Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
Not sure where we are on Iran this evening - oil prices seem to be heading down but more on rumour than an actual basis of fact. The "blockade" of the Straits of Hormuz seems to have had varied success so far - 100% according to the US military but other sources claiming ships have and are transiting.
There may be more talks between the US and the Islamic Republic in a couple of days thought why they should be any more fruitful than the negotiations in Islamabad I'm not sure.
Here in rural Derbyshire, no evidence of any disruption to petrol supplies at this time and the price has stabilised in the past few days albeit at very high levels.
Rural Derbyshire? But I thought you never leave East Ham ...
p.s. I'm no longer in Newham, having crossed the river to Greenwich six months ago.
As I remember Bob Smithson is an admirer of this inward looking Little American:
Amid historic jumps in gas prices triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran, the California congressman Ro Khanna is to introduce legislation on Tuesday that would ban the export of gasoline during price spikes.
“The country is crying out for a new energy policy,” said Khanna in an interview with the Guardian, “that doesn’t have us subject to the whims of the profits of big oil companies.”
The Iran war has sparked the largest-ever disruption to fuel supply, according to the International Energy Agency, with crude costs topping $100 a barrel so far this week. That has in turn caused the price of gasoline – for which crude is the main input – to rise dramatically, with Americans paying more than $4 a gallon at the pump.
Keeping domestic gasoline supplies at home, Khanna said, could lower the cost of gas for US consumers. During any period when national gas prices average $3.12 a gallon or higher, his proposed legislation would stop US shipments of refined gasoline to other countries.
Export of oil from the US (nearly all) was banned between 1975 and 2015
You mean when the USA was an oil IMPORTER.
The USA is now an oil EXPORTER.
Now if you ban oil exports and put restrictions on domestic prices can you guess what will happen to US oil production ?
Not to mention different types of oil with some being imported while others are exported.
The US is a massive oil importer.
It's just an even more massive oil exporter.
It imports heavy crude from Canada. And it exports light crude and NGLs from the Permian basin.
And if that oil exporting is stopped then either:
Consumption of that oil within the USA has to increase Production of that oil has to decrease There has to be a massive increase in stocks
It would be monumentally stupid to stop export of that oil, because the US Gulf Coast refining complex is not setup to process it. It would simultaneously discourage production, and probably raise US prices.
So, we're fucked, aren't we?
It would be monumentally stupid, but that isn't what is being proposed.
For all I know stopping petrol exports would not necessarily be a great idea either, but it's probably not as monumentally stupid as is being portrayed.
It seems that some junior doctors should be on £8ph apprentice wage:
We sighed with relief - strikes act like a firebreak."
That was how one hospital boss recalled hearing news of a walkout by resident doctors in England last December.
Now that the latest doctors' strike has ended, some NHS trust leaders who have spoken to BBC News are reflecting again that the system has run more efficiently - with some saying it has been smoother than on non-strike days.
Looking back to previous walkouts they suggest that far from the predicted chaos, there were shorter patient waits, faster decisions and calmer corridors.
Local election leaflets for the Newsome & Netherton, Kirklees ward all ups stand at Greens, one leaflet covering all the Huddersfield wards being targeted and one ward specific leaflet, Reform, one national level mailshot. We get a Labour Rose more often than not, but I'm wondering if we may not this time.
We also have a lamppost postering by-law, so I did my first poster count on a drive that took in Dalton, Crosland Moor and Holme Valley North today, occupied lampposts came in at 9 Labour, 6 Independent and 1 Green. I expect those numbers to fluctuate between now and polling day.
Keep up the local election updates everyone!
I have heard ..... zilch from anyone.
But I did see a crocodile of primary school children walking down my lane to the library this morning.
Which will be added to my ammunition for getting a rat-runner filter added to my lane (which has been there for the last 50 years anyway), but requires something to make it effective like a row of bollards.
I had a flier from my local Tory MP, all full of the wonderful community work they are doing in the Constituency. No bigotry or Brexitism or Badenoch at all. Clearly a tribute to Lib Dem pothole politics rather than the Faragist flag shaggers.
No local elections here, but someone is worried about holding their formerly safe seat.
TSE, a load of posters are still on or sneaking back to that undemocratic 'private' setting whereby you can't see their body of work.
Waste of time since it’s all Googleable
I actually wrote a scraper that would take all the PB comments extant and turn them into a data cube - search by all the dimensions you could wish for.
Then I thought it might upset @rcs1000 if I put a site with that on it.
So I didn’t.
What language is it written in?
Java
Ouch. Can it be translated into (say) R and still work?
People pick the language they are most comfortable with - for me my go to is C# and previously Perl.
Downside with Perl is no-one else could ever read someone else’s code and after 3 months even the author had problems reading his shortcuts
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
This whole thread is ridiculous, it's not going to happen, for a trillion reasons (which I have spelt out before). This is not a partisan point, just practical
But here is one to be going on with
Why would any British government call something as epochal and dangerous as an EU Rejoin referendum? We all know, and politicans all know, what happened to David Cameron
You would only call it if you were supremely confident of winning, due to governing really well and being really popular. The economy humming along. But then why would you take the risk? Why Rejoin, with all its grave uncertainties, if Britain and the British govt is doing well?
So that won't happen. But maybe you get desperate and the economy is fucked and it's a last throw of the dice, but that means you, the PM, will be really unpopular and the people will punish you by voting against your favoured cause, Rejoin
Lose lose
It's not going to happen. The alignment of ducks required to get us back into the EU is exceptionally unlikely. Not entirely impossible, but right out there
A referendum could happen the same way that Cameron destroyed his PMship by calling one - the alternative being that backbenchers give the reluctant leader the heave, or a fringe party threatens to siphon off too many votes, and the leader making the promise doesn't expect to have to deliver on it.
Local election leaflets for the Newsome & Netherton, Kirklees ward all ups stand at Greens, one leaflet covering all the Huddersfield wards being targeted and one ward specific leaflet, Reform, one national level mailshot. We get a Labour Rose more often than not, but I'm wondering if we may not this time.
We also have a lamppost postering by-law, so I did my first poster count on a drive that took in Dalton, Crosland Moor and Holme Valley North today, occupied lampposts came in at 9 Labour, 6 Independent and 1 Green. I expect those numbers to fluctuate between now and polling day.
Keep up the local election updates everyone!
I have heard ..... zilch from anyone.
But I did see a crocodile of primary school children walking down my lane to the library this morning.
Which will be added to my ammunition for getting a rat-runner filter added to my lane (which has been there for the last 50 years anyway), but requires something to make it effective like a row of bollards.
I had a flier from my local Tory MP, all full of the wonderful community work they are doing in the Constituency. No bigotry or Brexitism or Badenoch at all. Clearly a tribute to Lib Dem pothole politics rather than the Faragist flag shaggers.
No local elections here, but someone is worried about holding their formerly safe seat.
If they have more money in reserve than the campaign spending limit then it makes sense to do a leaflet drop before the limit kicks in.
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
As I remember Bob Smithson is an admirer of this inward looking Little American:
Amid historic jumps in gas prices triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran, the California congressman Ro Khanna is to introduce legislation on Tuesday that would ban the export of gasoline during price spikes.
“The country is crying out for a new energy policy,” said Khanna in an interview with the Guardian, “that doesn’t have us subject to the whims of the profits of big oil companies.”
The Iran war has sparked the largest-ever disruption to fuel supply, according to the International Energy Agency, with crude costs topping $100 a barrel so far this week. That has in turn caused the price of gasoline – for which crude is the main input – to rise dramatically, with Americans paying more than $4 a gallon at the pump.
Keeping domestic gasoline supplies at home, Khanna said, could lower the cost of gas for US consumers. During any period when national gas prices average $3.12 a gallon or higher, his proposed legislation would stop US shipments of refined gasoline to other countries.
Export of oil from the US (nearly all) was banned between 1975 and 2015
You mean when the USA was an oil IMPORTER.
The USA is now an oil EXPORTER.
Now if you ban oil exports and put restrictions on domestic prices can you guess what will happen to US oil production ?
Not to mention different types of oil with some being imported while others are exported.
The US is a massive oil importer.
It's just an even more massive oil exporter.
It imports heavy crude from Canada. And it exports light crude and NGLs from the Permian basin.
And if that oil exporting is stopped then either:
Consumption of that oil within the USA has to increase Production of that oil has to decrease There has to be a massive increase in stocks
It would be monumentally stupid to stop export of that oil, because the US Gulf Coast refining complex is not setup to process it. It would simultaneously discourage production, and probably raise US prices.
So, we're fucked, aren't we?
Trump will think* like this - We used to ban oil exports. Foreigners are taking our oil. And Obama signed the bill ending the ban
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Local election leaflets for the Newsome & Netherton, Kirklees ward all ups stand at Greens, one leaflet covering all the Huddersfield wards being targeted and one ward specific leaflet, Reform, one national level mailshot. We get a Labour Rose more often than not, but I'm wondering if we may not this time.
We also have a lamppost postering by-law, so I did my first poster count on a drive that took in Dalton, Crosland Moor and Holme Valley North today, occupied lampposts came in at 9 Labour, 6 Independent and 1 Green. I expect those numbers to fluctuate between now and polling day.
2 posters in the next street. Both Green. Concerning as this is a LD ward. Don't want Reform sneaking home.
Given they can post anywhere, our lot don't need to bother much with householders. Through the years there is one farmers field that used to have a big Tory sign.
I'm looking forward to more going up, as I'm hoping to catch a single lamppost, probably in Lindley ward, with nine or ten candidate posters on it.
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 3h I know we're all looking at oil.
But live cattle just rose above $2.5 per lb for the first time (to an all-time high). The BBQ season in America is going to be rather expensive for flipping burgers.
If you have a cow now you can sell it for a high price. Or you can get her pregnant and hope that prices in the future are going to be as high. That’s a heck of a bet for farmer to take… result is that the number of starts is declining… which will cause higher prices in future…
Isn't this also partly because they had to cull a lot of cattle when Avian flu tore its way through cattle herds?
I remember that created a glut of cheap beef for a while, but a rebound was inevitable.
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
David Frost did a good job I think, with Boris's backing.
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 3h I know we're all looking at oil.
But live cattle just rose above $2.5 per lb for the first time (to an all-time high). The BBQ season in America is going to be rather expensive for flipping burgers.
If you have a cow now you can sell it for a high price. Or you can get her pregnant and hope that prices in the future are going to be as high. That’s a heck of a bet for farmer to take… result is that the number of starts is declining… which will cause higher prices in future…
Are you advocating farmers try and fuck their cows?
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
It’s not the oldest, but a friend has a mint gold sovereign (first strike) from each monarch since Charles II
The collapse in the Leave vote is quite amazing. I always assumed that sheer emotion alone would have kept it around 50%. That this hasn't happened demonstrates the plunging ineptitude of those tasked with making Brexit a success. Or were they only interested in getting the thing over the line and didn't give a hoot about what followed?
The collapse in the leave vote is heavily linked to Covid (and its economic impacts), the war in Ukraine (and its economic impacts) and the general feeling of national decline.
Imagine if Remain had won and then covid and Ukraine had happened. What would Leave be polling now?
Probably much as they are now, because an awful lot of what we've seen is the action of the Grim Reaper. Here's the Ipsos breakdown of the 2016 referendum by age:
Now roll those ages forward a decade. Leaverdom had to run very fast to stand still, and they haven't, because it hasn't been seen as a success. But a lot of what we're seeing looks like an identity thing. It's not that people have changed their minds, it's that the people have changed, and will continue to do so.
(And before anyone starts, this isn't about wishing Leave voters dead, it's just observing that death comes to us all.)
Why did so many incumbent governments get turfed out in the last four years? It wasn’t Brexit as that only applies to us. It was the economic effects of Covid and the war. It’s mad to deny this. For sure 10 years have passed and perhaps some shift can be attributed to that but I stand by my thesis that if remain had won, leave would now be ahead in the polls.
This is obviously true.
And, had we been in the EU for the last ten years, then the negative effects of Covid and the war would no doubt have been blamed on the EU. It is -whether we're in or out- the universal scapegoat. We're either hurting 'cause we're in, or we're hurting because we're out.
(When, in the real world, the EU is probably only a fairly marginal contributor -either way- to economic performance. What matters most is global events. And then luck. And then the competence of your national government.)
TSE, a load of posters are still on or sneaking back to that undemocratic 'private' setting whereby you can't see their body of work.
Waste of time since it’s all Googleable
I actually wrote a scraper that would take all the PB comments extant and turn them into a data cube - search by all the dimensions you could wish for.
Then I thought it might upset @rcs1000 if I put a site with that on it.
So I didn’t.
What language is it written in?
Java
Ouch. Can it be translated into (say) R and still work?
People pick the language they are most comfortable with - for me my go to is C# and previously Perl.
Downside with Perl is no-one else could ever read someone else’s code and after 3 months even the author had problems reading his shortcuts
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 3h I know we're all looking at oil.
But live cattle just rose above $2.5 per lb for the first time (to an all-time high). The BBQ season in America is going to be rather expensive for flipping burgers.
If you have a cow now you can sell it for a high price. Or you can get her pregnant and hope that prices in the future are going to be as high. That’s a heck of a bet for farmer to take… result is that the number of starts is declining… which will cause higher prices in future…
Are you advocating farmers try and fuck their cows?
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Ok, despite the massive centrist dad vibes that one gets from a latish evening online debate about what old objects one has in the lovely, mortgage-probably-paid, covid-proof house one lives in, I did start to think about this one.
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
David Frost did a good job I think, with Boris's backing.
No he didn't. He was as stupid as the rest of them. Indeed his reincarnation as "the sensible right wing voice of a firm Brexit" is ridic. He was a Remainer. The whole thing is absurd
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
It’s not the oldest, but a friend has a mint gold sovereign (first strike) from each monarch since Charles II
What the polling actually shows is that Brits want a closer relationship with Europe but without alignment with EU laws and regulations. Only half of Brits saying they would vote Remain in a rerun EU referendum is not a massive margin for rejoin either and only 51% of Brits wanting another rejoin the EU referendum is not a huge lead either
Closer relationship means alignment with EU laws and regulations. Maybe except defence where the EU doesn't have a defined position.
It tells us Brits wish (a) the divisive referendum had never happened and part of them wants to go back to how things were before and (b) they want a more practical and easier relationship with the EU, but without any of the downsides - like giving away decision-making or immigration control.
So we want it all to work better and have our cake and eat it.
It's no different in other domestic political issues.
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
David Frost did a good job I think, with Boris's backing.
No he didn't. He was as stupid as the rest of them. Indeed his reincarnation as "the sensible right wing voice of a firm Brexit" is ridic. He was a Remainer. The whole thing is absurd
And a stupid remainer at that. He was vocally pro-Remain as head of the Scotch Whisky Association, and the India trade deal alone has done wonders for Scotch exports. And, since it's Scotch not raw meat, european exports have been unaffected.
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Ok, despite the massive centrist dad vibes that one gets from a latish evening online debate about what old objects one has in the lovely, mortgage-probably-paid, covid-proof house one lives in, I did start to think about this one.
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
WWII utility sideboard inherited from my parents and same vintage ceramic fruitbowl.
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
It’s not the oldest, but a friend has a mint gold sovereign (first strike) from each monarch since Charles II
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
David Frost did a good job I think, with Boris's backing.
No he didn't. He was as stupid as the rest of them. Indeed his reincarnation as "the sensible right wing voice of a firm Brexit" is ridic. He was a Remainer. The whole thing is absurd
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
It’s not the oldest, but a friend has a mint gold sovereign (first strike) from each monarch since Charles II
Nice, But, er, why?
His predecessors started buying them at the time and it just sort of happened
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Spain approves plan to give around 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status
Spot on. It is insane there is not an EU wide immigration policy, at this point. All of these people - lots of them north African males of fighting age (etc etc) will soon be able to move anywhere in the EU. It is obviously disastrous. It's lilke paying handsomely to share a house with friends but each of those friends is allowed, by the lease, to bring in as many lovers as they like and they are in turn allowed to sleep in any room in the house, including the kitchen, in a tent, forever
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
David Frost did a good job I think, with Boris's backing.
No he didn't. He was as stupid as the rest of them. Indeed his reincarnation as "the sensible right wing voice of a firm Brexit" is ridic. He was a Remainer. The whole thing is absurd
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Interesting the Conservatives now the most closely divided party on Brexit. Still 52% of 2024 Conservative voters would vote Leave but a substantial 41% of Tory voters would vote Remain.
Far closer than the big 74% of Labour and 71% of LD 2024 voters who would vote Remain and the unsurprisingly still large 72% of 2024 Reform voters who would vote Leave
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Ok, despite the massive centrist dad vibes that one gets from a latish evening online debate about what old objects one has in the lovely, mortgage-probably-paid, covid-proof house one lives in, I did start to think about this one.
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
You need to start buying some 4000 year old Bactrian kohl vessels on eBay, my friend (around £60)
Alternatively and more practically, buy some lovely old ceramics. I bought this the other day, It is sublimely beautiful. It is LITERALLY 200 years old and it is exquisite. As good as it looks in the photos if not better. £30. That's all. thirty quid!
Every time I use it I get a buzz. It's like owning a Raphael painting that also hoovers the living room, £30
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Ok, despite the massive centrist dad vibes that one gets from a latish evening online debate about what old objects one has in the lovely, mortgage-probably-paid, covid-proof house one lives in, I did start to think about this one.
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
My wife has a Rudall & Rose flute from ~1832.
These conical bore wooden flutes were typical of the flutes used at the time in orchestras, to be replaced in the second half of the century by Boehm-system flutes which had a different design that enabled a greater volume (and various other changes in key and fingering).
This meant that there was at the time a surplus of the older-style of flute that orchestral musicians weren't interested in, so they were picked up cheaply by Irish musicians and have become the standard design for Irish traditional music.
We found a Rudall & Rose flute in the Edinburgh instrument museum, but it had been allowed to dry out and so was badly cracked and was no longer playable.
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Strictly it’s a harpoceras falciferum. Found it just lying in a field at a site I can’t disclose. It’s 20cm across, sits on my shelf at work and it staggers me to think it was buried in the ground for 180 million years.
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 3h I know we're all looking at oil.
But live cattle just rose above $2.5 per lb for the first time (to an all-time high). The BBQ season in America is going to be rather expensive for flipping burgers.
If you have a cow now you can sell it for a high price. Or you can get her pregnant and hope that prices in the future are going to be as high. That’s a heck of a bet for farmer to take… result is that the number of starts is declining… which will cause higher prices in future…
Are you advocating farmers try and fuck their cows?
Local election leaflets for the Newsome & Netherton, Kirklees ward all ups stand at Greens, one leaflet covering all the Huddersfield wards being targeted and one ward specific leaflet, Reform, one national level mailshot. We get a Labour Rose more often than not, but I'm wondering if we may not this time.
We also have a lamppost postering by-law, so I did my first poster count on a drive that took in Dalton, Crosland Moor and Holme Valley North today, occupied lampposts came in at 9 Labour, 6 Independent and 1 Green. I expect those numbers to fluctuate between now and polling day.
Keep up the local election updates everyone!
I have heard ..... zilch from anyone.
But I did see a crocodile of primary school children walking down my lane to the library this morning.
Which will be added to my ammunition for getting a rat-runner filter added to my lane (which has been there for the last 50 years anyway), but requires something to make it effective like a row of bollards.
I had a flier from my local Tory MP, all full of the wonderful community work they are doing in the Constituency. No bigotry or Brexitism or Badenoch at all. Clearly a tribute to Lib Dem pothole politics rather than the Faragist flag shaggers.
No local elections here, but someone is worried about holding their formerly safe seat.
Those Tory MPs who survived the 2024 massacre are finding they are having to become LD MPs. No ministerial jobs on offer just the hard slog of being backbench MPs in opposition for most of them, sorting out potholes and protecting against overdevelopment and visiting community events. Also the Tories having to copy the LD barchart strategy, as the LDs used to say 'Only the LDs can beat the evil Tories here, Labour can't win here' now the Tories are having to say 'Only the Conservatives can beat the even more evil Reform here, Labour and the LDs and Greens can't win here'
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Spain approves plan to give around 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status
Spot on. It is insane there is not an EU wide immigration policy, at this point. All of these people - lots of them north African males of fighting age (etc etc) will soon be able to move anywhere in the EU. It is obviously disastrous. It's lilke paying handsomely to share a house with friends but each of those friends is allowed, by the lease, to bring in as many lovers as they like and they are in turn allowed to sleep in any room in the house, including the kitchen, in a tent, forever
Did someone mention really crap analogies and Brexit earlier?
Local election leaflets for the Newsome & Netherton, Kirklees ward all ups stand at Greens, one leaflet covering all the Huddersfield wards being targeted and one ward specific leaflet, Reform, one national level mailshot. We get a Labour Rose more often than not, but I'm wondering if we may not this time.
We also have a lamppost postering by-law, so I did my first poster count on a drive that took in Dalton, Crosland Moor and Holme Valley North today, occupied lampposts came in at 9 Labour, 6 Independent and 1 Green. I expect those numbers to fluctuate between now and polling day.
Keep up the local election updates everyone!
I have heard ..... zilch from anyone.
But I did see a crocodile of primary school children walking down my lane to the library this morning.
Which will be added to my ammunition for getting a rat-runner filter added to my lane (which has been there for the last 50 years anyway), but requires something to make it effective like a row of bollards.
I had a flier from my local Tory MP, all full of the wonderful community work they are doing in the Constituency. No bigotry or Brexitism or Badenoch at all. Clearly a tribute to Lib Dem pothole politics rather than the Faragist flag shaggers.
No local elections here, but someone is worried about holding their formerly safe seat.
Those Tory MPs who survived the 2024 massacre are finding they are having to become LD MPs. No ministerial jobs on offer just the hard slog of being backbench MPs in opposition for most of them, sorting out potholes and protecting against overdevelopment and visiting community events. Also the Tories having to copy the LD barchart strategy, as the LDs used to say 'Only the LDs can beat the evil Tories here, Labour can't win here' now the Tories are having to say 'Only the Conservatives can beat the even more evil Reform here, Labour and the LDs and Greens can't win here'
You either lose your seat as a hero or live long enough to become a LD.
TSE, a load of posters are still on or sneaking back to that undemocratic 'private' setting whereby you can't see their body of work.
Waste of time since it’s all Googleable
I actually wrote a scraper that would take all the PB comments extant and turn them into a data cube - search by all the dimensions you could wish for.
Then I thought it might upset @rcs1000 if I put a site with that on it.
So I didn’t.
What language is it written in?
Java
Ouch. Can it be translated into (say) R and still work?
People pick the language they are most comfortable with - for me my go to is C# and previously Perl.
Downside with Perl is no-one else could ever read someone else’s code and after 3 months even the author had problems reading his shortcuts
I'm about to throw out six inches of perl books. I never really programmed in perl but occasionally still use one-liners and have a daily script that is basically just a fast sed. Perl to C# also implies a move from Unix to Windows though, since C# is Microsoft's Java knock-off.
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 3h I know we're all looking at oil.
But live cattle just rose above $2.5 per lb for the first time (to an all-time high). The BBQ season in America is going to be rather expensive for flipping burgers.
If you have a cow now you can sell it for a high price. Or you can get her pregnant and hope that prices in the future are going to be as high. That’s a heck of a bet for farmer to take… result is that the number of starts is declining… which will cause higher prices in future…
Are you advocating farmers try and fuck their cows?
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 3h I know we're all looking at oil.
But live cattle just rose above $2.5 per lb for the first time (to an all-time high). The BBQ season in America is going to be rather expensive for flipping burgers.
If you have a cow now you can sell it for a high price. Or you can get her pregnant and hope that prices in the future are going to be as high. That’s a heck of a bet for farmer to take… result is that the number of starts is declining… which will cause higher prices in future…
Are you advocating farmers try and fuck their cows?
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Ok, despite the massive centrist dad vibes that one gets from a latish evening online debate about what old objects one has in the lovely, mortgage-probably-paid, covid-proof house one lives in, I did start to think about this one.
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
My wife has a Rudall & Rose flute from ~1832.
These conical bore wooden flutes were typical of the flutes used at the time in orchestras, to be replaced in the second half of the century by Boehm-system flutes which had a different design that enabled a greater volume (and various other changes in key and fingering).
This meant that there was at the time a surplus of the older-style of flute that orchestral musicians weren't interested in, so they were picked up cheaply by Irish musicians and have become the standard design for Irish traditional music.
We found a Rudall & Rose flute in the Edinburgh instrument museum, but it had been allowed to dry out and so was badly cracked and was no longer playable.
Oldest man made things we have are some Roman coins and a fragment of Roman pottery (black, with tiny white dotting) we found at the vineyard when planting.
Actually strictly speaking a detectorist found the coins while detecting with our permission and gave us one. The pottery was just sitting in the upper field after ploughing.
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
Looking back, the 'We Hold All the Cards' propaganda line was completly foolish and self-defeating. How could our negotiators take on a powerful, hard-nosed and devious entity like the EU when they thought they'd won it all already? Our chaps should have striven for every miniscule concession, instead they sat back, puffed up and complacent, and allowed themselves to be picked apart.
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Ok, despite the massive centrist dad vibes that one gets from a latish evening online debate about what old objects one has in the lovely, mortgage-probably-paid, covid-proof house one lives in, I did start to think about this one.
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
You need to start buying some 4000 year old Bactrian kohl vessels on eBay, my friend (around £60)
Alternatively and more practically, buy some lovely old ceramics. I bought this the other day, It is sublimely beautiful. It is LITERALLY 200 years old and it is exquisite. As good as it looks in the photos if not better. £30. That's all. thirty quid!
Every time I use it I get a buzz. It's like owning a Raphael painting that also hoovers the living room, £30
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 3h I know we're all looking at oil.
But live cattle just rose above $2.5 per lb for the first time (to an all-time high). The BBQ season in America is going to be rather expensive for flipping burgers.
If you have a cow now you can sell it for a high price. Or you can get her pregnant and hope that prices in the future are going to be as high. That’s a heck of a bet for farmer to take… result is that the number of starts is declining… which will cause higher prices in future…
Are you advocating farmers try and fuck their cows?
Ukraine and Germany signed a defense cooperation agreement during President Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to Berlin on April 14, elevating bilateral ties to a strategic partnership. 1/5 https://x.com/revishvilig/status/2044020158713245879
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
Looking back, the 'We Hold All the Cards' propaganda line was completly foolish and self-defeating. How could our negotiators take on a powerful, hard-nosed and devious entity like the EU when they thought they'd won it all already? Our chaps should have striven for every miniscule concession, instead they sat back, puffed up and complacent, and allowed themselves to be picked apart.
Trouble is that, had a Brexit campaign had acknowledged that upfront, I very much doubt that they would have got to 52 percent.
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Ok, despite the massive centrist dad vibes that one gets from a latish evening online debate about what old objects one has in the lovely, mortgage-probably-paid, covid-proof house one lives in, I did start to think about this one.
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
You need to start buying some 4000 year old Bactrian kohl vessels on eBay, my friend (around £60)
Alternatively and more practically, buy some lovely old ceramics. I bought this the other day, It is sublimely beautiful. It is LITERALLY 200 years old and it is exquisite. As good as it looks in the photos if not better. £30. That's all. thirty quid!
Every time I use it I get a buzz. It's like owning a Raphael painting that also hoovers the living room, £30
But how big is your flat? Seems to be a lot of stuff coming in at the moment!!!
Yes, a lot of stuff coming in, but it is - so far - replacing anything industrial, banal, modern, IKEA, etc. I have spared some John Lewis bookcases and a couple of John Lewis rugs, and some kitchen stuff that simply must be modern - eg kitchenware, for induction hobs, but even there I have upgraded. I now have top of the range Japanese damascened knives rather than everyday good-enough knives
I'm nearly at the end, I've reached the point where I have two Georgian decanters on my two windowsills, one for each balcony, plus iridescent 1910 Bohemian glass watering can on one side and 200 year old silver lustreware jug on the other doing the same job, That is to say: nearly replete. I will be a little sad when it is finished, but also pleased
My aim was to make every corner of my flat interesting, old, beautiful, storied, even the bloody bathroom, and I think I have succeeded. My soap dish is now an English latten fingerbowl from the 15th century (probablly made in Nuremburg) filled with shells (I found) and crystals and pretty rocks (I bought), it works weirdly well
On beef prices in the US: Try a search on: "drought + beef prices". (Much US beef is raised in what some rude people call "flyover country". Much of which has been rather dry -- for years.
On the effects of junior doctors: Residencies in the US typically begin on July 1st. Some think it wise to avoid US hospitals, if possible, for the whole month of July. (Descriptions of the residents' first month often sound more like hazing than training, at least to me.)
Also on junior doctors, some will be reminded by the key insight from "The Mythical Man Month".
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Strictly it’s a harpoceras falciferum. Found it just lying in a field at a site I can’t disclose. It’s 20cm across, sits on my shelf at work and it staggers me to think it was buried in the ground for 180 million years.
That's a big one. Bigger than any fossil I hve found. I do have one which arguably has a better story, but I'll stop being competitive. That's an excellent find. 180 million years!
Fossils are brilliant, finding them yourself is brilliant-er
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
Looking back, the 'We Hold All the Cards' propaganda line was completly foolish and self-defeating. How could our negotiators take on a powerful, hard-nosed and devious entity like the EU when they thought they'd won it all already? Our chaps should have striven for every miniscule concession, instead they sat back, puffed up and complacent, and allowed themselves to be picked apart.
My reading of the negotiations was different. I don’t think the UK attitude early on particularly affected the generosity or approach of the EU negotiators. It wound them up a bit, hence the moments of snark and leaks (mostly emanating from one individual), but more problematic was the fact we had politicians negotiating, in large part, with themselves and then presenting a confused message to what were, on the EU side, largely administrators and civil servants.
The government never really accepted the fact it was the commission they needed to do a deal with, not a handful of national leaders. And the commission had a series of standard templates for how trade and regulatory relationships worked with non member states: EFTA/EEA, CU, association agreements etc. plus a bespoke agreement with Switzerland that was the product of decades of iteration, not a few months of talks.
The UK should in my view have picked a template off the shelf, got a nice relatively trouble free exit, then continued to iterate over the following years - as indeed is finally happening now.
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
Looking back, the 'We Hold All the Cards' propaganda line was completly foolish and self-defeating. How could our negotiators take on a powerful, hard-nosed and devious entity like the EU when they thought they'd won it all already? Our chaps should have striven for every miniscule concession, instead they sat back, puffed up and complacent, and allowed themselves to be picked apart.
My reading of the negotiations was different. I don’t think the UK attitude early on particularly affected the generosity or approach of the EU negotiators. It wound them up a bit, hence the moments of snark and leaks (mostly emanating from one individual), but more problematic was the fact we had politicians negotiating, in large part, with themselves and then presenting a confused message to what were, on the EU side, largely administrators and civil servants.
The government never really accepted the fact it was the commission they needed to do a deal with, not a handful of national leaders. And the commission had a series of standard templates for how trade and regulatory relationships worked with non member states: EFTA/EEA, CU, association agreements etc. plus a bespoke agreement with Switzerland that was the product of decades of iteration, not a few months of talks.
The UK should in my view have picked a template off the shelf, got a nice relatively trouble free exit, then continued to iterate over the following years - as indeed is finally happening now.
I think the UK was unrealistic and hampered by a complete lack of clarity about what it would even ask for, whilst the EU was very much inclined to be as obstructive as possible, even if it meant a less positive deal for them as well. The pretence that 'cherry picking' was impossible was ridiculous when the whole point of negotiation is because some cherries are there to be picked - even if the UK definitely will have sought ones which were not.
"We certainly don’t want the French anywhere near these negotiations; we’d like to keep them as far away as possible from pretty much everything- particularly peace negotiations" says Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter to i24NEWS'
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Strictly it’s a harpoceras falciferum. Found it just lying in a field at a site I can’t disclose. It’s 20cm across, sits on my shelf at work and it staggers me to think it was buried in the ground for 180 million years.
Fossils are brilliant, finding them yourself is brilliant-er
Ah, the appeal of Jeremy Corbyn is discovered at last.
In surely the most boring photo ever posted on PB, here is my new soap dish
It’s eroded Pearl soap with some free posh hotel soap pressed into it. I am weirdly frugal about soap
Anyway the soap is balanced on a selection of rocks and fossils and shells that I either found myself or bought. They are all in a “latten bowl”, a fairly regular alloy bowl made from the 14th-17th centuries. Various indications suggest mine is about 15th century, probably used as a “hygienic” finger bowl between courses (we still ate with our fingers?!)
Next to it are some shells I found and then a massive trilobite I bought. You can see its compound eyes. It was unstable when I bought it so I gorilla glued some fossils and crystals to the bottom to give it a stable base then spray painted them black to match the trilobite
Now it glares at me as I shower, from 400 million years ago
Labour has won in Wales in every general election since 1922. And in every Senedd race for 27 years.
Reform are about to beat them in the country of Nye Bevan, Raymond Williams and the Manics. It’s massive.
This will be good for Wales in the long run, no party is good enough to deserve a century of dominance in an area, plenty more areas could do with such a switch.
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
Who was saying there are no more bargains on eBay?
I bought an ambiguous handmade object last week. £60. Something about it intrigued me
I now have it in my hands and after some hours of research I have concluded there is a very real chance it is 4000 years old
1.5p per year! I have had investments like that!
You bought a chlorite funerary kohl vessel from the Bronze Age of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex?!
Two of us on PB! What are the chances?
You've got me wondering what the oldest human made object is that I own.
Discarded Roman oysters from the garden don't really count, and I've not kept any worked flints, so I've concluded that whatever it is, it probably isn't old enough to be interesting. This needs rectifying.
Mine is pretty hard to beat. A human shucked oyster shell from the Dead Lakes of Willandra. So old it is mineralised. 40,000 years. And I found it myself!
The Dead L:akes of Willandra are genuinely fascinating and important, even if no one has heard of them
I get the appeal of the human factor but I get a kick from my fossil collection, including the rather fine specimen that is my current avatar. Any one able to name the species?
I am, of late, well into fossils but that's a hard one
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
It’s an ammonite, and a good one . Clue is it’s Toarcian from Somerset.
OOOH I nailed it! Yay me
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
Ok, despite the massive centrist dad vibes that one gets from a latish evening online debate about what old objects one has in the lovely, mortgage-probably-paid, covid-proof house one lives in, I did start to think about this one.
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
You need to start buying some 4000 year old Bactrian kohl vessels on eBay, my friend (around £60)
Alternatively and more practically, buy some lovely old ceramics. I bought this the other day, It is sublimely beautiful. It is LITERALLY 200 years old and it is exquisite. As good as it looks in the photos if not better. £30. That's all. thirty quid!
Every time I use it I get a buzz. It's like owning a Raphael painting that also hoovers the living room, £30
But how big is your flat? Seems to be a lot of stuff coming in at the moment!!!
Yes, a lot of stuff coming in, but it is - so far - replacing anything industrial, banal, modern, IKEA, etc. I have spared some John Lewis bookcases and a couple of John Lewis rugs, and some kitchen stuff that simply must be modern - eg kitchenware, for induction hobs, but even there I have upgraded. I now have top of the range Japanese damascened knives rather than everyday good-enough knives
I'm nearly at the end, I've reached the point where I have two Georgian decanters on my two windowsills, one for each balcony, plus iridescent 1910 Bohemian glass watering can on one side and 200 year old silver lustreware jug on the other doing the same job, That is to say: nearly replete. I will be a little sad when it is finished, but also pleased
My aim was to make every corner of my flat interesting, old, beautiful, storied, even the bloody bathroom, and I think I have succeeded. My soap dish is now an English latten fingerbowl from the 15th century (probablly made in Nuremburg) filled with shells (I found) and crystals and pretty rocks (I bought), it works weirdly well
Big speech coming tomorrow from Polanski it seems.
Universal benefits for all.
The usual rule is Ming Vase when you expect to win, Moon on a Stick when you expect to.lose. That's been so for ages- Thatch's '79 manifesto was more cautious than many remember it as.
The unusual features of 2019-24 were that Starmer had to change mode in autumn 2022 for some reason, and Sunak went Moon on a Stick in the dying year or so if his government.
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Spain approves plan to give around 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status
All the same old arguments being trotted out there.
Interesting that most of them are Latin American.
Worth noting, of course, that until Spain gives them citizenship, they won't have the right to live and work elsewhere in the EU.
(Portugal has a similar -if smaller- issue with undocumented migrants from Brazil.)
Yes, but the point is that once they do - they are free to go anywhere in the EU.
So your immigration control is only as strong as your weakest member.
I don't disagree, but it is also worth remembering that different EU countries have very different visa systems. The UK is really unusual in essentially having almost all visas having a path to citizenship. In the US, my visa has no path to Green Card / Permanent Status / Citizenship.
To take this example, is the Spanish government giving legal status via the Residencia Temporal visa? In which case they have a one year visa, which can be extended twice for two years apiece. Or are they being given status via the Tarjeta de Larga Duración, in which case they are on a path to citizenship?
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
Looking back, the 'We Hold All the Cards' propaganda line was completly foolish and self-defeating. How could our negotiators take on a powerful, hard-nosed and devious entity like the EU when they thought they'd won it all already? Our chaps should have striven for every miniscule concession, instead they sat back, puffed up and complacent, and allowed themselves to be picked apart.
My reading of the negotiations was different. I don’t think the UK attitude early on particularly affected the generosity or approach of the EU negotiators. It wound them up a bit, hence the moments of snark and leaks (mostly emanating from one individual), but more problematic was the fact we had politicians negotiating, in large part, with themselves and then presenting a confused message to what were, on the EU side, largely administrators and civil servants.
The government never really accepted the fact it was the commission they needed to do a deal with, not a handful of national leaders. And the commission had a series of standard templates for how trade and regulatory relationships worked with non member states: EFTA/EEA, CU, association agreements etc. plus a bespoke agreement with Switzerland that was the product of decades of iteration, not a few months of talks.
The UK should in my view have picked a template off the shelf, got a nice relatively trouble free exit, then continued to iterate over the following years - as indeed is finally happening now.
I think the UK was unrealistic and hampered by a complete lack of clarity about what it would even ask for, whilst the EU was very much inclined to be as obstructive as possible, even if it meant a less positive deal for them as well. The pretence that 'cherry picking' was impossible was ridiculous when the whole point of negotiation is because some cherries are there to be picked - even if the UK definitely will have sought ones which were not.
That wasn’t the message I got from them and their spokespeople at the time. It was more bureaucratic - computer says no. We should have at least started from a clear understandable template and then looked for cherries to pick. And also, in time honoured EU style, the actual concessions don’t happen until the very last minute. Same to be honest with most other trade deals.
"We certainly don’t want the French anywhere near these negotiations; we’d like to keep them as far away as possible from pretty much everything- particularly peace negotiations" says Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter to i24NEWS'
Israel’s really enjoying being McKenzie Crook to the USA’s Ricky Gervais isn’t it. Assistant general manager / assistant to the general manager.
Clearly no country is going to sign up to something that you can’t leave . And the EU don’t want another UK psychodrama .
The UK can’t just call another EU referendum without the EU actually agreeing to even contemplate the UK rejoining.
It would be a waste of time to call a referendum and then the EU says sorry no thanks . There has to be a very strong majority in favour in polling and the terms of re-joining laid out clearly .
Even though I’m very pro EU I think it might be better to contemplate EEA membership which comes without the CU, CFP and CAP.
There are more restrictions on FOM within that .
I think that’s more feasible and could happen more quickly .
The EEA has more restrictions on FoM than EU membership? Interesting. Do you have a link?
“More controversially, from the perspective of those who voted ‘leave’ in the referendum, the principle of free movement of persons applies. However, it is a more limited version of free movement, as it is not underpinned by the idea of citizenship of the Union.
It gives rights to those who are economically active (workers, the self-employed) and those semi-economically active (students and persons of independent means) but not to the economically inactive.
There is what might pass as an emergency brake on free movement: Article 112 states that ‘if serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties of a sectorial or regional nature liable to persist are arising, a contracting party may unilaterally take appropriate measures’ (subject to further procedures laid down in Article 113).”
EFTA/EEA is the obvious route for us.
As to EU and referenda, SFAICS the only serious option would be to agree everything with the EU for re-entry and the whole package to be put to a referendum at that point. Otherwise the 'pig in a poke' problem is inevitable.
The problem with that is that a referendum where you actually knew the grisly details of the deal and not just metaphysical hand waving (Euro, Schengen, rule taking, FoM, ever closer union, cost) would be hard to win.
An interesting asymmetry: to join, everything must be agreed before the vote; to leave, after the vote.
Yes. The asymmetry is real. Under Article 50, as it was understood in 2016 (there was a case on it in 2018 which may have changed things) it isn't possible to agree terms with the EU, hold a referendum and then trigger article 50 if the referendum agrees. You were (or seemed to be) obliged to buy an unknown relationship with the EU in leaving as you can't start discussions until triggering article 50.
However, IMO even so the government in 2016 should have made clear what its intentions were in some detail if we left and published a document outlining its 5-10 year plan for a Brexit world.
Nah - sequencing was never “as understood”. It was a bullshit argument used by the EU because they thought it gave them leverage in the negotiations
And, unfortunately, it did
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
Looking back, the 'We Hold All the Cards' propaganda line was completly foolish and self-defeating. How could our negotiators take on a powerful, hard-nosed and devious entity like the EU when they thought they'd won it all already? Our chaps should have striven for every miniscule concession, instead they sat back, puffed up and complacent, and allowed themselves to be picked apart.
My reading of the negotiations was different. I don’t think the UK attitude early on particularly affected the generosity or approach of the EU negotiators. It wound them up a bit, hence the moments of snark and leaks (mostly emanating from one individual), but more problematic was the fact we had politicians negotiating, in large part, with themselves and then presenting a confused message to what were, on the EU side, largely administrators and civil servants.
The government never really accepted the fact it was the commission they needed to do a deal with, not a handful of national leaders. And the commission had a series of standard templates for how trade and regulatory relationships worked with non member states: EFTA/EEA, CU, association agreements etc. plus a bespoke agreement with Switzerland that was the product of decades of iteration, not a few months of talks.
The UK should in my view have picked a template off the shelf, got a nice relatively trouble free exit, then continued to iterate over the following years - as indeed is finally happening now.
I think the UK was unrealistic and hampered by a complete lack of clarity about what it would even ask for, whilst the EU was very much inclined to be as obstructive as possible, even if it meant a less positive deal for them as well. The pretence that 'cherry picking' was impossible was ridiculous when the whole point of negotiation is because some cherries are there to be picked - even if the UK definitely will have sought ones which were not.
That wasn’t the message I got from them and their spokespeople at the time. It was more bureaucratic - computer says no. We should have at least started from a clear understandable template and then looked for cherries to pick. And also, in time honoured EU style, the actual concessions don’t happen until the very last minute. Same to be honest with most other trade deals.
I agree the UK position was unhelpful, I'd put that as the major driver of getting in the way of a good deal, but I don't agree the issues on the EU side were purely bureucratic and classic political dealmaking with late concessions etc.
It was not just the UK side which was acting on emotion, and the people directing the bureaucrats will have had an incentive for things to have been made as difficult as possible, to further demonstrate the undesirability of our act. I don't even blame for that, it is not a totally illogical position, but I do hold firm to the view that it was not emotional and irrational UK actors against a calmly and reasonably rational EU set of actors. They were just playing their role better, as they had the stronger hand.
"Labour is on course to lose control in Wales for the first time since devolution, an exclusive poll for The Telegraph reveals.
Plaid Cymru is set to emerge as the largest party in Wales, with Labour pushed into third place behind Reform UK.
Labour is also facing a Reform rout across England, with the near-total collapse of the Red Wall and the loss of stronghold councils held since the 1970s."
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Spain approves plan to give around 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status
All the same old arguments being trotted out there.
Interesting that most of them are Latin American.
Worth noting, of course, that until Spain gives them citizenship, they won't have the right to live and work elsewhere in the EU.
(Portugal has a similar -if smaller- issue with undocumented migrants from Brazil.)
Do you think that will stop a significant number of them from trying to move to northern European countries like the UK, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, etc?
Labour has won in Wales in every general election since 1922. And in every Senedd race for 27 years.
Reform are about to beat them in the country of Nye Bevan, Raymond Williams and the Manics. It’s massive.
This will be good for Wales in the long run, no party is good enough to deserve a century of dominance in an area, plenty more areas could do with such a switch.
"Labour is on course to lose control in Wales for the first time since devolution, an exclusive poll for The Telegraph reveals.
Plaid Cymru is set to emerge as the largest party in Wales, with Labour pushed into third place behind Reform UK.
Labour is also facing a Reform rout across England, with the near-total collapse of the Red Wall and the loss of stronghold councils held since the 1970s."
Some will say Reform will do poorly in those councils and people will then swiftly turn on them.
That may happen in several cases, but screwing up that badly is not actually that easy on a local council, I would think many will not be dislodged at the next term, and as with others national swings will be more important than presuming Reform will face extra punishment - the potholes and bins will be as good, or as bad, as they ever were in most cases.
Labour has won in Wales in every general election since 1922. And in every Senedd race for 27 years.
Reform are about to beat them in the country of Nye Bevan, Raymond Williams and the Manics. It’s massive.
This will be good for Wales in the long run, no party is good enough to deserve a century of dominance in an area, plenty more areas could do with such a switch.
SNP out in 2107?
That will be probably be quite some way into Independence, so possibly.
"Labour is on course to lose control in Wales for the first time since devolution, an exclusive poll for The Telegraph reveals.
Plaid Cymru is set to emerge as the largest party in Wales, with Labour pushed into third place behind Reform UK.
Labour is also facing a Reform rout across England, with the near-total collapse of the Red Wall and the loss of stronghold councils held since the 1970s."
'The Telegraph’s projection shows that Plaid will be the largest party in Wales for the first time, winning 33 of the 96 seats, followed by Reform with 29 and Labour with 17.
Despite talk of a Green Party surge in Wales, the party looks to have been constrained by support for Plaid and is forecast to win just three seats....Of the 136 English local authorities facing elections, Labour currently controls or is the coalition leader in 83.
The party could suffer its worst night in local election history – winning just 42 authorities – with almost half of that total in London.
The expected Green surge in the capital will split the Left vote, but Zack Polanski’s party is set to gain control of just two of London’s 32 boroughs...At the highest end of predicted results, Nigel Farage’s party would gain control of up to 69 councils – half of the number voting this year – by gaining support from Labour voters in the Red Wall and Conservatives in the East of England.
Even on a more modest prediction, it would net 56 councils, compared with 42 for Labour, 17 for the Liberal Democrats and 15 for the Conservatives....Kemi Badenoch’s Blue Wall of shire councils across the south of England is also set to crumble.
Reform is on course to seize Essex, the county council including Mrs Badenoch’s own constituency, along with Suffolk and Norfolk.
The Tories are also on course to lose East Sussex, West Sussex and Hampshire, finishing second or third behind either the Lib Dems or Reform. The Tories’ vote share could fall as low as 15 per cent in East Sussex.'
Big speech coming tomorrow from Polanski it seems.
Universal benefits for all.
If it’s UBI then fair play. First interesting, radical and brave policy in ages. Hopefully people aren’t totally partisan over it and discuss the merits - it’s an old idea with supporters from all sides.
I did enjoy the Scottish Greens double-lock on all benefits policy, if only because it highlights how absurd the triple-lock is.
Things like this are why rejoin won't happen. There is still a fundamental problem with the way the treaties are structured that allows a single country to make decisions unilaterally that impose long-term costs on others, à la Merkel in 2015.
Spain approves plan to give around 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status
All the same old arguments being trotted out there.
Interesting that most of them are Latin American.
Worth noting, of course, that until Spain gives them citizenship, they won't have the right to live and work elsewhere in the EU.
(Portugal has a similar -if smaller- issue with undocumented migrants from Brazil.)
Do you think that will stop a significant number of them from trying to move to northern European countries like the UK, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, etc?
Latin American Spanish speaking migrants? Not many will prefer northern Europe, being unable to speak the lingo and getting extra cold and rain, no.
I'm allowed to make fun of the Greens btw, since, unlike I expect 95% of those expressing an intention to vote for them, I've read their last three GE manifestos. Not entirely terrible.
I'm allowed to make fun of the Greens btw, since, unlike I expect 95% of those expressing an intention to vote for them, I've read their last three GE manifestos. Not entirely terrible.
Still a league below Count Binface's manifestos. On both comedy and policy.
Big speech coming tomorrow from Polanski it seems.
Universal benefits for all.
He did in the past talk about Universal Basic Income .
Sounds like great fun in the new Green utopia .
I can get stoned , and have the state pay for that and my munchies !
The IFS looked at it and said if it was say £400 a month it would cost 200 billion pounds a year .
Maybe Polanski was stoned when he came up with this idea !
Growth is not a thing to be sought, and you can just print money, it'll be fine.
In other news, I'm about to be announced as the next Green Party spokesgenderfluidperson for Finance.
"Maybe Polanski was stoned when he came up with this idea !"
This is one of the things that really annoys me about where the Greens are and how the media and commentors respond (and not having a go at you personally):
Citizen's income (Universal income) has been Green policy for forever (ok - not literally - about thirty years).
It is NOT fucking Polanski's idea nor is it "Polanski's Green Party" as ever single newspaper article begins at the moment.
Conference makes policy. And the policies are all written up in the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society.
May be stuff full of what others consider batshit material but it 'aint Polanski.
Comments
Best guess: it's either a shit ammonite or a large coprolite (ie: fossilised shit)
Or it is more likely something I have never heard of?
p.s. I'm no longer in Newham, having crossed the river to Greenwich six months ago.
For all I know stopping petrol exports would not necessarily be a great idea either, but it's probably not as monumentally stupid as is being portrayed.
No local elections here, but someone is worried about holding their formerly safe seat.
#!/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL
$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa
2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]\EszlXx++p|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print
pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m,($w=2*$d-1+length$n&~1)/2)
One of the gravest indicttments of the UK political elite is the dumb fuck stupid way they went into negotiations with the EU. And here I am mainly blaming Brexiteers like David Davies and John Redwood and Boris himself, all of them, Wankers
It was plainly apparent that the EU would not only play hardball in the Brexit negotiations but DELIBERATELY try to make it all as nasty as possible, and as wounding as possible for the UK economy, so no one would copy the UK in leaving. It really was a punishment beating. And it still is - see the way we generously allow EU citizens to use e-gates into Britain and yet this is very much not reciprocated. The entire EU felt menaced by our departure and it still does, if we ever prosper it will give other countries ideas
Yet somehow the bright folk in the Brexit camp didn't foresee this and they went in breezily expecting a kind of amicable dissolution of a fun but failed company. Twats
https://bsky.app/profile/chriso-wiki.bsky.social/post/3mjhxjryzmn2i
*yes, I know
I believe you that it is good but then your photo is terrible! But gratz on finding it, Finding fossils is deeply rewarding. I have only found a small handful of genuinely interesting examples, in my entire life
I'm looking forward to more going up, as I'm hoping to catch a single lamppost, probably in Lindley ward, with nine or ten candidate posters on it.
Time to break out the local election avatar....
I remember that created a glut of cheap beef for a while, but a rebound was inevitable.
Trump is an even bigger scapegoat now, of course.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy511nln2xvo
Spain approves plan to give around 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status
What is the oldest thing in my house?
There's a well over 100 year old apple tree at bottom of garden. Planted long before any of the surrounding houses were built. But does that count? Outside the house. Inside. Hmm. This has me stumped. Edwardian dining room table inherited on my wife's side probably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frost,_Baron_Frost
So we want it all to work better and have our cake and eat it.
It's no different in other domestic political issues.
Interesting that most of them are Latin American.
(Portugal has a similar -if smaller- issue with undocumented migrants from Brazil.)
Far closer than the big 74% of Labour and 71% of LD 2024 voters who would vote Remain and the unsurprisingly still large 72% of 2024 Reform voters who would vote Leave
Alternatively and more practically, buy some lovely old ceramics. I bought this the other day, It is sublimely beautiful. It is LITERALLY 200 years old and it is exquisite. As good as it looks in the photos if not better. £30. That's all. thirty quid!
Every time I use it I get a buzz. It's like owning a Raphael painting that also hoovers the living room, £30
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396513942806
These conical bore wooden flutes were typical of the flutes used at the time in orchestras, to be replaced in the second half of the century by Boehm-system flutes which had a different design that enabled a greater volume (and various other changes in key and fingering).
This meant that there was at the time a surplus of the older-style of flute that orchestral musicians weren't interested in, so they were picked up cheaply by Irish musicians and have become the standard design for Irish traditional music.
We found a Rudall & Rose flute in the Edinburgh instrument museum, but it had been allowed to dry out and so was badly cracked and was no longer playable.
So your immigration control is only as strong as your weakest member.
Actually strictly speaking a detectorist found the coins while detecting with our permission and gave us one. The pottery was just sitting in the upper field after ploughing.
But how big is your flat? Seems to be a lot of stuff coming in at the moment!!!
https://x.com/revishvilig/status/2044020158713245879
I'm nearly at the end, I've reached the point where I have two Georgian decanters on my two windowsills, one for each balcony, plus iridescent 1910 Bohemian glass watering can on one side and 200 year old silver lustreware jug on the other doing the same job, That is to say: nearly replete. I will be a little sad when it is finished, but also pleased
My aim was to make every corner of my flat interesting, old, beautiful, storied, even the bloody bathroom, and I think I have succeeded. My soap dish is now an English latten fingerbowl from the 15th century (probablly made in Nuremburg) filled with shells (I found) and crystals and pretty rocks (I bought), it works weirdly well
On the effects of junior doctors: Residencies in the US typically begin on July 1st. Some think it wise to avoid US hospitals, if possible, for the whole month of July. (Descriptions of the residents' first month often sound more like hazing than training, at least to me.)
Also on junior doctors, some will be reminded by the key insight from "The Mythical Man Month".
Fossils are brilliant, finding them yourself is brilliant-er
The government never really accepted the fact it was the commission they needed to do a deal with, not a handful of national leaders. And the commission had a series of standard templates for how trade and regulatory relationships worked with non member states: EFTA/EEA, CU, association agreements etc. plus a bespoke agreement with Switzerland that was the product of decades of iteration, not a few months of talks.
The UK should in my view have picked a template off the shelf, got a nice relatively trouble free exit, then continued to iterate over the following years - as indeed is finally happening now.
Universal benefits for all.
"We certainly don’t want the French anywhere near these negotiations; we’d like to keep them as far away as possible from pretty much everything- particularly peace negotiations" says Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter to i24NEWS'
Tony Diver
@Tony_Diver
EXC: A Telegraph MRP poll ahead of the local elections finds Labour will be pushed into *third place* at the Welsh elections next month.
It will be the first time in more than a century Labour does not control Wales.
https://x.com/Tony_Diver/status/2044138104106475810
Aaron Bastani
@AaronBastani
Labour has won in Wales in every general election since 1922. And in every Senedd race for 27 years.
Reform are about to beat them in the country of Nye Bevan, Raymond Williams and the Manics. It’s massive.
And an extra oil and gas tax on polluting north sea types.
It’s eroded Pearl soap with some free posh hotel soap pressed into it. I am weirdly frugal about soap
Anyway the soap is balanced on a selection of rocks and fossils and shells that I either found myself or bought. They are all in a “latten bowl”, a fairly regular alloy bowl made from the 14th-17th centuries. Various indications suggest mine is about 15th century, probably used as a “hygienic” finger bowl between courses (we still ate with our fingers?!)
Next to it are some shells I found and then a massive trilobite I bought. You can see its compound eyes. It was unstable when I bought it so I gorilla glued some fossils and crystals to the bottom to give it a stable base then spray painted them black to match the trilobite
Now it glares at me as I shower, from 400 million years ago
Is that too much info? Soz boz
It is tempting to liquidate...
The unusual features of 2019-24 were that Starmer had to change mode in autumn 2022 for some reason, and Sunak went Moon on a Stick in the dying year or so if his government.
So what's Polanski's game?
To take this example, is the Spanish government giving legal status via the Residencia Temporal visa? In which case they have a one year visa, which can be extended twice for two years apiece. Or are they being given status via the Tarjeta de Larga Duración, in which case they are on a path to citizenship?
It was not just the UK side which was acting on emotion, and the people directing the bureaucrats will have had an incentive for things to have been made as difficult as possible, to further demonstrate the undesirability of our act. I don't even blame for that, it is not a totally illogical position, but I do hold firm to the view that it was not emotional and irrational UK actors against a calmly and reasonably rational EU set of actors. They were just playing their role better, as they had the stronger hand.
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Plaid Cymru is set to emerge as the largest party in Wales, with Labour pushed into third place behind Reform UK.
Labour is also facing a Reform rout across England, with the near-total collapse of the Red Wall and the loss of stronghold councils held since the 1970s."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/04/14/labour-set-to-lose-control-of-wales-for-first-time-poll/
That may happen in several cases, but screwing up that badly is not actually that easy on a local council, I would think many will not be dislodged at the next term, and as with others national swings will be more important than presuming Reform will face extra punishment - the potholes and bins will be as good, or as bad, as they ever were in most cases.
Despite talk of a Green Party surge in Wales, the party looks to have been constrained by support for Plaid and is forecast to win just three seats....Of the 136 English local authorities facing elections, Labour currently controls or is the coalition leader in 83.
The party could suffer its worst night in local election history – winning just 42 authorities – with almost half of that total in London.
The expected Green surge in the capital will split the Left vote, but Zack Polanski’s party is set to gain control of just two of London’s 32 boroughs...At the highest end of predicted results, Nigel Farage’s party would gain control of up to 69 councils – half of the number voting this year – by gaining support from Labour voters in the Red Wall and Conservatives in the East of England.
Even on a more modest prediction, it would net 56 councils, compared with 42 for Labour, 17 for the Liberal Democrats and 15 for the Conservatives....Kemi Badenoch’s Blue Wall of shire councils across the south of England is also set to crumble.
Reform is on course to seize Essex, the county council including Mrs Badenoch’s own constituency, along with Suffolk and Norfolk.
The Tories are also on course to lose East Sussex, West Sussex and Hampshire, finishing second or third behind either the Lib Dems or Reform. The Tories’ vote share could fall as low as 15 per cent in East Sussex.'
As opposed to just terrible.
I did enjoy the Scottish Greens double-lock on all benefits policy, if only because it highlights how absurd the triple-lock is.
Sounds like great fun in the new Green utopia .
I can get stoned , and have the state pay for that and my munchies !
The IFS looked at it and said if it was say £400 a month it would cost 200 billion pounds a year .
Maybe Polanski was stoned when he came up with this idea !
In other news, I'm about to be announced as the next Green Party spokesgenderfluidperson for Finance.
This is one of the things that really annoys me about where the Greens are and how the media and commentors respond (and not having a go at you personally):
Citizen's income (Universal income) has been Green policy for forever (ok - not literally - about thirty years).
It is NOT fucking Polanski's idea nor is it "Polanski's Green Party" as ever single newspaper article begins at the moment.
Conference makes policy. And the policies are all written up in the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society.
May be stuff full of what others consider batshit material but it 'aint Polanski.