tedious bletherings...

    The Trump Administration won on an anti-globalisation platform - basically American jobs for American workers - and that carried states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Being able to make your widgets in Vietnam, Bangladesh or Gabon for a fraction of the cost of making them in America, the UK or Japan is a strong argument and both business and consumers have done well out of it. The losers have been the workers in the more advanced countries who have seen traditional manufacturing jobs go overseas without commensurate newer more skilled work replacing those jobs.

    The other aspect to the relatively free movement of labour and capital is you can continue to make your widgets in America but bring in foreign labour who will think what you want to pay is a king's ransom - compare the UK minimum wage with average wages in Romania and Bulgaria (not Poland any longer) and you see why people come here to work.

    You resist this and "protect" your indigenous labour by both clamping down on the influx of foreign labour and imposing tariffs on imported goods in an attempt to level the playing field and get back to American workers making American widgets in American factories charging American prices to American consumers.

    This might work as long as your consumer is happy to "buy American" at higher prices and the business can still turn a buck despite the cost of producing every widget having gone up. The worker might be happy for a while but if the price of everything else goes up he or she will demand more money to keep pace (been there, done that).

    In the end, it's a nakedly political move to play to the core vote. America is big enough for the policy to be successful in the short term (as others say, the convulsions of the DJIA and FTSE aren't of relevance to many) but it's not an answer now any more than it was when they moved pineapple production from Hawaii to Guatemala for the same reason.

    To get $10 T-shirts to the US consumer workers in Asia work for $200 a month. A good job in the US, according to surveys, pays around $5,000 dollars a month. That would see T-Shirts being priced around $150-200.

    The idea that the US can simply reshore production and create good jobs is absurd.
    Your maths doesn't work.

    Firstly labour is not the only cost, but secondly costs don't work like that, costs and prices aren't all held 1:n to scale. You can get t-shirts made in the UK, they don't cost anything like £150.
    Or indeed in the US.
    Though this price point will likely change now that Trump has tariffed cotton imports.

    How a $12.98 T-Shirt Is Made in America—at a Profit
    American Giant invested in machinery and made design changes to produce inexpensive T-shirts for Walmart
    https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/america-made-shirts-american-giant-6fb4ae70
    Paywall busting link
  • RogerRoger Posts: 20,304
    HYUFD said:

    https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1908086617698394571

    Westminster Voting Intention:

    RFM: 28% (+2)
    LAB: 22% (-1)
    CON: 20% (-2)
    LDM: 13% (+1)
    GRN: 11% (=)
    SNP: 3% (=)

    Via @FindoutnowUK, 2 Apr.
    Changes w/ 26 Mar.

    Big difference between FON and MiC, the latter had the Tories ahead in their latest poll
    Is that one of findoutnow's 10 minute polls?

    Looks like overall majority for Reform. A good result for Trump

  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 37,657
    Nigelb said:

    this price point will likely change now that Trump has tariffed cotton imports.

    If only there was a way of growing cotton in the US using very cheap labour...
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 14,766

    TOPPING said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    The biggest shock for HYUFD is to have been told today, by Algakirk, that he is an agnostic.
    Algarkirk is operating from the logical basis that its impossible to know, thus everyone is agnostic.

    But he's not counting for the fact that HYUFD is, like his God, omnipotent. He knows everything. Even the stuff he's wrong on, he knows that he is right, even if he's not.
    You on the other hand are far too narrow minded to even be agnostic. Everything is black and white in the small brained world of Farage voting Brexit-Barty. Simplistic solutions and beliefs are what Barty expounds and anything that challenges those, such as someone having faith, is to be mocked in a condescending way that is in fact a psychological projection of your own intellectual inadequacies.
  • BartholomewRobertsBartholomewRoberts Posts: 23,275

    TOPPING said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    First, I’m not a left liberal but thanks for dictating what you think I am so wrongly.

    Secondly, if you listened to it, you would understand how far away from saying “prayers in the event of an accident”, it was almost medieval in the belief that it was prayers that stopped infection, got the ambulance to the hospital quickly etc.

    If people want to pray etc that’s great but to ascribe the things they did and the absolutist handover of modern life to religion was extreme - if we hear Muslims or any other religion claiming allah or others did these things we would scoff.
    Of course you are, you are a left liberal who dislikes conservatism and rightwing politics.

    Evangelical Christians and many Roman Catholics even here would think that prayer can genuinely save someones life, you just live in a left liberal echo chamber.
    You don't have to be a left liberal to dislike right wing politics.
    There are plenty of centrists who feel the same way.

    IOW, you're wrongly implying that your opinions are those of the majority.
    The biggest shock for HYUFD is to have been told today, by Algakirk, that he is an agnostic.
    Algarkirk is operating from the logical basis that its impossible to know, thus everyone is agnostic.

    But he's not counting for the fact that HYUFD is, like his God, omnipotent. He knows everything. Even the stuff he's wrong on, he knows that he is right, even if he's not.
    You on the other hand are far too narrow minded to even be agnostic. Everything is black and white in the small brained world of Farage voting Brexit-Barty. Simplistic solutions and beliefs are what Barty expounds and anything that challenges those, such as someone having faith, is to be mocked in a condescending way that is in fact a psychological projection of your own intellectual inadequacies.
    As always you misjudge me. You are far too narrow-minded to understand what I believe.

    I am an agnostic atheist.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 65,155
    Labour need to hammer Farage's close links to Trump from now until 2028 relentlessly.

  • CookieCookie Posts: 14,719
    HYUFD said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    boulay said:

    Sometimes, if you ever really need it, you get a reminder that the US is largely a crazily different country to us.

    I was listening in the small hours to a world service programme about a teenager in Ohio who was shot twice at school and survived - all quite a remarkable story in itself how it played out.

    What was more than eye-opening was the unbelievable religious fervour of the town and people involved.

    Everything was “praying. The school nurse - a former combat medic - praying to Jesus whilst helping the boy. The boy, praying for the shooter, everyone praying non stop.

    The ladies who had a prayer room above a shop apparently saved him by praying.

    The whole town prevented the shotgun pellets from giving him infection in his heart and lungs by praying - forget the skilled doctors - praying.

    If it had been a story from, say an Islamic country, we would likely mock and raise eyebrows but this was like something out of 1600s Salem or Cromwell’s England - everyone sodding praying and genuinely believing that everything worked out ok because they all prayed.

    Loons. No wonder you get Trumpism when there is a huge swathe of the country who are so credulous and backwards.

    Hardly, in most of the world prayers would be said in the event of a serious accident or crime leading to injury, it shows how militantly secular left liberals like you in the UK are you think that is worthy of mockery!
    Yes but 'most of the world' includes large swathes of the third world which is, frankly, whatever euphemisms we may employ, backwards,
    If you were to look at the developed world, American religious attitudes stick out like the sorest of sore thumbs. It's not just that atheism is much higher everywhere other than America, it's that among the religious, the belief that God is actually interventionist on an individual level in response to this sort of thing is much lower.
    In values there is an argument to some that much of the 'third world' you so patronise still holds true to traditional values and morality which were the backbone of humanity for centuries.

    In Greece, Poland, much of Italy even rural Ireland and Orthodox Jew Israel attitudes to religion would be similar to red state USA
    Well yes there are some splodges elsewhere in the developed world were religious fervour is the norm (though I'd question rural Ireland, nowadays - 30 years ago perhaps). But they are exceptions.

    And yes, for centuries, traditional values and morality were the norm. I don't think that's an argument that it should be the norm now. I certainly wouldn't want the value of the Middle East to be the norm here. And plenty of things used to be the norm, like autocracy, outdoor defecation and grinding poverty - I don't think we should be looking to emulate those either.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 65,155
    Scott_xP said:

    Nigelb said:

    this price point will likely change now that Trump has tariffed cotton imports.

    If only there was a way of growing cotton in the US using very cheap labour...
    Ouch.
  • DopermeanDopermean Posts: 901
    Andy_JS said:

    Warwickshire are playing champions Surrey. Starts in about 5 mins.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJyji8WGlTM

    Pedantic correction - Sussex
    Essex vs Surrey, Essex batting line-up looking a bit thin, opening with Paul Walter.
    Surrey top 6 all former/current internationals.
  • FossFoss Posts: 1,352

    Scott_xP said:

    Nigelb said:

    this price point will likely change now that Trump has tariffed cotton imports.

    If only there was a way of growing cotton in the US using very cheap labour...
    Ouch.
    According to the article the 'company buys yarn that is grown, spun, dyed and sewn in the U.S.'...
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 62,395
    F1: no bet, though I was tempted by Russell at 12 each way for pole, but here's a quick pre-qualifying ramble.

    https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2025/04/japanese-grand-prix-2025-pre-qualifying.html
  • CookieCookie Posts: 14,719
    Dopermean said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Warwickshire are playing champions Surrey. Starts in about 5 mins.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJyji8WGlTM

    Pedantic correction - Sussex
    Essex vs Surrey, Essex batting line-up looking a bit thin, opening with Paul Walter.
    Surrey top 6 all former/current internationals.
    Pedantic correction: I don't think your correction was pedantic, but actually quite an important correction to the previous point.
    Pedantically, I am pointing out your slight misuse of the word 'pedantic'.
  • boulayboulay Posts: 6,060
    Cookie said:

    Off thread - I've just been to my youngest's Easter assembly. I will favour you all with a few thoughts:

    Again, a religious theme for Easter. I am mildly uncomfortable with this: I would imagine the large proportion of the school with a non-Christian heritage (I've mentioned before: from about 2% English-as-a-foreign-language 5 or 6 years ago, we are now at about 40%, with the bulk being Asian - along with of course a lot of Asians born here who speak English perfectly well but do not have a Christian heritage) are also rather uncomfortable with it. It's not like the Christmas story - which is part of our culture almost aside from the religious element - it's the actual stating-that-Jesus-came-back-to-life bit. Feels a bit uncomfortable getting Muslims and Hindus doing that. Also, it's rather harder to deliver the Easter story than the Christmas story in a primary school setting: a birth in difficult circumstances is believable and relatable; a man getting tortured to death is not relatable and a man coming back from the dead is not believable.
    Anyway, it was - because this is how primary school assemblies go - a retelling of the Christian Easter story, from the point of view of the trees which provided the wood for the manger, a fishing boat, and the cross, together with some twee and unnecessarily drawn out songs and one surprisingly jaunty and enjoyable one. Of its sort, it was actually quite good, though unfortunately the child who delivered the moral at the end delivered it so quietly that it was lost (possibly that we can all overcome disappointments and succeed in our dreams despite setbacks?). Happy to report my rather unfocused daughter delivered her couple of lines as Mary quite capably, before, unfortunately, going to sit behind the fat girl* behind whom she was lost from sight thereafter. Though enjoyably, for a primary school performance, the star of the show was tree #2, who with a few words and actions and a confident manner managed to be the centre of attention and managed somehow to knowingly catch the eye of everyone in the audience.

    So: uncomfortably religious, not really primary-school=appropriate, trite, some tedious songs with too many choruses - and yet from the efforts of kids and staff, actually rather charming. Realised with a jolt coming out that there's only a couple of these left, and the long kids-at-primary-school stage of my life, which has lasted almost a quarter of a lifetime, is - well the end of it is almost in sight. Feeling a little wistful about that.

    *the fat girl has all the hallmarks of one in my day who would have been socially shunned. I'm happy to report that this is not the case and she is as included in whatever it is 10 year old girls do as the rest of them and that they judge her purely by her personality. Also happy to report that she is surprisingly brilliant on stage. I hope this keeps up for her at secondary school.

    Surely you can’t be seriously complaining about an Easter thing having a religious theme - sort of the whole point of Easter and the therefore the holiday.



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