It's always vingt-cinq and cinquante in my experience, maybe I've been in too many out-of-town budget hotel bars at 11pm.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
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It's always vingt-cinq and cinquante in my experience, maybe I've been in too many out-of-town budget hotel bars at 11pm.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Yeah, people on single claims living together is probably 90% of what I report, with the other 10% being self employed people not declaring it. They do nothing about either.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Tell us more about being propositioned Spikey...
Don't we all have a red line amount of misery that we'd suck a council worker off to escape from? Some of us might sink lower than others, I suppose.
Do you still have that drawer full of bungs from your boss?
So you think that your government is shit, but you want them to take more money and power? You don't see the issue there?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Don't tax the wealthy. Trickle down economics will make sure we're all rich.
All that taxing the wealthy on their assets does is make you feel better, they will just dodge it or move abroad to an even greater extent than they already do.
Council tax is the big one for me, you need to start hitting huge valuable homes hard, as that's a tax you can't dodge or hide in the Cayman Islands. We're still doing council tax on 1991 bands which is insane. Might also help unscrew the housing market, which is why they won't do it.
:lol:
That one's sensible. Gets the kid a place to study that isn't bothered by the press. £20k flat in London is clearly some kind of hovel anyway.
Starting an argument with the NHS and refusing to back down when you're supposed to be the party on their side is pretty impressive as well.
That sounds like the sort of paid-for educational advantage that ought to come with a VAT bill.
No, I'd like them to stop squeezing the middle and address wealthy people finding ways to avoid paying their share.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Let's say your government manages to get the 'fair share' of taxes out of all those rich assholes and/or that council tax mentioned above. Then what? Do you really think they'll manage to put even a single pound of that into good use?
Of course not, they'll waste it wherever it comes from, but they're going to do so anyway, so who gets rinsed is all there is left to argue.
Then you should focus on getting rinsed less first as opposed to others getting rinsed more.
I do like reading about all those corruption scandals. Reminds me a bit of Mexico. 🙂
Sir Beer Korma (we should have known) isn't even the biggest problem with this government, that is the Foreign Secretary, who is a walking fucking embarrassment and needs to be sacked really urgently before he makes a serious mess. Never seen anyone so out of their depth.
They're not buying somewhere for 20 grand. That'll have been rent for a few months.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
He was praising Azerbaijan for doing some ethnic cleansing the other day.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Oh. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
Jesus. :happycry:Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
You could just about buy a burger and aQuote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
pint50cl glass of beer in London for 20 grand.
This stuff really isn't a good look when you've spent the last few years telling everyone how corrupt the tories are and you're meant to be the good guys.
Emperor Farage gets a step closer.
Given he hasn't actually really made (m)any unpopular decisions yet this is grim stuff as well.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgn155lr1ro
I'm not reaching for the lettuce just yet but he seems to have a huge blind spot when it comes to how messaging works and the impact of doing it badly.
I can't get enough of this shit. :drool:
I read a good post on it earlier speculating that they simply can't conceive of how it looks bad because it was all declared and 'within the rules', like they sub-contract all of their thinking and morality out to wanky process, and it sounds like the most convincing explanation.
I just want to live in a serious country with competent leaders.
This is the last thing they wanted to happen.
That depends on the criminals, really.
Is Ian Huntley still going? What about that rapist murderer cop? Have they mistakenly released Charles Bronson or whatever name he goes by now?
All this Labour freebies shit. Surely is being fed by the Tories, just turn the fire back on them because what they would have been taking would more than likely have been ten times worse.
When I read Guido's headline 'Starmer used Alli penthouse for Queen tribute' I was imagining him breaking out the feather duster for a rendition of I Want To Break Free.
They will have done but that doesn’t matter now as they’re not in power and gave up on looking competent and having integrity years ago anyway. Labour should have been different. They were promising they’d be different.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
Of course it is, but it's also true and a bad look when Labour made so much noise about similar when in opposition.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
If you win votes on being the party of working people, you need to act like you're the party of working people. If people vote in the party of coke-snorting aristocrats then they at least know what they're getting.
I was just thinking thought he was an Arsenal fan wants he doing hanging around with Dele Alli?Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c756d56d2dro
Seems a sensible move. :face:
It's something the UK left needs to detach itself from, this sort of immature posturing about people it doesn't like. Take the fucking money. You can think about your principles when the place isn't a decaying mess.
Indeed. It's not as if you have to behave sycophantically around him either if he is there, but to not invite the World's richest man to a top investment summit is just pathetic, made all the worse on the back of recent events. If you're going to compromise your moral outlook could you do it with Elon and hand the Taylor Swift tickets back please.
The more I think about it I'm actually angry. Telling average people they're going to have to take a lot of pain (when all of the average people know the very rich won't) and simultaneously publicly snubbing a man who could put billions upon billions into our economy is madness.
I think it's a great move. Fuck him and his money.
Why are you two salivating over Musk, show me a project he's involved in that isn't a shit show. How's that hyperloop that was going to be far superior to rail coming along?
He's crying about Labour pulling the AI project he was balls deep in under Rishi's lot, Musk only 'invests' when the majority of the cash is put up by the state.
He's a retard, but he's a very powerful retard. In an ideal world, he'd be strapped to the front of one of his rockets and be fired at the sun, but this - quite obviously - is not an ideal world, so turning the nations nose up at him and his future projects, is unwise in a financial sense.
We seem to realise this when it comes to arms sales and being complicit in the murder of civilians across Palestine and Eastern Africa, so I'm not sure why we suddenly have a conscience when it comes to him. I guess being mates with Trump is somehow a worse crime than dead toddlers in Yemen:
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I mean, you can't seriously believe this. You might think he's a twat, but that doesn't mean he's bad at business (which Spikey has covered).Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
Outwith Musk generally, why is the viewpoint he now seems to align with so utterly obsessed with paedophiles?
He was matey with Epstein and Maxwell.
If the decadent elite (as opposed to the virile strongman elite) are all paedophiles then it justifies everything else that the easily-led already want to think about them. Might even be true to a limited degree.
Tesla build quality is dogshit and their EVs are worse than the offerings from traditional car companies. Their output is worse, google about the bumpers falling off in the rain. He bought Twitter for a ludicrous amount, rebranded to something no-one except him cares about, reinstated all the stuff that is cancer to advertisers and said 'fuck them' then cried when they left his platform.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Aformentioned hyperloop being crap. Paypal he was twice ousted from the board for being shit and only when he fucked off was it sold for a profit.
He is a guy born into wealth who has landed on his feet, now cultivating his image as a genius to people who don't understand what he is talking about. He delegates the real work to cleverer subordinates and takes the credit (see taking everyone else's name off the Neuralink research).
I wouldn't trust him to wire a plug.
I firmly believe that the surplus of nonces amongst the elites is similar to the various rich fuckers dying climbing mountains or climbing into shitty submarines.
It tends to be risk takers that get rich and successful, and the thing with risk takers, is they have to take bigger and bigger risks that are more and more extreme to get the buzz they're chasing. Now, surround those same people with people that only ever say yes to them and it's a race to depravity and suicidal behaviour of one form or another.
It tends to be rich arseholes that spawn even richer arseholes, to clarify that for you.
Musk isn't a risk taker, nor is he a visionary. He's a cunt.
He's worth $228bn, he wasn't born into wealth of anything like that. And you don't need to trust him to wire a plug, he's overseeing/running businesses, not working on a production line.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
As for him being a genius or not, it's irrelevant, he's worth $228bn dollars, which doesn't just happen through luck or hard work, despite what people may claim - There is clearly some very high form of talent there, which is obvious when one takes the politics/personality out of it and looks at it objectively.
None of this is at all important if he wants to chuck several million into some investment here.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
Yes Yev it's definitely not related to him manipulating unregulated crypto markets by posting Doge memes periodically.
He's dripping with money, the thicker he is the better, frankly. Fleece him.
And to focus in on this bit (as I see this terrible take time and time again) that is literally a very valuable skill to possess as a leader and certainly not a stick to beat him with.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
He takes the credit as he's the public face of his organisations and if the people involved perceived him to be unduly taking the credit then presumably they'd have left his organisations ages ago.
Fuck, if only I'd realised sooner that he'd built all of his two hundred and twenty-eight billion dollar net worth from doing that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
The problem with Musk, is that he does say alot of retarded shit. HOWEVER, this seems to be the key to grifting the Right. As far back as George Bush, this was the case. The geezer made a reputation for himself being a decent politician, but he only broke through when he dialled up the accent and started deliberately mispronouncing words. I think the same is probably true of Trump. I highly doubt he's as stupid as he pretends to be. Over here, Boris Johnson obviously played the same part.
It's probably linked to the left being so aggressively academic. The right is now anti that and, here we are.
Indeed. Not a chance Musk is actually stupid and you can see as much when he isn't trolling for the lols, like when he eviscerated that BBC interviewer.
I mean if you read accounts from people who've worked for him he does sound like a genuine moron. His companies sound like they are entirely structured to placate him whilst allowing others to get on with the actual work. He seems to just flounce about demanding completely impossible things he doesn't understand whilst people try to pander to it without letting him destroy what they're doing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Luck is a bell-curve. Someone has to be the person who fell on the far, far right of the curve. Musk seems to be that person.
I'm not sure if that was tongue in cheek, but just in case it wasn't:Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
In February 2018, Musk made headlines when he referred to his wealth during Elon's teen years in an interview with Business Insider South Africa. Musk described having "so much money we couldn't even close our safe" and mentioned his emerald dealings. Snopes confirmed that Errol at some point owned "a stake in an emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia".
There will always be people who're out to knock you (particularly those who've left under a cloud) and it's good copy to read about his eccentricities (which he clearly has). I just really struggle to believe that his businesses work in spite of him, time and time again, if he's actually useless. I've seen enough shit leaders to know that it'll actively harm the business if they're that bad.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
I don't know if you and others are innumerate, but you understand the difference between $100m, which a lot of people have and $228bn, which only he has, right? One is 0.04% of the other.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Criticizing his businesses and ignoring SpaceX, which ushered a new era of private space exploration is pretty lol. Also, I've been talking shit about Tesla for a long time, but without it, electric cars would be way behind where they currently are. No traditional company had any interest in them until Tesla started selling them at a decent rate.
Becoming the single wealthiest person in the world by sheer luck would be like breaking the 100m world record by luck.
A spot on analogy that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Nah mate, if random TTHer had inherited one million he would be even more successful.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
You said he wasn't born in to wealth lol...Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
There is wealth and wealth. Like saying someone who won a Nobel prize has no merit because their mother taught at the local community college.
Innumerate and illiterate. Congratulations.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Indeed and is exactly what I said. I despair sometimes, I really do - I'm old now, it shouldn't be this easy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Completely stupid analogy actually.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Only if one doesn’t understand how much $228bn actually is. It’s obviously built up over a lifetime so this comparison needs that context but it’s more than the GDP of three quarters of the countries in the World.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
SpaceX is wild and Tesla's given the electric a visibility (and viability... ish) that otherwise wouldn't have happened. Part of that is down to business sense and his ability to get people onboard. Tesla especially feels like a market leader rather than a bandwagon jumper.
He is also names his kids stupid names, has a shit Elden Ring build and thinks an underground tunnel full of lithium-powered cars has no downsides.
EDIT: Also PayPal. I'm of the opinion his mate did most of the coding but Musk had to sell that and that's now part of the banking fabric.
Ok I'll add that $100,000,000 isn't wealth to my notes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
I’m trying to understand here, so.. is the perspective that past a certain point all wealth is the same? If so, what’s that point?Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
You made it out like he's a self made man. He's not. He's got immense privilege and is a massive cunt. The two exact things you need to become an extremely rich, massive cunt.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
I absolutely did not, I said he didn’t come from wealth of anything like $228bn, which he didn’t.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
I think they should have invited him because responses like this proves he's a very normal human.
"I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts," Mr Musk claimed on X.
Jimmy nailed it really. He might be whatever you want, but you should be trying to get him to toss some money your way. Not like all of Britain's allies and partners are vetted for being 'normal', are they?
Mostly the last part. It seems a bit petty and only then leads to whataboutery when the list of actual invitees is scrutinized, which wouldn't have happened had they not gone for this snub.
No, it just makes no sense.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
You can make "good" investment decisions purely by luck. If a trillion people with zero knowledge or skill were all given a load of money and all asked to make a series of investment decisions, some would get all the decisions right and get extremely rich by chance.
You cannot run faster than your physical limit by chance.
That's some outrageous cope right there.
Andrew Marr's coming for the Magics of the world.Quote:
Marr, who was born in Glasgow, highlighted the signs at Edinburgh’s Haymarket train station as an example. Since 2010, it has had signs declaring it to be “Margadh an Fheoir”, which translates as “market of hay”.
He also attacked Scottish “exceptionalism”, describing it as “one of the most offensive loads of tripe in modern politics”.
The former BBC political editor criticised “the Scottish Nationalist view that if you’re Scottish, you’re a better person; because you’re Scottish you’re more innately liberal; because you’re Scottish you’re more progressive”.
The point is that it's just as impossible to win the 100m by luck as it is to accrue a net worth of $228bn by luck.
There's also a difference between being extremely rich and having a net worth of $228bn, which he hasn't made solely through investment decisions. He's not just investing, he's heavily involved in running things.
It's actually just FACHTs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Nah Yev, he just starts companies and then poof... instabillions, completely out of nowhere. Pure luck
This is a stupid argument, but no, it isn't. One is literally impossible. The other is not literally impossible.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Agreed it's a dumb point to get stuck on. So given he isn't just an investor, do you genuinely think he has accrued his net worth through luck?Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
And who else in the World's rich list has relied on luck, either exclusively or heavily?
I do find discussing him fascinating as you can nearly always tell instantly as soon as you know someone's political leanings what they will think of Musk. If you're more left he's a lucky fucker who has done nothing to achieve his position, whereas if you're more right he's a genius who is worth listening to on every subject going. Both of which are stupid takes, but the left sided one more so.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
If we're being sincere then I obviously have no idea.
Giving credit to a rich/successful person for anything is akin to joining the KKK nowadays.
Here's the test: if Elon Musk wanted to donate £10 billion to the NHS (which admittedly would only fund it for 16 days, but let's run with it), and in return he wanted an A3 photo portrait of himself installed in every hospital wing in the country for those 16 days, would we do it?
The NHS managers would find a way to pay £10 billion for the A3 pictures.
Tell him to shove his money up his arse and put a portrait of a minority nurse up instead.
Yeah, some of the things he says hurt my feelings. He can keep his money.
One of these days one of those managers will get lucky and solve all of the NHS's issues by accident.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
:D My first response was going to be yes, if he pays for the picture installs too.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
Musk isn't thick and probably is lucky. He clearly has some weird interconnection between all his endeavors and probably thinks he's the savior of the species on another planet. But definitely right now, his mind is completely pickled due to either Twitter brainrot or the ket.
Definitely past his prime.
He never had the makings of a varsity athlete.
Pretty much this, yeah. He was born the son of a millionair. So yes, he's lucky, there's no argument on that, but thick people don't take that lucky start and make themselves the richest man on earth.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kikó
Now, while he isn't thick, he does say some incredibly thick things. But then, they're the things his thick fans believe, so that's the brand.
He definitely gives off Evil Billionaire vibes rather than savior ones though.
Can't wait for him to fire the paedos to Mars.
https://youtu.be/_U-7L1tmBAo?si=OB7-7GcZLT-_t0K8Quote:
Originally Posted by Manc
Crazy to think Keir Starmer personally flew him back and released him.
Elonm Usk.
The thing I find most offensive about Musk is how cringeworthy he is. Look at the fucking state of this:
I had a nightmare last night that I went to a pub and they insisted on pouring 15% of the pint away before serving it, claiming it was a 'benefit'. First time proposed government policy has ever impacted my sleep, bravo Small Beer Kier.
Musk is a weird one because my instinctive reaction to lefties claiming he's a talentless moron who has done nothing of value and got where he is out of pure luck is to roll my eyes, yet literally everything I see him do and hear him say is just absolutely preposterous and he's clearly such a fucking weirdo.
On balance I think he has been very lucky and owes a fair amount of his success to happenstance, and that he definitely is a total idiot in a lot of ways, but that he obviously has a lot of talent and is mostly a self-made bazillionaire. It's just that the latter isn't really a net positive for society as a whole, and I don't think we really need to look to him as some kinda thought leader. It's a bit like how I feel about Alan Sugar and Vince McMahon, yeah well done you've made loads of money but you're also a fucking nob head and most of your ideas are fucking stupid.
Can anyone name me a nice billionaire plzthx
Richard Branson's probably alright.
Bill Gates is the best.
When I say nice I mean human. Caring. Empathic. Kind.
Warren Buffet.
I guess it depends on whether you think space exploration and electric vehicles are a "net positive" to society or not. There is also the whole satellite internet thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by igor_balis
Alternatively, let's say that president-queen Kamala 'Kamala' Harris's government seized all of his shares in SpaceX, Testa, Twitter, etc. sold them off, and used all of the money to do U S of A government things. Do you think we would be better off?
You were much more fun when you were a scumbag Magic.
Sold them off to who? Another bazillionaire? Doesn't really change anything does it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Those people would presumably do worse jobs of it, which is why they don't own the space internet company to begin with.
But on the same token, Musk owned companies have benefited from those very same government subsidies. Both compliment each other to achieve certain breakthroughs (namely in space).Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Austria. :facepalm:
:lol:
Kamikwazi the budget and he's gone.
It's just so depressing. Where are all the leaders? I can't think of a single politician that I'd want to be PM. Just useless cunts as far as the eye can see.
Stay the course, damn it.
People have very fucking short memories. Are they fucking goldfish?Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
They're just doing the same thing they did under the Tories. "This lot are shit, let's give the other lot a go". A nation of deeply stupid people.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
I'd be interested to see the Reform UK figures.
I was talking to my dad about this the other day and said to him as a country we probably just need Farage to win an election. Then everyone can see just how shit he is and how much of a chancer and maybe things can settle down a bit. Everything is seen through the lens of him calling everything suit for the past 20 years and making it seem that is easy to fix but never having to show how he would actually fucking fix it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
He's already started being alot more moderate with his language. He called mass deportations "impossible" the other day and said he doesn't really care about immigration as long as they integrate properly. I can't work out if he's doing it because he knows he needs to be more moderate to have a chance or because he knows he'll have no more luck stopping illegal immigration than anyone else has.
People generally are thick as shit and spend the majority of their democratic currency voting directly against their own interests because they are so easily manipulated. Blah blah I sound like a cunt, but it is so obviously true.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
It's one poll gents. No chance Rishi would actually win if there was an election again tomorrow.
Oh I know. I also can't see Reform ever getting anywhere near power. The greater likelihood is that voter turnout will just continue to plummet to the point where no party can truly say they have a mandate to govern and even less will get done.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Who needs a government anyway? Top Ireland a great example.
Lol she definitely got caught by a colleague trying to brief Johnson
I believe her. She's never briefed the Tories in advance on anything before.
It does seem a rather extraordinary mistake to make.
My guess is she meant to BCC and CC'd and realised she was cooked.
Yep, that's absolutely what she's done.
I am not averse to a bit of shenanigans but surely you just whatsapp it to him separately. Very clumsy tradecraft to bcc him on the same email (I'm presuming it must be an email or how would they find out, he can't be in their slack group).
Feels like a pretty good summary of things. The media needs to be binned along with our politicians.
Ashworth lost his seat. He's about as relevant as me.
He was going to be their Paul Boateng.
That's the point. He's never off the fucking TV now. He'll probably get a peerage and be back in the cabinet in the not too distant future. In the meantime he's got his cushy job as head of Labour Together now.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
Even when you vote them out, you can't flush these turds.
There will always be a political-media blob of some sort. Someone has to be the conduit between high politics and the people, unless you want the people only to be fed lines directly from politicians on the terms of those politicians. A completely independent media would result in pretty much that happening, so the media have to have relationships with politicians to oil the wheels of the system (oil of course just one of many lubricants that eases things along). Everyone within the blob is acting rationally in their own interests, and the blob and how it behaves is the sum total of the convergence of those interests. To take away their right to do so you have to have an external controlling authority preventing them from doing so, and then you're not a democracy.
Wanting journalists to actually hold politicians to account is anti-democratic now, right.
We all want journalists to hold politicians to account but that means, as a public, we have to sponsor the journalism, because it's only in our interest that that happens and not in the interest of the politicians. That means paying money for our news, which evidently people are not willing to do. This is what leaves you with the blob media being the only media. What has been the narrative surrounding BBC news (the only news we do all pay for) during Laura Kuennsberg's time? Huge pressure exerted on it by various political factions upset that they perceive the beeb not to be acting as clients for their favourites. That's what causes someone to fund GB News or the Telegraph or Novara or whatever. It used to be that people would fund public-interest news because they could make money selling it, but that's no longer the case.
Blob media is inevitable, and Jon Ashworths will always populate it, the problem for us as a public is that it is now a far larger percentage of all media than it used to be.
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced Baz is right and the only answer is just to stop paying attention to any of this shit. We're not going to change anything whether we want to or not, so why bother?
Exactly this. I stopped following it all about a year ago and it's been much nicer. Why bother worrying about something your have such little influence over.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
The other problem is publications like Private Eye exist but people don't care, too many words in small print, where's the tits and football scores. Never mind the wider issue of people not wanting to know things that go against their ingrained beliefs. There's a reason the reading age of a tabloid newspaper is 3.
I think those people also want simple answers to complex questions. You could try to explain to them the inner workings of the CPS (or the justice system in general) but they'd prefer to hear that Keir Starmer was 100% responsible for Jimmy Saville and Al Fayed getting away with it.
Sue Gray resigning is a bit :cab:
Has she been shunted into a better paid position or something?
She lost the factional struggle against Morgan McSweeney's lot.
You just know these benders treat dripping to journalists like they're running IRA informers.
Such a bunch of small-time pygmies these days in both parties. SKS must be properly useless as well to allow this kind of student politics squabbling to dominate three months into power.
What's happened to the Establishment? Bring them back.
Genuinely astounded that the Tory MPs have managed to punt Cleverly from the leader race. He's likeable and genial which is about as much as they can hope to offer up against weirdo robot Starmer. Jenrick is dead behind the eyes and Badenoch is an ideologue and alienates half the electorate. Just complete idiocy.
If Jenrick's parents were common scummers how was he privately educated?
EDIT: Just reading about the Westferry approval...what a disgusting little cunt he is.
Jenrick must have so much dirt in his back catalogue it's going to be hilarious if he wins. Apparently a lawyer, went to Russia, then became an auctioneer, then up to his neck in all sorts of planning sleaze as an MP. A solid choice for the membership.
How did all the grown-ups-in-the-room Tugenhat moderates break to the two most extreme candidates? Are they just all complete idiots?
I suppose they could have been trying to lend their votes to Jenrick to try and oust Badenoch (who is the favourite to win with the members), while Jenrick voters might have responded by switching to Badenoch to try and oust Cleverly.
The idiot thesis probably more plausible.
It's not about that, it's about who can do the most favours for the richest people in the country. Moderates won't do that.
Cleverly got fewer votes than yesterday? :cab:
Yep, it's the idiot theory.
We're getting a Farage government in five years aren't we?
Nigel has a hard ceiling, too many people will just never vote for him even if the 20-25% who will are really enthusiastic. The only way he'll get 100+ seats is if immigration starts to properly dominate politics, like, people start seeing it as more important than the NHS, and that will need some fairly dramatic events I think.
He has the enthusiastic numbers, they're just spread out all over the country, which is useless in this system. He's going to need his own versions of Bradford and Luton, but full of gammons. Clacton isn't going to cut it.
James Cleverly was the continuity Do Nothing and Suffer a Record Defeat candidate, so in all likelihood he would have done nothing and suffered another record defeat. That's why all the whammers liked him.
The more you see of Kemi Badenoch the worse she looks, so it's on Big Bob Jenrick to stop us turning into an Indian slum.
You'll never get a Corbyn or Badenoch type figure into number ten, the electorate will just never go for them ever vs a centrist dad candidate unless there's either a sudden and total collapse in living standards or a military coup. Worked for Pinochet I suppose.
I've kind of given up on actually knowing whats going on but looking at the current results, are the Tories voting to continue culture war bullshitters because they think it's how they win and get to do what they actually want or are they so broken brained by reading Daily Telegraph culture war bullshit that they actually believe the culture war is important.
Wasn't project Indian slum kickstarted by big brain right wing culture war experts implementing Brexit by hook or by crook?
Quite.
Although to be fair, it will allow us to go live in India whenever we want and it will stop illegal immigrants somehow.
:eyemouth:
They're not illegal if we let them in, to be fair.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0r82pjd8gpo
Very funny shit, all of this. Both the idiot minister and Starmer look completely pathetic at the same time. Round of applause.
This is far worse than the Musk bollocks because it was palpable investment, you can't really Arthur Scargill it when you juat told everyone to clench their arseholes for massive cuts.
She was right.
Some people would probably prefer to have a job or a billion quid than be 'right'.
And whilst their practices were, at best, unscrupulous, to the extent that they were within the laws of the day, which I assume they were, then they were the responsibility of the government of the day, and, by extension, the people of the day. By all means call out and reform those laws, but there is nothing to be gained from being a person of protest when you are a minister of state.
She was indeed, but it isn't her job to be right.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
And yes, "this". You can't throw moral judgement at a capitalist corporation for taking advantage of lax employment laws.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Nationalise all cruise ships
Why notQuote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
The only thing that has changed since the days of Chimney Sweeps is employment law and human rights law. Left to their own devices, the rich will use and abuse the poor for profit. They're still doing it in Asia and Africa right now. It's pointless expecting morality from these people. If you want them to treat their employees with respect, you have to force them to.Quote:
Originally Posted by igor_balis
But then they won't pay tax because they'll leave the country lol!
Sir Keir Starmer's attempt to define 'working people'. Sounds like some 19th century aristocrat who's just found out about factories.Quote:
He said he thought of a working person as someone who “goes out and earns their living, usually paid in a sort of monthly cheque" and who can't "write a cheque to get out of difficulties".
:D
The length they all go to to demostrate how their lies aren't actually lies is quite something.
Carry on at this rate and they'll be rivalling some of the Tory incompetence, which I genuinely thought was impossible.
The Runcorn MP sparking out a bloke with his hands in his pockets, then whacking him several times on the deck is jolly good sport. Kinder, gentler politics etc.
Budget related moaning.
Not much to day beyond people fearing what cuts might come their way.
Yasmin. :happycry:
Allana apparently had three careers with good pension options but at 70 is paying £800 a month on her mortgage...
Should I be filling my car up today?
Yasmin is a single mother of two? I am sure that Lewis will be shocked.
If it needs doing, sure, why not?Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
I have a date with the pump at lunchtime, 133.9, should see me through until early December when we start recycling the corpses to use as biofuel.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Yeah I saw that. She’s obviously a helmet as is everyone in that article include the They/Them person.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
Nicole clearing the better part of three fucking grand a month (as a single person) in benefits and "freaking out over cuts".Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
I mean they always pick the freaks and/or thick bastards for these types of articles I suppose, but how tone deaf do you need to relay that kind of opinion to a national news outlet.
Luken Coleman works as a Level 3 business administration apprentice for a recruitment agency
This sounds to me like someone is gaming the fuck out of the apprentice system. What the fuck is a business administration apprentice? Also, what sort of name is Luken, spelled like that anyway?
I thought that about that apprenticeship too. Basically getting an office admin for less than minimum wage. What fucking skill is he learning there?
And the stupid name.
My step-brother did an apprenticeship at a builders yard. He spent a year moving heavy shit by hand for £3 an hour, then they let him go and got a new one in. No qualification. No forklift licence. Nothing.
It's a cheap labour scam.
His college day must be going through the most basic Excel shit.
Every time.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
:D
That last photo is superb.
:lol:
:lol:
How on earth do they manage it? Of all the pensioners in the country...
Inclusivity.
I mean if that’s what they want to do then by all means do it. If it’s true they are then blowing a load of money every month though then it’s time to stop moaning.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kikó
The same way they found a single black mum earning £150,000 per year.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Must. Challenge. Stereotypes. At all cost.
Can't help but think with the full names on the article someone at the BBC was setting these people up to be found and ridiculed.
Another lost decade, plus more deliberately destructive tax increases to go with it. But at least a woman delivered the budget so I'm happy.
I've been reading around it this afternoon and it just reads like a huge raid on business so that we can keep on pouring untold amounts of money into the health system.
Where I live it is quite rare for me to have a customer who will exceed the inheritance limit of £500,000. Especially if they are married, moving pensions into IHT is massive it is going to drag so many people in. Just looking at it logically £300,000 for 50% of a house and a £200,000 pension pot which isn't out of the question based on the fact that most people automatically get put into one now anyone is going to be a killer for people in the long-term. It's going to take a long time to hit but once it does it will be huge.
Why are they waiting two years to start taxing vapes as well? Probably for the same reasons they are waiting until next summer to ban the sale of disposable ones.
What's the unspent pension pot thing, is that doing away with 'the wishes' thing where those pensions were outside of the remit of IHT? That'll be absolutely massive and will torpedo a lot of people's plans in terms of ways around IHT.
Are they still banning flavoured vapes or has that been buried due to lobbying?
I can’t believe they left alone the amount you can put into a pension tax free each year, so I’m calling it a win for me personally.
It's easier to tax the dead and this way the get all the Boomers that are already retired too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
I've not got much to worry about from that. The minimum wage bump gives me a pay rise by default (I'm not on minimum wage currently but the hike blasts past my current pay) so I can look forward to that in April.
When it comes down to it, I've benefitted so much from a nation of people that are useless with their money. "People aren't saving enough? Lifetime ISAs. WE'LL GIVE THEM A FREE GRAND EVERY YEAR UNTIL THEY LEARN."
No impact on pension contribution, moderate rise in capital gains.
Fine by me, for now.
Get it in ISA’s you can still invest in whatever you want but then it’s all outside that shit anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by Foe
I’m putting as much into my Isa as I can. Unfortunately, I’ve got more to play with than they’ll let me add into an isa. Will be maximising every year and eventually I’ll be immune to it as you say.
Bazbot vFoe is functioning.
I think the raising of the price on pints outside of a pub and dropping the price of drafts is such perfect neoliberalism.
The pint of a draft dropped 1p to the pub. However the overwhelming majority of the pubs are franchised out by a brewery which will not change their prices. So the only people who actually see any of that money are the 10 or so companies that own 95% of the pubs in the country anyway.
Meanwhile individual drinkers will pay far more than 1p per pint to not drink in a pub. Awesome.
Wait are pint prices regulated? Lmao.
No but there’s tax on alcohol and draft vs cans have seperate tax.
What do you mean drinking outside the pub? As in restaurants, or at home?
I only ever drink in pubs. Restaurants too, but you're there for the food so you'll pay whatever for a pint.
Sounds like it means on-sales vs off-sales.
Pub vs at home/at a a bus stop.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
And Phonics is spot on. You aren't going to price alcoholics out of their alcoholism or, I guess, bring them into the pubs, by changing the prices.
The bloke is an absolute whopper, but Russell Brand nailed this years ago when asked about giving money to homeless people. They may indeed be heroin / crack addicts, but you aren't going to change anything by not giving them money. They will get the drugs either way. They'll find a way.
I might have missed the point of the above discussion, but the penny off beer duty has always been a business benefit rather than a consumer one.
Should make up nicely for their rates relief going from 75% to 40%.
The current end point for society is everyone drinks Brewdog alone in their homes 24/7.
Oh definitely, but as the whooping and hollering of the MP's showed, it's not seen that way. They're trying to sell it as getting people back into pubs, but - even if the saving were passed on, and if it wasn't more than undone by the tax hikes - saving 1p a pint isn't going to stop people from drinking at home. £3.70 a pint or £2.00 for a 2 litre bottle of cider. [BigBrotherVoice] you decide.[/BigBrotherVoice]Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
It's an utter shambles of a budget all round, really.
Stop judging me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
£3.70 a pint?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
I don't know the cost of a pint of milk either. I'm basically Rishi Sunak.Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
£3.70 is pretty much bang on for my local.
It doesn't help the actual pubs though, which is what it's supposed to be virtue signalling towards. It'll just give the massive brewery conglomerates an extra packet on the end of year accounts. It helps absolutely no-one that needs it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Yeah, I assumed the whole thing was a meme type gig that every chancellor is obliged to continue the tradition of. A bit like quizmaster's making the answer to question 1 of any film round Marlon Brando.
Six quid here. It's insanity.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
I have two Surrey pub meet-ups scheduled next week, planning a bank job at the weekend which if successful should allow me to keep both appointments.
It's six quid most places in Belfast these days but that's probably because of our stupid licensing laws. No new licences are ever granted so to open a pub you have to pay big money for an existing licence.
It's around £5-6 by me, and increasing all of the time. I paid £9 for a big Peroni in a restaurant the other day.
It varies massively here. £3.70 is probably right in a 'spoons, more like a fiver in one of the village pubs. Last time I bought a round (a pint, a wine and a couple of J2O's for the kids it was about 18 quid I think.
Not the end of the world, but you could buy 4 cans, a bottle of Rose and pack of fruitshoots for the same in a shop, so it's no surprise they're killing pubs off at the rate they are.
I love the idea of a government worried about its citizens not going to the pub enough.
Same here, apart from Spoons everywhere is at least £5 a pint and that's for the shite.Quote:
Originally Posted by SvN
Top stuff.
:D what are they even complaining about?
Shiver harder grandma.
Service economy innit.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Oh no, they might need to sell one of their SIXTY but to let's.
Presumably they're mortgaged up to the eyeballs and actually own very little.
Yeah, they’re absolute retards.
Servicing debt on nearly £6m must be fun, I assume rents are fairly tragic in Colchester and they'll be getting walloped from all angles as modern-day landlords unless they're of the unscrupulous variety. The valuations will probably be Trumpian as well, so, all in all, lol.
They cut out the lol bit, which is that them 'go[ing] back to full-time working' is them managing all of the properties because the agency they were using put the fees up.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
Going to the bank to cash sixty checks every month is a lot of work.
Nah, I feel like part of the IPA wankery involves forcing it upon others. Typically in a bar setting. As for pint pricing, it's around £2.50-£4 here.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Badenoch wins Tory leadership. The right decision I think, Jenrick is dead behind the eyes and has a grifter's poise. Badenoch is possibly a lightweight but has more about her and probably more malleable to what may well become changing times.
She's a wretched cunt.
The fact that all of the people who killed the party endorsed her tells you all you need to know, and that's without the fact that she appears to get very shirty very quickly under any sort of pressure (not unlike the Prime Minister). I was all for it in whenever it was they did their last contest, but further exposure suggests that she is actually crap. If she makes Honest Bob shadow the Home Office, and lets him devise their not turning the country into India policies, then it might work; but otherwise Nigel will be pissing himself.
I'm surprised you think that. She may well be crap (they all are) but the shirtiness can be weeded out with time and experience, and for the next 2-3 years the policies don't matter anyway. The key thing with Badenoch is she is going to be the only party leader with the combination of intellectual confidence (however thin in reality) and narrative authority to tell immigrant 'communities' where to shove it, which I think is going to be a far bigger rupture between the government and the opposition in the next ten years than is anything to do with economics, much of which is dictated to us anyway. What is 60 year old Nigel going to do, tell everyone that Kemi is a wet liberal and to vote for him and his completely empty words instead? I'm not sure that will wash.
Foreign policy might be a bit of a weakness, but she can presumably drag in some old soldiers (possibly literally) to do that.
Nigel just needs to keep his fifteen per cent or whatever that prevents the Conservative Party from governing and him in national relevance. In the meantime, the Communities will just call her a racist like they did Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, which leaves you with a thin-skinned, foot-in-mouth merchant beholden to the pathetic twat wing of the party. Maybe Labour continues to implode and she wins anyway in 2029, but then you just have that in government instead.
I hadn't appreciated that all those IHT on pensions reforms are merely out for consultation rather than being some set in stone new law. So that's them never happening, at least not retrospectively.
I was speaking to my development manager at Royal London today about this and he said one of the things which they have been told is that they need to pay HMRC the tax and it needs to be paid within 6 months which shows just how out of touch politicians are. Even for well planned out estates 6 months is quick to get the estate settled.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
He said there will be push back from the providers on how some of what is being asked for can be implemented.
It isn't going to happen.
It's wildly unfair and massively moving the goal posts after the fact for some people. There will be all sorts of challenges if they try to push it through. It also has a dangerous public policy impact of deterring people from making provision for their own old age if the taxman can just come along in the future and go, nah, I'll have that. If you're going to pierce the veil of the trust structure then maybe start a bit higher in the wealth spectrum.
That said, most of this is a consequence of the 2015 reforms not being properly thought through in the same way that these haven't.
They're not all over educated though are they as a lot of them have done utterly pointless degrees.
The end of my loan is almost in sight. £300 a month. :sick:
I paid mine back this year, it was a great feeling to be free of it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
Pointless for who though? Certainly not for the highly paid chancellors and provosts.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Middle class on minimum wage? That doesn't sound right.
Ultimately the economy. For university to mean what it should we simply shouldn't have anywhere near 50% of the population going, or whatever % it currently is.
Tell employers to stop requiring degrees for jobs that don't need them then and to do any sort of on the job training.
I was chatting to a mate of mine about this the other week his daugher is 18 and doesn't know if she should go to University. My thoughts are if you want to be something and it needs a degree to do it and you will be well paid once qualified then do it. If you just don't know what to do and are going for the sake of it then don't do it. I have seen so many people down the years who pissed around with History and Geography degrees who have never done anything with the qualification and just piss around in lowly paid jobs never actually paying back their student loan.
Between the student loan stuff and the various child benefit cliff edges there are some really perverse incentives in the British tax system (VAT registration seems another one), and yet everybody in a position to resolve them seems perfectly happy with them, presumably because they are not as obvious as headline rates.
If you're doing history and geography (or politics, as I did) you're not meant to 'do anything with' the qualification, it's an academic degree not a vocational one. A lot of people find this really hard to get their heads around, and I'm not saying that to diss them, it's just an observation.
Not sure about the UK, but over here getting a degree, even in the shit disciplines and despite the lol costs, is worth it when it comes to earnings. I did see a lot of job ads when I was looking without degree requirements, which was nice to see, but then the experience they were asking for is basically impossible to get without a degree in the first place. I would never recommend anyone to skip university unless they are too stupid to finish. Delaying it for a few years would be a good idea for many though.
More testing less degree requirements and several month probationary people would be the way forward, but then people would complain about that too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
Who gives a shit about students? *Spits on floor*
God I wish I'd delayed going to university. At our high performing grammar school, it was basically assumed almost everyone would go, so my thinking as a spasticated 17 year old wasn't "should I go?" or "what is the purpose for me going?" and then working it out from there, it was more well I'm DEFINITELY going, and just sorta picking the subject I enjoyed doing most at A-level.
I went a social anxious mess, so didn't even do the fun making friends stuff, I spent 3 years getting up in the afternoon, playing football manager, then getting pissed with my weirdo mate I'd known from back home and his older brother and his mates who were also at the same university.
A year or two doing menial jobs, a bit of travelling, maybe I'm kidding myself, but i feel like I'd have been far more capable of picking something useful and getting something more worthwhile out of the whole experience.
I mean, I did complete the degree and get a 2.1 but obviously I've done nothing with it. I'm getting on, about to turn 33 (Christ), but maybe it isn't too late to do a vaguely vocational masters of some description. Probably not though.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyjm6nrr0zo
I wonder what you find if you try to dig behind the facade of BROCKWELL GROUP BEXHILL LLP?
I'm glad I went, even if my degree was a waste of time. I grew up a lot and developed some work ethic.
I went too young, it was a disaster, went again at 21 and that did the trick. In classic 21st century man terms I therefore believe everyone should have the exact same experience as me and am calling now for a law to ban university until the age of 21, give people 3 years to go and get a job, then they can choose whether to carry on or whether to go back into full time education. Obviously the universities should be taking account of the contents of those 3-5 years when they consider applications. No timewasters.
Lol, I wish it was the same for me, if anything it did the opposite - I learned pretty early on that my course was dead easy, my peers were thicker than my classmates were at school, so it just enabled my lazy tendancies.Quote:
Originally Posted by SvN
I didn't start a single essay more than 48 hours before it was due, and I think I averaged about 20% attendance over the 3 years, including not going to a single lecture or seminar in my second semester of year 1, so didn't see any of my classmates from December 2010 until September 2011, except exams. Sounds like I'm showing off, but it was absolutely horrendous. I think I had a bit of a mental breakdown really. Part of me thinks getting found out, failing first year and getting kicked out would have done me good in the long run.
Yeah I scraped through, don't think I did much growing up. There were people on my course who I remember thinking "wow you really have your shit together" during first year, and they were generally the ones that lived at home and/or had already had jobs with responsibility, and were the ones that ended up doing well. Most of the people who were wasters at the start (me) were also wasters at the end.
In hindsight I cringe, but considering who I was before uni it was never really going to go any differently. Nearly all 16-20 year olds are so very childish that I think it's a bit of a dead loss projecting your 32 your old self backwards.
So funnily enough, the growing up and work ethic were completely independant of my course, of which I did the bare minimum. It was the job working in a pub kitchen that I needed to survive that actually provided me with the most benefit.Quote:
Originally Posted by igor_balis
My 5 years at uni looked like this:
- First Year: Attempted a Physics degree, but basically did fuck all, pretty much gave up on lectures after a couple of months. Still attended the labs and did the bear minimum. Decided to switch courses before I had chance to fail my exams.
- Started a new course in Computer Engineering. Told myself I was going to do things right this year, but found the course ridiculously easy and stopped attending any lectures or classes after a few weeks. Finally went back in about February and realised they'd moved past the easy stuff and I now had no clue about anything, so stopped attending again. Revised/learned like a lunatic for exams and passed 90 credits, 10 short of passing.
- Told some sob story and they allowed me to re-take the 30 credits part time. So while most of my friends were in their final year, I was doing about 5 hours per week. But my reduced timetable meant I had hardly any student loan, so I had to work for a living (properly) for the first time in my life. Got a job working as a "chef" in a pub, worked my arse off all year and genuinely enjoyed it, and made a lot of friends. Passed the 30 credits and finally moved onto second year.
- Worked quite hard most of the year while still working 25-30 hours per week because my parents couldn't afford to subsidise my student loan anymore. Fair enough, given I was on my fourth year at Uni after starting a 3 year course. Managed to get around 65% overall, which wasn't bad as the course was actually quite tricky, especially the electrical engineering parts.
- Basically got bored, motivation to do well at Uni took a hit after my girlfriend (now wife) moved in with me. Managed to get a 2:2 in the end.
Uni allowed me to come out of my shell a lot, make proper friends, meet girls and understand what it really meant to work for a living. I think there's a realistic chance I'd be a 38 year old virgin if I hadn't gone.
Also - we had no internet access in my first year in halls. Hated it at the time, but it did wonders for me. I would've been camped in my room playing CounterStrike all day/night.
Given he's obviously an intelligent bloke, and he very much knew the question would be coming, I would have thought old Jeremy Clarkson ought to have had a better answer to his own words being put to him on the subject of farms and inheritance tax than saying "typical BBC nonsense" or whatever it was. Yeah, classic BBC, asking people to comment on their own words which have been published nationally and pertain to the matter at hand. Wokerati bullshit!
I'm very much enjoying all the ire this seems to have drawn. Not sure how the politics of it all play out in terms of whether it is worth doing for Labour, but it is quite funny.
The general government line now being, well, you can get around it anyway if you structure things correctly seems like more of an argument against the entire concept of inheritance tax.
What the country really needs is proper reform of laws on the taxation of land.
Good thread here. He'll probably be losing the whip soon.
I feel like the only reason this Rachel Reeves job history stuff isn't gaining a massive amount of traction is because it would open the floodgates.
No one likes a slippery slope.
Problem Starmer seems to have, other than very evidently being a careerist with no real political convictions, is that his comms people are absolute numpties and seem to think that putting this sort of stuff out is in any way a good idea. It reads like something a hostage would be forced to say.
Even something as simple as a Diwali get-together got shambolically handled. A quick google would send them in the right direction instead of a beer and beef buffet.
Starmer's already fighting the last war, the ground has shifted from under him incredibly quickly. Starting to think a huge Reform surge could happen, frankly even if Nigel just locks himself in a fridge for the next year.
I'm all for this, but I'm pretty sure the Tories proposed basically the same thing a couple of years back and Labour were OUTRAGED at the idea.
I'm also not sure why it's restricted to just young people. I hear "I can't work, I have kids" atleast twice a week and I'm yet to have a good response to "can't you work while they're at school?"
The Tory one was mandatory national service unless you paid a fee to get out of it. This is you have to do these things if you haven’t found work to receive the benefits.
I’ve long said the benefits system is fucked in this country. The system I grew up under made so much more sense. Unemployment was after 2 years of contributions you would receive 75% of your salary for 18 months. If you’re still unable to find work after said period you can take a job under the government doing say gardening, paving, road cleaning, binman. Day to day looking after the city stuff for a living wage and enroll in free courses/apprenticeships or you could receive nothing. It’s your choice.
The more obvious thing would be to remove the incentives for people not to work, but that would mean tackling the recent explosion in self-diagnosed shite, gigantic labour surplus, etc. Much easier to force 'young people' to work for their benefits, which companies will be all too happy to abuse, like when they were offering 'training' in stacking shelves.
Nah, not the National Service one. That was just a last minute attempt to win back the pensioners, who seem to want young people to be as miserable as possible.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
I can't remember the details of the Tory one, but Labour essentially just said "THEY'RE ALL QUADRASPAZZED ON A MENTAL HEALTH-GLUG YOU MONSTERS!" and then, like everything the Tories tried, nothing at all happened. Usually for the best, but not in this case.
Recently I've started seeing all the policymaking in this area, and other areas, by both parties, as a conscious attempt to suppress wages at pretty much any cost. I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that, but the world makes a lot more sense viewed through that lens.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Honestly, that's a non-starter. This is a cultural thing, to the extent that we might need to add Benefits-class to the nations class system.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Children of workers grow up to work. Even when it's hard, they juggle it. They find childcare. They struggle through a bad shoulder, etc.
The children of benefit claimants grow up to be benefit claimants. Work is something other people do. It's an abstract idea, it's not something their people do. I've seen that moment if realisation in too many people's eyes.
"I'm just really struggling financially here..."
are you trying to find work?
".........."
It hasn't even occurred to them as an option. They'll beg, pawn things, go to food banks, cool. But not look for work until the idea is introduced to them.
Now, on the other hand most benefit claimants already DO work and they just get benefits to top their criminally low wages. That needs looking at too. Nobody working fulltime should be earning so little that they qualify for Universal Credit.
My short time unemployed in the uk was eye opening in the sense that it was clear neither end of the system worked. The only way to access the job centre was to claim benefits and then the job centres aim was not to find you work but to stop you claiming benefits asap.
I went in there with 15 years of experience in a field where I’d worked for Kensington palace, the UN, the WHO, two international corporations and the only two jobs I was offered the entire time was Insurance Salesman and a Prison Officer. After a few months I was told to take one of those or be sanctioned.
I don’t know when it happened as it wasn’t like that when I was looking for work in university in 2008 but I presume they merged benefits and the dwp at some point and it broke the whole system.
By all means progressively squeeze the benefits as a lifestyle people, but most people are either looking for work or have been allowed to not look for work, and could be incentivised back into it if full-time employment offered better prospects than working ninety minutes away for fuck all or sharing a bedroom with five Indians. When it doesn't, and you can claim an extra wodge for having Mental Health, why bother?
Great, so let's raise the wage you have to pay people so that it incentivises it so they're not competing with people who are trying to share a bedroom with 5 indians or send money back to Poland/Phillipines/Nigeria. Ah wait if we do that you'll complain about inflation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
The foreigners wouldn't be here, and any inflationary pressures would be more than levelled out by also not having to compete with them for housing. Easy. I could solve that and Ukraine by half-nine as well and take the rest of the Parliament off.
From memory, it was mainly filling in your job search every fortnight and showing it to some twat behind a desk. If they don't like the look of it (you could just make shit up, to be honest), then they started looking at sanctions or whatever. I never got anywhere near that. Six months without work wound you up on a New Deal placement which ultimately meant "You're not a jobseeker now. You're in training." Just moving you from one bucket to another, basically. Not that I saw that 13 weeks stint as bad. You wind up either sitting in a room all day looking for jobs or the recruitment agency in charge grabs you an unpaid job placement.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
From my recollection, the two placements I got were as follows:
A computer store - Ran by a complete shitehawk that really loved the free labour. Me and two other lads were upstairs all day trying to cobble together PC's from whatever used stock was there.
Charity shop - Spent most of the time sorting through donation bags looking for good stuff to put on the racks. Not much else to it but some of the people I worked with were definitely incapable of anything else.
For what it's worth, the young faces (me included) seemed more keen to get into work. The older ones were either clearly not fussed or were pigeonholed into one industry that was never going to have them back.
So your solution is to keep everyone so poor that they're equivalent economically to a 5 to a bedroom Indian? Thats your ideal British society?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
No? Wages would rise owing to a significantly reduced labour pool (like they briefly did in 2020 before the government moved to squash it), and external costs would fall for the same reasons (housing demand, taxes, etc.). Everybody wins, except people who think that condemning Indians to warehouse serfdom is somehow the compassionate and sensible thing to do.
Thankfully haven't needed the place in well over 10 years, but can attest to this.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
In one of my later meetings, while waiting in the security guarded(lol) waiting area, I was close enough to hear the guy before me talking to his "advisor." At the time they'd not long switched it from bringing your actual job search book, to doing it all online. You could write any old shite in the book and often you'd see people stood outside the office and sometimes even in the waiting area, scribbling stuff in there to get the nod from their advisor. It was almost impossible for them to check.
The online system time/datestamped everything you did, so no more of that. It also allowed them to send you a "matched vacancy" in-between appointments. If you get one of those it's a vacancy they deem that you must apply for. If you don't do so, immediate sanction and they wont see you for 26 weeks+. I got given one once for a place that was a near hour double bus ride from. They put me straight through to interview, which again is mandatory. I went and the guy explained that there will be a requirement for me to be there for 6am some days. The bus doesn't start running til closer to 7am, so I told him this wasn't possible. He then wondered why I was wasting his time and we ended the interview there. Cut the the job centre hauling me in demanding to know why I made myself unavailable for said job.
In your commitments you agree you will travel for x time each way to enable you to expand your job search, I think at the time it was 90 or 120 mins each way. I only avoided sanctions because he worked it out in front of me that walking there would have taken me a couple of minutes over the time. Had Google maps showed a few minutes fewer, I'd have been cut off.
Anyway, back to the other guy. He was your older Uncle who is useless with technology. He'd ask you over to change a HDMI cable over because he wouldn't know what hes doing. That type. He tried to start his meeting by explaining he had no idea how to fill out his log book on the site but he'd brought things with him. She cut him off telling him she wasn't going to accept that, because only things on the online log book can now be considered and he must have already been shown how to use it. He had a stack of papers with him that she ignored and he asked her to help him fill out an online application for something he had found to which she gave the answer "I'm not here to help you find a job. I'm here to decide if you have done enough to get your payment on this visit."
Also heard a girl before me be told that she must choose between her uni course(whatever it was, she was in a 3rd year of uni) and signing on, because making herself unavailable due to said course broke her work agreement and they wouldn't see her again.
It always felt like you were talking to people who fully believed everything the Daily Mail would write about people on benefits.
This is fantasy land. Companies would just lower production rate leading to less need for people in service roles 50 years after your idol offshored us doing anything useful which would lead to mass unemployment. We’d become Ireland/Portugal with the added negative that we’re incapable of learning a foreign language so we’d be shitty emigrants.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 50 years and the worlds still shit. If you remove 5 people from a bedroom they’re 1) not going to pay 2 strapping Brits the minimum wage + what those 5 lads were earning because 2) those 2 patriots won’t be able to produce as much as the 5 Indian lads.
It just doesn’t work.
Ya bird made globalism happen, it’s too large to fight. The core issue is that we spent the past 15 years of money being free doing absolutely nothing to invest in the country’s growth. We make nothing, our water, our power, our transport even our post office is owned by foreign companies that have no investment in making the country work only to skim profit off the top.
The only thing we had going for us was global finance to skim off and your lot fucked that too in the name of patriotism.
Sanjay isn’t the problem. He’s a symptom.
FAKE NEWS! Or, rather, not really. All they've done is make one full time job, four part time jobs. Which is why we're stuck with record low unemployment AND record high benefit payments at the same time.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
This is the way in Austria too. Seems great on the surface but their populations are much more modest so I'm not sure how well it could work here?Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
Yes the new Labour idea sounds suspiciously like the widely decried Tory scheme where Poundstretcher lay you off then you sign on so you can go and work at Poundstretcher on a benefit placement, costing them nothing.
There is definitely ingrained dependency culture that can become generational, the problem is as stated for every person reckoning they cant work when they definitely can, there's another person wanting to work being treated as a scumbag by the system. Add in the figures have been on the wonk since Blair decided everyone should have a degree to mask the true figure and cause the shit show we see now, it's a mess.
Barrow is an interesting case study, the shipyard is recruiting more heavily than ever, paying massive wages in all areas to the point they've had to agree to stop employing people from the local police, fire, NHS and schools due to people thinking 'fuck this I'll just get £20 an hour to push a mop bucket round instead' and yet, despite all this investment and influx of high salary opportunity, the town is more deprived than ever and has a huge divide between the high flying defence careers and the down and outs claiming benefits until the grave.
Stealing ideas from the other team isn't anything new.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/ta...sto-delivered/
Which is as it should be, the whole point of an opposition being to propose alternatives to what the government are doing.
This is a very bizarre idea of incentives and outputs. If a company can only (not sure why it would only) hire two natives instead of five Indians, investment can also be made into productivity saving measures such as new equipment, training, etc. This country has fewer automatic car washes than it did when we were at primary school. Why? Have machines become more expensive and less reliable since? Clearly not, but labour has become significantly cheaper and more available, so why bother competing with illegals in an old petrol station? The same goes for most other low-skilled occupations. Fifty foreigners in a warehouse or fewer people with some automated assistance. This is literally why we have a productivity crisis.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
I still need an explanation of what the advantages of shit wages are, because it does not make much sense to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Because CEO pay is based on growth not output.
Seen from the executive level of a large business, they are many and varied. Politicians are scared of those businesses leaving the country. I can't imagine this is an issue in the US.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
And considering pretty much everything is foreign owned now, it would be very easy in many cases and has already been done in others.
This level of scrutiny is pretty amazing considering the last 15 years.
That must be the biggest non-story of all non-stories. Jesus wept.
That's work related, I guess. :D
I bet they've bought the Foreign Secretary a globe n'all. Devious bastards.
If the goal is keeping businesses, surely lowering their taxes and just general deregulation is more effective than purposely 'depressing wages'. Businesses want to sell stuff, and people need money to buy said stuff. They do not benefit from a poor population.
I would love to have some illegals to wash my car for cheap nearby. The automatic ones are not good enough.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
A result of the mass brain drain in our political establishment, unfortunately. Most of them were just too thick to get a job in Finance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
To me it looks like Uber rich buying from Uber rich. For example, AI.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Don't get me wrong, I am sure that whatever they are doing is indeed keeping wages low, but I doubt that is their purpose. They are just too shit to actually achieve their goals, whatever those may be (if they have any beyond keeping their jobs).
Didn't know the big AI companies were British.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
I never said they were. However look at our data centre plans. This isn't a consumer or even B2B market.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
The labour that is left over will be so surplus the wages will be basically slavery.
If you've been following his recent tik tok exploits then a shot at the festive charts is small cringe beer.
He'd have more luck if it was just him getting kicked in the balls live on TikTok every day.
By Ed Balls.
Will his son be providing vocals?
In all this 'stolen' phone business, surely the least plausible part of the whole story is the police actually investigating the loss of any form of property and then launching some sort of crack operation to look into the reactivation of an allegedly stolen phone. I'm absolutely not having that that actually happens.
See she's resigned now, seemingly citing some of the worst legal advice ever given as a factor. There must be more to it than is in the public domain. She probably made the whole thing up and someone has the kompromat to prove it. Looking at her you wouldn't think she'd be a grade A moron, oh wait.
As lol as the whole thing is, this is what sticks out to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Why have they gone after her over the cost of a phone like that? I would have thought the cost of gathering the evidence and taking her to court, would be far more than telling her they can see shes turned her phone back on and to stop taking the piss.
I see the euthanise the disabled bill has passed, excellent, fire up the wheelchair accessible gas chambers.
Going off some of the reaction that seems to be what some of the anti-camp seem to think anyway.
Quite funny that something that could be seen as a defining piece of legislation of this parliament might be a private member's bill. Does that make the government look bad?
I wonder how they'll play that when it comes to Power of Attorneys?
I should retrain to be a lawyer.
I found the debate fairly interesting. I had to watch my mum die a horrific death, during which she often didn't know who I - or indeed she - was, had to have her lungs drained regularly and often sobbed that you "wouldn't put a dog through this". I am fully supportive of the outcome and I think it's been a long time coming. However, it has to be acknowledged that if this had happened 5 years ago, Captain Tom's cunt daughter would have been rubbing her hands together and there are an awful lot of scummers out there just waiting for their boomer inlaws to die, so the devil will be in the detail.
Homeless crisis solution: done. Plenty more room for muzzers now.
Generally speaking I have absolutely no issue with homeless people. There's far more deserving members of society that I'd put way above them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggles
Who? Someone that arrived in after coming from a country they could already have stayed in? Massively deserving.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Don't tell them down the students union that I said that before your bra burning.
In this scenario would they have offed him before he became a covid sensation, thus denying themselves the ability to profit from said stardom?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
An interesting moral quandary.
I don't know the details of whatever is being proposed particularly, but I don't get the impression that agency is being given to third parties, more like a system is being implemented for when you get to the everyone knows it's time stage ["make them comfortable"], and it is just a waiting game, you have the opportunity to forego that misery by agreement in advance.
I am all for it in principle, but the safeguards sound a bit flimsy, and you would put your own life on their being a massive NHS scandal to come out of it. The various shit reasons I have seen various MPs giving for supporting it hardly fills you with confidence that they would take any issues seriously as well.
Less people > more people. Simple.
If we put the ability of the NHS to somehow fuck it up at the top of the don't do that priority list for deciding things then we wouldn't have any healthcare at all.
The Irish, for a start.Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggles
That's more like it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
I saw some leaks from 'friends of Tony Blair' or something slating the Starmer regime. They really aren't doing well at all given that their entire pitch was competence.
'Middle Class Women Of A Certain Age' was funny.
Wrong thread but maybe it still applies.
Wasn't a great result overall, but looking very much like the Greens have been as good as wiped out here :drool:
Ok, so this Labour stuff above I'm sure if we looked into the last parliament and the current one a lot of the MP's on all sides would be doing it. It doesn't look great but she hasn't broken any rules. If you don't like the rules then don't have them in the fucking first place. Seems like at the minute the Mail & Express are just throwing as much shit at the wall as possible and seeing what sticks.
Obviously doesn't mean that Labour haven't been far more fucking useless than was hoped for. They talked about competence which seemed to be Rishi's pitch as well from what I remember and it's not as bad as the two spastics who were in charge before but their communication since they entered power has been fucking useless.
I see Starmer has now banned advertising porridge oats, among other things.
Lol, lmao.
Centre right is absolutely toxic.
The mystery is how con are so high. Maybe Kemi Badenoch is Cutting Through [/lol]
If Reform are consistently above them in the polls two years from now 'Kemi' will get the Iain Duncan Smith treatment. She has been pathetic in all of her House of Commons appearances up to now, and MPs think that they actually matter enough to have taken notice.
Unless they self-destruct, I'd have thought Reform will be above everyone in the polls two years from now.
Feels like it's been a bad month for presidential political systems, so at least we don't have to worry about President Nigel.
Rupert Lowe appears to be the only Reform MP actually doing any work. They have kept the domestic abuser off the air, Nigel Farage just talks shit, and Richard Tice is a fanny.
The only way to get rid of Farage as a permanent stalking horse now is he wins and is just massively corrupt and skimming all the cash he can whilst not delivering anything he promised.
I don't think he'd want to be Prime Minister. He doesn't have the work ethic or diligence even to do a crap, Boris Johnson-esque impression of the job. PM isn't President, the amount of poncing about in the job is minimal, it's mainly committees and briefing papers. He'd hand over I think.
Last time I saw him in an interview he was saying "it's pointless trying mass deportations" and "I don't care about skin colour" in response to questions about the decline of White British people. That's not what most of his market wants to hear.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
That said, the main Reform donor is a British Muslim - and one that's more right wing than Farage, if anything - so I'm not going to pretend I understand what's going on in the Far Right any more than I understand what's going on in the Far Left. Muslims for white supremacy vs feminists for trans-female athletes.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Also, Mandelson is our new ambassador to the US.
How? What dirt does he have on people (and on whom) to still keep being so influential?
He's Trumps kind of guy to be fair.
Fair point. Maybe he has some dirt on Trump from being Epstein's best mate.
You need to be a master of sleaze and corruption to have that role, as it says in the tweet great pick.
I guess the thinking behind it is to have the inside track so we can position ourselves accordingly and not be caught off guard by any lunacy.
Isn't it just the most high-profile grace-and-favour role going, what with the dazzling allure of the US and all?
We'd probably be better deploying the dark lord as ambassador to the EU, if we have one of those, if we wanted to put his chicanery to full use in the national interest.
Goodbye abolition of the Lords, hello Baroness Sue Gray.
:face:
She was never elected to anything in the first place so no big change but you can't even get rid of the shit the electorate said no to any more:
Bring back the hereditary peers.
While I believe in checks and balances and I'm no constitutional expert, I'm not Yevrah either, looking at both us and America, are our power structures written to factor in life expectancy increasing by 30-50 years since they were written in?
Labour releasing a questionable AI video with lyrics about sexually abusing young girls on the backing track this week is quite the fuck up.
Found it.
How do you even manage to fuck up that badly? :D
:lol:
Wow. :D
Even if you ignore the song, who the fuck thought that was a good idea? Seriously? Giant AI animals in human form?
It was something they put on TikTok apparently, which is for kids and retards, so it works.
Aren't they supposed to be the lefties and therefore anti AI taking over artists' jobs?
I agree that the video is even worse than the music.
I mean the Muslamic Ray Guns being back in the news big time, I'm not sure you could pick a worse song than one which talks about punching a young girl's pussy.
Yeah, I mean, in a normal week it's a quick lolol and everyone moves on. THIS week? Congratulations on creating a load of new conspiracy theories.
AI slop graphics being taken seriously by PR types in the governing party is the start of a long and dismal road.
If you wrote that for a TV show you'd be laughed out of the room for it being too far fetched.
It is increasingly feeling like we're being played with, but I think that's because the idea that this is part of a plan is more comforting than the realisation that absolutely everyone involved in running the country is completely useless, just like the last lot were.Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggles
I had the radio on in the car this morning and Farage was on LBC - he was very good and I'm increasingly of the belief that it's going to happen. This current lot and the Tories are sleepwalking into oblivion.
I heard a clip of it. Why does he sound like a proper statesman now and not a total cunt? Something is up with all this. 100% nailed on next PM.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Exactly because of what Yev said. He's no longer someone on the sidelines who needs to shout stupid shit to get heard. The incumbent have provided him the platform, so now he's front and centre it's more about not making a complete tit of yourself. And to be fair he got off to a strong start by telling Musk where to go.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Good let the cunt who’s been pissing into the tent from the outside for the last 20 years prove just how much of a charlatan he is and maybe we can move past all this culture and wars bullshit.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Farage is actually the favourite for next PM on Betfair. It's definitely happening.
You say that as if Farage is the only one responsible for all of the culture wars bullshit, which is far from the case.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
He's a conservative. His stance is basically "oh shut up" with regards to anything yer da would call woke. Blaming him for the culture wars is absurd.
I'm still not at all convinced by Farage, but disowning Musk is a very impressive (and not at all an obvious) move from him and if he somehow manages to transition into a serious politician over the next five years, and Reform itself doesn't collapse into a mess, then they're all going to have a serious problem on their hands. Quite big ifs, though.
I fear the right is moving further right than he is prepared to go and we will likely see another (further and maybe actually Far-right) right wing party pop up. Whether he likes it or not, his core voters like Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins and - whether it's going to happen or not - want mass deportations. Distancing himself is harming his chances.
He's probably far more palatable to normal people in his current guise and maybe Harvey Yevrah and Jimmy of Floyd would be prepared to vote for him, but if he loses his base supporters and a new version of the BNP pops up, he has split the vote of the right and he'll have no chance.
He will need to manage this very, very well to put it lightly. That said, Starmer is dropping a complete disasterclass and the Tories are still a joke, so who knows where we'll be in 4 years time.
Austria have just ditched their far right PM in favour of someone even more far right. Europe definitely a cycle ahead on these topics.
While I thought he handled the Musk thing very well (far better than any of the major party peeps seem to be able to do) he didn't really disown him, just pointed out that they don't agree on Tommy Robinson and that the US in general needs a bit of education when it comes to Yaxley-Lennon.
It was also refreshing to hear (seemingly honestly) that Musk's support is a big boost to reform. Night and Day away from the cloud cuckoo shit Labour have been doing with him, like that utterly pathetic and tragic move of not inviting him to that trade thing.
"Disowning" seems like quite a charitable interpretation of what's gone on with him and Musk. He basically said he doesn't agree with Musk's support of Tommy Robinson but would still love all his money, then Musk went on Twitter and called him a big whimpy girl.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
I've no doubt money plays a part, but he pressed home more the point that Musk's popularity with the young is giving Reform cool points. I've no idea whether either of those things are true or not. Most of the news I read just seem hell bent on painting the party as far right with very little substance on anything else, so quite difficult to ascertain.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
Right and left are not really helpful terms anymore. If there's a spectrum it's from grey technocrat pragmatists at one end, to whatever Elon is up to at the other. That's why Starmer was so incensed by the latter spouting off, because he's at the far opposite end of what I think is the real spectrum these days.
Farage is probably quite centrist in this regard.
Britain having a centrist PM would be great for the cause of bringing back normality. You can have your other small European countries but Britain along with the US would be huge.
It would be nice to have a PM with society's best interests at heart.
Pragmatists and Idealists, let's call it.
In the pragmatist corner you've basically got all of the 21st century western political and cultural establishment. Not only Starmer but David Cameron, Barack Obama, Blair, Kamala, Biden, Macron and so on. They had 25+ years of unbroken power. Quantitative easing, gay marriage, low interest rates, celebrating diversity, they're big fans of all these things. When the rape scandal comes up they are cautious and nervous and urge calm and advocate for 'community cohesion'. They have something to lose, namely their grip on the polity.
In the idealist corner, meet their opponents. President Donald J. Trump is one but then there's Bernie Sanders, there's Jeremy Corbyn, there's Elon Musk, Le Pen and so on. All these people resent the control that the pragmatists have over western culture and believe their ideas to be better. Sometimes their ideas involve palling up with Putin, or seizing the assets of the rich, or rounding up the Jews (again), or sending rockets to Mars, or whatever you can think of. The pragmatists despise not only their specific ideas but also the notion that anyone could ever take an idealist seriously, lacking as they do the sensible temperate nature that has made the pragmatists (or so they believe) successful.
What we've seen with Twitter is basically the seizing of an established pragmatist public space by the forces of idealism.
God I love a half baked theory. I'll work on it.
Sounds like The Establishment vs The Populists repackaged. I am all for it.
The political compas just got a 3rd dimension.
Can we give the Lib Dems a turn before rolling the red carpet out for the right?
Oh Christ no. I'd sooner live the Greens a go.
Clearly a fan of massive white elephants but not getting your bin collected.
The political establishment in this country could retire Nigel Farage for good by simply having the same immigration policies we had thirty years ago and locking up violent criminals for longer. Yet they choose not to, despite these being things that most people would support, because they believe that their job is primarily to provide economic opportunities for Indians, reduce energy use, and make their own people less safe in return for favourable coverage in American newspapers. These people are not 'pragmatist' in any conceivable sense.
https://i.imgur.com/mLANhKd.jpeg
This from Wes' big plan to solve the NHS actually has me seething.
It is beyond parody. I cannot express how fucking unbelievably stupid it is.
What this fictional patient's journey should be is:
1) Have appointment with actual qualified GP (not one of the clueless alphabet soup brigade)
2) GP prescribes nasal steroid and refers to ENT to see a reg in clinic
3) ENT reg rules out serious causes of hearing loss and refers on for a hearing aid
The end.
But nah, let's send her to someone who doesn't have a clue who then refers her for an unnecessary investigation.
Let's expose her to a large dose of needless radiation at a CT scanner in a fucking shopping centre; where all these extra CT scanners are coming from, fuck knows.
Then we're apparently going to have it reported before she gets home. There's not enough radiologists to report the scans we're currently doing, but yeah I'm sure we'll suddenly find a load to report all these extra completely fucking pointless scans.
Then we'll send her a CT report which she will have no fucking hope of understanding for her to stress over.
Then we'll make the ENT registrar want to kill themselves by subjecting them to a mUlTi DiSciPlInArY tEaM meeting with a primary care ANP who knows fuck all about ENT, so they can tell them the CT is normal and was a waste of time and to give her some nasal steroids.
Then she'll somehow have a choice of loads of appointments at loads of hospitals to see a consultant about her hearing loss. This already fucking exists, it's called choose and book, and when patients log on there are no appointments available anywhere. But yeah, sure, there'll suddenly be loads everywhere for her to fit one round her life.
Now she's going to get a load more pointless investigations and sees a consultant once, possibly twice, for no useful reason.
Not only is it complete cloud cuckoo land in terms of the resources available, even it if weren't it would still be about the most inefficient way to use those resources that you could possibly come up with.
These people are morons. They have literally not a single clue about the thing they're in charge of. It's insanity.
I'll bow to your knowledge on the medical practicalities of such a system RL, but what struck me reading it was that it also absolutely wreaked of spunking a fuck tonne of money up the wall.
I don't think they particularly give a shit about Indians, they're just using them to boost GDP (while sweeping GDP per capita under the carpet). I agree they're not pragmatists though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Which leads me to a wider point, we're now 6 months into this new government and I am absolutely none the wiser as to what the plan is, let alone how we're going to accomplish it.
I assume the rest of you lot feel the same as it's very odd to have a sitting government that not one member of this board seems to be prepared to defend in any way.
It's absolutely spunking loads of money up the wall.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
They seem absolutely desperate to replace doctors with any other person they can pay less.
Then pay way more to make up for their lack of actual medical training and knowledge with all the pointless referrals they make and investigations they order and all the cleaning up after their fuckups that actual doctors end up having to do.
It's fucking mental. You've got GPs who can't get jobs whilst they're paying fucking paramedics - people who are desperately needed in the role they are actually trained for - cosplaying as doctors.
Let's not even go there with fucking PAs.
The whole country should be up in arms about this shit. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It's all fucked.
There isn't a (new) plan. It was to do things the same as before but in a slightly more "competent" way.
The only positive is no sleaze or corruption as far as I can see. Nothing major, anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
That is a fair point, the free clothing shit was such a non-story and that's all I can think of so far. Streeting must surely be enjoying a few envelopes to implement that monstrosity RL's posted above mind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
I mean it actually feels like what it used to before the daily stories of absolute lunacy started when BoJo was in charge. Grown ups.
If they are trying to boost GDP, they are doing an absolutely laughable job at it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Seeing as we're covering the NHS, my son needed a blood test today (originally Saturday, but the place we were given an appointment at couldn't do it because one of the tests had to go to the testing centre immediately) and it was a ridiculous ordeal.
Firstly, we were sent to the Chemotherapy unit, where they apparently now do walk in blood tests. Now, I'm not sure I understand the logic of doing that in a department full of immunocompromised people, but off we went. "Sorry mate, no can do, I'm not trained in paediatrics, you'll have to take him to paediatrics"
So we went up there. "Oh no, we wouldn't do that here, you'd need an appointment. Oh and your GP hasn't marked this as urgent? You could try outpatient paediatrics?"
So we went over there, "well, I don't know why you've been sent here, we only do under 4's..."
It took about 5 minutes of arguing with the lady at the desk about how ridiculous the whole thing is, never mind the stress it was causing my 6 year old anxiously awaiting his first blood test, before someone agreed they'd squeeze him in.
Anyway, what I mean to say is, defund the cunts. :moop:
Probably got some private companies lined up to take on the contracts to provide these services, with a consultancy role and a big fat payday lined up for Wes once he leaves government.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
I hate the stupid-faced cunt. He's not quite as detestable as the Tory ones were, but he is an absolutely pitiful little man.
I see you could have a hospital on every street corner if you just dump Boydy and the lads.
I mean it's certainly better, it would have been almost impossible for it not to be, but I'm yet to see much competence.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Tanking confidence in the economy through trailing a disaster budget for months before it was actually announced
The handling of the winter fuel stuff
Taking a pointless moral high ground against a man who could invest Billions into the UK (maybe that's why he's started tweeting everyone now I think about it)
Getting embroiled in an argument about 'grooming gangs' without actually doing anything to dispel what they're being accused of
Whatever the fuck that animal thing on Tiktok was
Are just some off the top of my head.
Maybe it's rose tinted spectacles or because I was young and everyone seemed more mature in those days as a result, but say what you want about Thatcher or Blair's government, they knew what they wanted to do and how to get shit done.
That's your next prime minister you're talking about. (@RL)
Does this hospital not have a phlebotomy department?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
The GP was most likely the problem here. I highly suspect they knew they weren't sending you to the right place, but that once you got to hospital someone would take pity because it's a child.
Well yeah, back to the competence thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Liz Truss wrecked the economy m8Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
I wasn’t really wanting much from Labour just a bit of quiet competence. Unfortunately at the minute we don’t seem to be getting that, maybe they will grow into it.
I think as said above at least there doesn’t appear to be the level of absolute piss taking that the Tories have been into for the past 10 years so at least there is that.
Not Indians specifically, but I believe this sort of thinking is much more prevalent than you would expect.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
As for corruption (and sort of the above), Tulip Siddiq appears to be benter than any Conservative was over their terms in office, and she is meant to be the anti-corruption bod. :harold:
They probably do but the blood ninjas don't seem to dabble in single figure ages.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
I had a similar, albeit more my fault experience taking my daughter for an allergy blood test. Had no idea where i was going so went to blood tests or whatever the sign said, took a ticket before noticing a sign saying we only do over 10s, under 10s have to go *here*. Flagged down rabdom person and asked where *here* was, did a lap of the hospital finding it and they gave me the old blank face I'm not sure why you've been sent here treatment, you need to track back and take the third corridor on your right, ring a bell and then cross your fingers. This was for an actual pre-planned appointment. Eventually got there and it was all done very well. Then the results came back however many weeks/months later and the thing they were supposed to be testing for wasn't one of the allergens that was tested. :face:
I had to take a blood test 3 times, because the first two times it simply got lost. #defundtheNHS
If only they'd taken your blood in a shopping centre I'm sure it would've been done right first time.
Our ones will do any kids above the age of (I think) 3.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
I got sent to the hospital for an URGENT blood test by what I suspect was one of those pretend doctor jobs who panicked and the woman taking my blood spent the whole time coating me off for being sent there, even though it was quiet. All came back fine.
They think they are pragmatists. Centrism in the Blairite third way sense is nothing more or less than trying to be pragmatic and knit together competing points of view. Whether one is successful or ends up simply following another ideology is another matter.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
They can think what they like. Rationalising stupid shit to keep the plates spinning isn't pragmatism, otherwise the Yorkshire Ripper was one.
Yeah, that's it done. Farage PM in 2029, if Labour even last that long.
He's not wrong either.
That was Jezza's biggest mistake.
If he'd stayed true to his beliefs he'd have pissed the post-Cameron election as the face of leave.
Our last PM was a Billionaire, I don't think this is going to be a problem for him.
He made it quite clear he wasn't a 'man of the people' as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
The Guardian (and their weird outriders like Led By Donkeys) still chasing Farage across the landscape as if people object to him making a bit of moolah on the side. One of the things you need to learn as an adult is that the hail fellow well met sector of society get free passes for everything, and that's just the way it is. Look at Boris, there are still people riding for him now.
I think the main point is they *are* the establishment and it should be blindingly obvious unless you're a culture war mouth breather.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Farage really is coming into his own at the moment. Speaks clearly, answers questions in a straightforward fashion and as Magic said is looking very statesman like.
It feels like there has been a huge social shift almost over night for some reason. People are starting to find their voice and state their opinions where before they'd have been silent. I can only assume it's because Starmer has used the "Far Right" line too often and people just don't care about that label anymore. Interesting times ahead.
I could do without having Farage as PM, but if it puts a boot up the arse of the establishment and makes them feel like they actually have to act to keep their jobs, then I'm all for it. I just want serious people that care about the country in charge.
The US election result showed (and many other results before it, but I think that was the final nail) that the progressive left bullshit has failed and is now well and truly dead. People are emboldened by it and have said enough is enough.
Now this is only part of it, but it speaks to why people have found their voice.
There's some of that in it too. Plus, Jimmy absolutely NAILED the grooming gang stuff kicking off. I'm not sure even he predicted Elon Musk getting on board, but he called it perfectly none the less.
The grooming gangs response has really highlighted how clueless these people are when it comes to messaging. From Starmer’s defensive but no substance response to Musk, to Jess Phillips talking about her safety, to the ludicrous idea that a full public enquiry would somehow prevent the change from happening that’s had 20 years to (from the offences) or two years from the last report, but somehow still hasn’t already.
There may well be some truth to these things but none of them have actually addressed what happened, so it all just sounds like more kicking the can down the road at best and another cover up at worst.
Contrast that with Farage’s response in seconds of “if the government won’t launch an enquiry, we will” and they’re just giving him an open goal to fire his cigarettes and real pints into.
Launching an expensive public inquiry to do none of the recommended actions in 5 years seems like a good way to deal with it.
Why has it taken two years already to not implement the recommended actions? Why did the report recommending those actions take so long in the first place? Why can’t the actions be implemented and a public enquiry held and further actions updated/implemented at the end of it?Quote:
Originally Posted by Kikó
Nobody is arguing that the Tories aren't a shambles, it's just a shame to see Labour following a similar path.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kikó
We currently live in a country where Nigel Farage is seen by many as the best option and I - even though I would never vote for him - am struggling to argue with that case.
Nigel Farage the best option available. Christ this country is in the shit.
Oh and what was the timeline for implementing those actions before the whole thing blew up?
I’ve not caught up with today’s developments yet, but those 4 questions seem like quite straightforward ones (some of which can presumably be blamed on the Tories, so essentially a free pass) yet the answers don’t appear to be forthcoming.
Instead we have BBC verify going into overdrive, whilst simultaneously verifying nothing and lingering doubt that for all his eccentricities how far up the agenda was this really before Musk got involved?
Labour understandably want this to blow over. Nobody wants one of the biggest scandals in the countries history to come to the fore just as they've taken power, but the problem is that their attempts to help it blow over look an awful lot like trying to cover it up again.
It's just painful to watch. I honestly don't think they get it. The tool makers son is, I fear, as out of touch as many of us thought he might be.
This is the same guy that destroyed the country with BREXIT and is clearly a Russian shill/corporate shill?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
It is. And yet there he is, saying the right stuff. It's easy stuff too. Any one of us could do it. Condemn the rapes, say it needs a review, palm it off on some Sue Grey figure hiding at the back of the chamber and then it probably would blow over. Until the results come out anyway. But then you leave that until after the next election unless you stumble upon something damning to hit the Tories with.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Easy.
Indeed. Instead they’re getting bogged down in defending not doing an inquiry due to process issues, which, with the best will in the World the average person (read voter) does not give a shit about.
Yes exactly.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Correct.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Every fucking political story on the BBC at the moment seems to be accompanied by what Elon Musk has tweeted about it. Why? Fuck off.
The previous report wasn't a report into the specific nationwide problem of Pakistanis raping white girls, and you would be hard-pressed to believe that any of its recommendations would have prevented said specific nationwide problem.
The Conservative Party are obviously being opportunists calling for something they never wanted to have, but anyone claiming that the issue was resolved with the other report is ducking it.
I enjoyed Jenrick getting arse raped live on Radio 4 the other day as his record on grooming gangs was exposed given his sudden concern about them.
There's not an ounce of sincerity in the lot of them and seeing them getting exposed and embarrassed before just moving on as if nothing happed is getting really, really old.
Consequences needed.
Like this cunt:
You were a Labour Councillor in 2015, then a Tory MP for about 5 years. Where was this energy then? Fuck off.
My guess is that as the nation's publicly funded news outlet they are caught between a rock and a hard place. Clearly on one hand a story about mass abuse cover up is in the national interest and they should absolutely be covering it, but on the other they clearly don't want to be touching it with a bargepole, for obvious reasons. So they've decided the approach they will take is cover it tentatively through the lens of what Musk is saying which allows them to widen that approach to other things he's gobbing off about without actually having to cover the story properly that they don't want to touch.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
It's a(nother) genuine disgrace in this whole sorry episode and yet more fuel for the "legacy media are not telling you the truth" brigade on Youtube.
What are Musk's thoughts on the Carabao Cup ball?
I don't get what a public inquiry would achieve or why the Lee Andersons of the world are calling for it. It would just be more wishy washy recommendations that wouldn't be adopted in 12 years' time when the thing actually reports. They should just be bombarding the news cycle with new specific examples and naming people.
Fantastic.
Yeah, I saw yesterday that bond/gilt prices have essentially reacted the same way to this budget as they did to the Lettuce's, but the media are mysteriously silent this time round.
I don't think other measures have reacted quite as badly (possibly until now), but yeah. Pretty shit.
Thank fuck we fixed out mortgage rate last month. It doesn't come into effect until May, and I was hoping for another interest rate from before then to fix lower still, but that's looking unlikely now.
Stagflation concerns. Having inflation +0.3% on the previous report off the back of the zero growth revision has really kicked this into gear.
Starmer won't last the term.
The UK is going to look very different in 5 years, isn't it? Not exactly sure what it will look like, but getting ready to buckle up for the ride.
If he doesn't I've really no idea what happens. It'll be too early for Reform to pull of the result they look set to at some point, so really not sure what we're left with in the absence of that. If we're back into the merry-go-round of replacing the PM as we did with the Tories, who else is there within Labour?Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
Inevitable without substantial change, unfortunately. And taxing the arse off of businesses and promising growth that isn't happening, is not the answer.
I'm not too sure what the answer is, which isn't surprising, but neither do Labour, which probably isn't surprising either, really.
I'd imagine if the "far right" swing carries on then we'll become a US-lite. If you're not an immigrant and are in a stable profession then it might be alright.
Keep an eye on Europe as they're a few years ahead in that respect. There are a few far right governments already but mainly in basket case countries. Finland and Austria could be ones to watch in the near future. And the big one is Germany, I think they'll get there before we do.
He won't last the term, but Labour will. No chance they call an early election. They'll just repeat what the Tories did.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
How are Argentina getting on with that nutter they elected?Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
We need to start with legalising and monetising things that a fuck load of people do. Pot being the most obvious one, but there'll be many others I'm sure.
Completely tits up for a while but it seems their inflation is cooling and they're getting growth. Whether that's because, or in spite of, the nutter, I don't know. When you're so low, you're bound to see something positive eventually just by having regular people doing stuff.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
We're currently at a state of high immigration, high borrowing, zero growth. Somebody solve that equation for me and I'll be back. No one has done so yet. The first two things should not result in zero growth.
Wage stagnation (linked to immigration), high housing costs (again, immigration) and steep inflation (I'll let Johnny Foreigner off that one) mean people just don't have money to spend. Hence; no growth.
Or, rather, growth in places you don't want it. Like in companies that manage/service debt.
That's been our problem since for at least 15 years. When there has been growth, it's not in places you and I ever witness.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
In contrast, go to Poland. Or just look in any city centre on Google Street View, comparing 2010/11 to now. That's how you do it.
Immigrants do great in the US.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
Things are happening exactly as they were predicted to occur. That's what happens when you elect someone with an actual goal and a proper plan to get there.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
The first two (housing in particular) are way more due to regulations than immigration. All those pesky foreigners could be building houses on the cheap, you know? If only the government allowed for such a terrible thing to happen.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
All essential things (water, energy, housing, transport etc) should be under social control.
Ban landlords and land/property owners, inc commercial real estate.
Law that dictates you can earn as much as you want but the multiplier must be only 10x as much as your lowest paid employee.
Nobody should own more than 1b worth of net worth, however it's made up.
Allow sex with minors.
:D
You had me until the end there.
In reality, what's fucked us? We could have kept the same stupid system however;
Thatcher
BREXIT
Tory private sector corruption, mostly but not limited to COVID
Greed
I love a bit of Thatcher bashing so let's have it.
Boomers yearn for her return but she really got the ball rolling on fucking us. Ditching all manufacturing and becoming a service economy is why we have nowhere to turn getting out of this mess.
In the modern mind British history seems to start with Thatcher, as if she Mary Poppinsed in from the clouds. You need to do some looking into what caused her to happen. The Heath and second Wilson years in particular.
Heath has a good claim to worst PM ever, despite the recent parade of rivals for the accolade.
Not only that, but selling our infrastructure to overseas business men. Or train companies for example. They're basically owned entirely by Italian and German companies, that rip us off so that they can reduce train tickets in their own countries. Which gives them all sorts of competitive advantages. I'm sure there are many other examples of this. The Royal Mail being one of them. Water companies being another.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
Wasn't the UK a complete basket case prior to Thatcher?
There must come a point at which it stops being a viable argument to keep blaming things that happened 30/40 years ago.
I love that you lot constantly talk about how incompetent your government is, yet you want them to be in control of more stuff.
For anyone interested in Milei:
Preliminary Milei Report Card
OK so we smoked and got cancer. Thatcher was the chemotherapy and radiotherapy, triple dose, that got rid of the cancer. But the decimation of our immune system has left us crippled and riddled with multiple terminal auto-immune illnesses and we're on life support.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
The only way we can recover is a full reset, a re-birth. This country is absolutely fucked. We are severe late-stage capitalism and the PE takeover will be the final nail.
All our government does is give stuff away to private sector lol. So yes, we'd like to be in control of even a single thing plz. Even if it is breathtakingly incompetent I'd rather that than corrupt private sector.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
It was a shithole, yes.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
However, one thing I notice over and over again is that we praise / criticise politicians for global events. Did Thatcher really turn things around? Or was she just in power when technology started to tick over into the current age. The west as a whole boomed at the same time, really. The same goes for the dot com bubble bursting, the 2008 financial crisis, etc.
If not the government, British companies. Selling your infrastructure abroad is just asset striping.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Giving free publicly owned stuff away to rich people so they can make even more money stimulates the economy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Granted. But was she the brains behind that, or - as I suspect - was she just doing what America was doing?Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Yeah it was in tandem.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Absolute short termism and benefited very few. But ECONOMY and GROWTH and all that.
Did it really benefit very few?
It's only really post-2008, when interest rates went to zero and massive asset value transfers to the wealthy on the back of that really kicked in that things seem to have gone off the previous generally upward trajectory, and even then, there are probably other, competing reasons for why things are as they are at the moment - ageing population etc - if they even are that bad.
You can't on one hand say the Boomers have ruined our lives by accruing and then hording all the wealth and on the other say that nobody of Boomer age benefitted from what was happening at the time in the 80s. It's moronic.
Our (Austria's) version of this will presumably be an inverted version of the coaltion we've already had twice: Freedom Party (right-wing) as senior partners this time, with our Conservatives (People's Party) in a new role as junior partner. I think the playbook will very much be modelled after Hungary (and Slovakia, I guess): defund our public broadcasting service and replace it with something much more friendly to their messaging, then entrench themselves in key positions and probably try to coopt the judiciary Poland-style.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
Fuck knows what the foreign policy will be. The Freedom Party is very pro-Russia, but I'm not sure the Conservatives (pro-EU) will be having that.
Yes. From a social perspective. Just exactly who in the long term has it benefited? Everything is crumbling, nothing works, it's an absolute joke. I'd sacrifice all my nice to haves in a heartbeat if it meant a functional country.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Nothing (regrettably) is done with long term aims in mind (for obvious reasons), so the fact that we got a good thirty years out of it is a good result. 30 years previous to that we were still rationing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
We should do this.
Pining for some sort of halcyon time in the past where 'everything worked' is daft. The past was almost always worse, it's just you either didn't have to suffer through it, or have erased the suffering from your mind.
Who's doing that? The point is there were multiple paths forward to improve life and the only ones that were taken were to benefit the elite to the detriment of wider society.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
See all the rich freaks in Malibu offering to pay people to put out fires near their mansions because the fire service has been cut to the bone.
I see Liz Truss has sent a cease and desist letter to Sir Beer Korma to tell him to stop saying that she crashed the economy. Has there ever been a more useless, thin-skinned cock-womble PM? That's bearing in mind the shower of shite that has followed her as well.
She was absolutely the worst in my living memory. Against some stiff competition as well.
The main difference between when Truss 'crashed the economy' and now is that the Labour Party are all fully behind their programme, at least in public, where as the Conservative Party couldn't help immediately being a bunch of fannies and dripping to the media to set the confidence spiral off.
If memory serves, didn't Truss deliver exactly what the Tories voted her in to do at the time? Only when they saw what it actually did to the economy they turned on her.
It won't be long before Labour start doing the same. Nothing will actually change policy-wise though, someone else (Wesley) will just want their turn in the big seat.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Their priorities up to now make me think they would all happily embrace austerity, at least for one term, in return for getting a load of other shit through.
:lol:
Good job we have the competent people in charge now.
That sort of thinking assumes that Rachel Reeves is the problem, when in reality the Treasury probably had two equally shit budgets written and she just read out the one in the red envelope. What would any of those people be doing differently?
Absolutely nothing. Still funny though.
One of 4 things will happen over the next month.
1) An Emergency budget announcing austerity measures (and Starmer is probably gone)
2) An Emergency budget announcing Tax Increases (and Starmer is probably gone)
3) The market chills out and stops devaluing the pound and increasing the Interest on our national debt (phew)
4) The market goes into another Lettuceesque death spiral and the Bank of England is forced into action again (shit)
This is an absolute mess. If I were looking at one of my Tenants in this situation, I would be expecting bankruptcy.
Your man Gary of "Gary's Economics" had quite a good video explaining the situation the other day. Kinda seems like the UK is a bit fucked.
It's quite long but it was mostly borrowing costs are too high and therefore debt is increasing as percentage of GDP because GDP isn't growing fast enough to keep the proportion the same due to low growth and now low inflation again.
Can't believe a country that refused to invest in itself when money was cheap for 2 decades is fucked.
Remember the Tories crowing about Labour not fixing the roof when the sun was shining when they started implementing austerity in the 2010s?
Quite. If they’d levelled up the north by building micro chip manufacturing even 10 years ago let alone 20 we’d just have a massively profitable industry coming online instead we decided to spend 20 billion on a train line to make it 20 minutes faster to get from Birmingham to London which was also abandoned because it was too expensive. Fucking abysmal handling of the economy by the ‘sensible people’
Alternatively, money remained cheap because the government wasn't wasting it on boondoggle shite like the Featherstone microchip foundry, limiting itself only to doubling the national debt to line the pockets of pensioners and human rights barristers. Besides, any worthwhile investments that we might have made during that period would probably have been seen off by European Union rules (or at least or pathetic approach to them). Meanwhile, houses go unbuilt, wages get compressed, and the welfare bill spirals out of control because having eczema or whatever gets you a free car.
Even in this fucking farcical world you pretend exists that happened under the people you voted for your entire life you realise?
You’re a fucking racist retard that the world would be better without.
Make up excuses for why we can’t do things and then make up your iq. Have a pint of milk and fuck off.
Who is they? The government? Are you suggesting that the government should have built some sort of state-owned microchip facility twenty years ago? First of all, that would require a massive amount of foretelling from their part, which they are obviously incapable of, but even if they had built such a thing, there is no way that some sort of British state-owned semiconductor company would be in any way competitive against the likes of TSMC. If you are suggesting that private companies should have invested in semiconductor manufacturing in the UK, then that probably would have required the types of policies you would chimp out about if they were enacted.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
To imagine we'd ever be competitive with Chinese fabs is insane. We should achieve growth with a massive rearmament programme.
The last government spent the last few years parroting promises that they were going to turn Oxbridge into the UK's Silicon Valley. Predictably, nothing at all happened, a tale that explains the last decade and a half. Talk, but no action.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Whether Phonics would have chimped out or not, he's right.
He's just chimped out here, is there a cooldown on that?
The plans to make Britain a leader in AI sound like the same shambles.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
As ever the devil is in the detail. For a start, how’s this £14bn been calculated and what period does it land over?Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
We all know that 14bn would have become 140bn and the end result would have been an AI that's basically one of those Chatbots from the 2010's.
Coleco GPT.
It's just building a couple of data centres and giving the rest to a consultant who claims it will cut down on admin.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
The thing is, I don't even need AI. I just need something that will do things for me.
For example, I have to merge one of my old company maintenance contract with my new company. It is a literal fucking admin nightmare. Why doesn't anything exist that will do that for me? I know what I want it to look like and I know what needs done. I don't need some stupid 10 step plan to monetise taking a shit.
Apparently they are going to drive about with an AI camera that identifies potholes that need fixing. Probably cheaper to just set up a website where locals can report them but what do I know.
Reporting potholes on the council website is one of my favourite hobbies. And to be fair when I do report them they usually come and sort them within a week. So the facility is there and if people use it, evidently it does work. AI not required.
Lol how about fixing the ones we know about first. Classic AI business management bollocks. REPORTING.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
One use case I can think of is to just use Google Maps data and get it to view that, rather than to just remap the entire countryQuote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
The consultant nonce who sold them a load of dogshit wouldn't be able to get paid for that though.
This country doesn't make anything or do anything. It's just consultants bleeding us dry because we don't do or make anything we just do 'services' so it's just being bumfucked by consultants all the way down and then getting a half baked piece of dogshit at the end thats over budget by 400%.
My employer has recently put a "scrutiny team" in place. They have gone out of their way to make trouble for themselves and pay handsomely for it. I think that's a pretty good case study of why the country is so fucked. Where ever you look there are people seemingly employed just to make things difficult.
Now, obviously you don't want houses being built that are going to blow over in the next storm, so I get it to an extent, but there has to be a balance and I think the balance is about as far off as it's possible to be at the moment.
When I went to Lara Beach last year, there were cranes as far as the eye could see as we headed from the airport to the hotel. Building houses, offices, shops, all over the place. It's impossible to imagine anything like that here. We can't even come up with a new ID card, never mind lay a train track.
Which, again, is a complete misunderstanding of how Silicon Valley came to be. The government didn't decide 'let's turn San Francisco into the tech capital of the world' and set a multi-year, multi-billion plan forth to do it. The US is simply a place more welcoming to entrepreneurship, so people here came up with new ideas and had the right environment to run riot with them. Maybe if you lot were less into 'tax the rich' and more into 'let them run riot,' you would have something similar, but again, that kind of policy is not very popular, is it?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Same, the government has had nothing to do with the US being a leader in AI. Government programs won't make a country a leader on AI either, unless maybe you adopt China-like policies, I guess. I bet those would go well with the public.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
Difference in the US is a) they have the world dominant currency (always underrated this, and is why Thatcher's achievements are so much more impressive than Reagan's), and b) they don't have a docile population addicted to state welfare.
Do it yourself (hire a couple of Indians to help you out) and become rich.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
I see. Can you provide me with a 10 step plan please?Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Sure:Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
1. Define Your Business Idea and Research the Market
Conduct thorough market research to validate your business idea
Identify your target customers and analyze competitors
Create a unique selling proposition that differentiates your business
Test your concept with potential customers
2. Write a Comprehensive Business Plan
Outline your business strategy and objectives
Include detailed financial projections and funding requirements
Plan your marketing and sales strategies
Set clear milestones and goals for the first few years
3. Choose Your Business Structure
Decide between sole trader, limited company, or partnership
Register with Companies House if forming a limited company
Get professional advice from an accountant if needed
Select a business name and check its availability
4. Sort Out Your Finances
Open a business bank account
Arrange startup funding (savings, loans, investors)
Set up accounting systems and bookkeeping processes
Consider hiring an accountant or using accounting software
5. Register for Taxes
Register for Self Assessment with HMRC
Register for VAT if expected turnover exceeds £85,000
Set up PAYE if hiring employees
Understand your tax obligations and deadlines
6. Get Business Insurance
Identify required insurance types (public liability, professional indemnity)
Shop around for the best coverage
Ensure compliance with legal requirements
Consider additional optional coverage
7. Set Up Your Business Location
Choose between home-based, office, or retail space
Check zoning laws and obtain necessary permits
Set up utilities and business services
Create a professional work environment
8. Legal and Administrative Setup
Apply for necessary licenses and permits
Register for data protection with ICO if handling personal data
Create terms and conditions and privacy policies
Set up contracts and legal documents
9. Build Your Business Infrastructure
Set up IT systems and software
Create operational procedures
Establish supplier relationships
Develop quality control processes
10. Launch and Market Your Business
Create a marketing plan and budget
Build a website and social media presence
Network within your industry
Start promoting your products or services
That will be $5,000.
https://i.ibb.co/nRMyht0/whatre-some...zey90z39a1.png
Simply replace the underpants with what you want to achieve.
I would also like $5000.
If you let the rich run riot in the UK (we already do), they'll just buy up property and not invest in anything productive.
Taking off my communist hat and putting on my, I dunno, social democrat (?) hat - we need to make a distinction between productive investment and non-productive investment. The former will raise productivity, develop new technology and provide good jobs and all that jazz. The latter does fuck all other than enrich someone already rich and has negative effects on the the rest of society. Let the former run wild and tax the fuck out of the latter.
You'd get more entrepreneurship if people lived in a society where they were more able to take a risk too. If housing was much cheaper for instance and people could afford to take a year out of their regular jobs to have a go at starting a business.
I think re-training is an issue too. Everywhere I look they're crying out for tradesmen. Something I'd love to move into, but there's no way of making the step without having to quit my job. No evening training or work based learning, etc. So instead we rely on immigration to plug these gaps, rather than helping people change careers.
Let's not pretend it wasn't also the fact California is sub tropical, a fairly liberal state and crawling with beautiful people willing to lick the nutsack of a rich nerd to get ahead. Those conditions can't be replicated in Grimsby.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
We're also shit at getting people into careers generally. I spent 3 months on Universal Credit where we wasted each others time for an hour every week where I would list the 50 jobs I'd applied for in the area I had 15 years of experience and a degree and they would say 'Have you considered being a prison guard?' to all 9.5 stone of me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
You have to remember also that America contains depths (mostly murder and opioid related ones) that we don't have here. We have lots of regulations and a huge welfare state and that means people don't die in those ways, but it also means no one is forced to take risks like they are in the States. You takes your choices, I suppose.
I think one of our big underrated issues is that our elites are insufficiently patriotic. That needs to be sorted out. Travel ban to Dubai? Maybe.
I think the healthcare costs would be 15% cheaper if it was ran like the NHS.
Someone calculated that.
Edit: no that's not right. It was a quarter of what it costs now.
The government supercomputer being held up in the planning process for ten years, only for the electricity bills to mean they can only run it for three hours a day, ought to act as a handy demonstrator of where our real problems lie. Unless it really is the lack of California sunshine.
I see Reeves has got the old vote of confidence, after some equivocation.
Was this written by a bot?Quote:
Originally Posted by "Sir kA.I.r Starmer
There's those words again. Give it a proof read, Keir.Quote:
Sir Keir said AI "will drive incredible change" in the country and "has the potential to transform the lives of working people".
Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Loooool
Reform now 1 point behind Labour. :happycry:
They need to get the phrase 'working people' out of the lexicon, it's absolutely embarrassing. 'The British people' please.
Strivers and scroungers, Jim.
The scroungers would be shown up more if they were continually forcibly associated to the mother nation from which they are scrounging, as opposed to rhetorically divided from the mug workers.
It's particularly stupid when more than half of working people also claim benefits, because we prefer to subsidise flat wages, rather than focus on increasing them.
All of the FTSE100 C-suite individually earned more than the average worker annually by this point in the year.
I know that doesn't make sense but I'm tired and you get the point.
It was little commented upon really, but that time a couple of years back when the governor of the Bank of England (underrated villains in all this) issued a statement saying that people should not be asking for payrises was the most outrageous moment of recent times and in a less neutered nation would have had thousands out in the streets.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Incorrect. When you see that 26.6m figure, it includes 13m pensioners and 620,000 children receiving DLA. 9m people of working age claim the rest, mostly Universal Credit. 33.77m people work in the UK.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
If Dr Google is wrong, then fair fucks. That's still more than a quarter of working people in receipt of benefits though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
Dr. Bing (I should stop using Microsoft Edge) pointed me to a government report dated 2023 for the benefit numbers. Some AI thing returned the employment number.
13 million pensioners is still a problem as well though. When the State Pension was bought in the average life expectancy in the UK was low 70's people collected their pension for 6/7 years on average. Now it's 82. That's a lot of money which is being pissed away annually. Plus the very vast majority of the time those in receipt of that income really don't need it because they have received big inheritances and tended to be of an age whereby they got much more generous workplace pensions.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
It will never happen but the State Pension age needs to be increased much more dramatically than it currently is being and it probably needs to be means tested much more than it currently is as well.
All plasters.
The real problem is the ultra rich have got even richer and elite. THAT is where the money is. Everything else is merely small fry and won't fix anything.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
A problem that will only get worse with people having less children/future tax payers.
The country desperately needs a proper leader and sharpish. Sadly, I can't see it coming. We've 4 and a half years left of this, then - it seems increasingly likely - Farage / Reform, which I can't see delivering anything much better.
Correct. But only the Greens are even willing to have that conversation and the rest of their beliefs are so out of step with the rest of the country that they're a complete non-option.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
I can't think of a single major person in any sector with patriotic vision. Farage doesn't have vision, he just moans about others.
The big figures are all after American, Arab or Chinese money rather than pushing this country forward.
Aye, we need to rethink pensions and working in old age in general. I've worked with two 70+ women who are still capable and don't really show signs of packing in. Meanwhile the blokes driving the local buses look to be pushing past retirement age. Then there's Jimmy's lot.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
Just had a look to see what a full state pension is at the moment. £11k a year. A lifeline if that's all you've got and too big for the well off to say no to.
I spotted an absolute classic of this country is fucking useless today.
The small road I go down to park my car in the morning has a part that is sinking. There’s been a sign up for the past few weeks saying the road is going to be closed today I assumed that would be because they were going to bit that is sinking. No turns out that they have fixed up another part of the road which is nowhere near as bad and completely left the sinking part of the road even though it was literally 10 yards away.
I can one up you there....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czen7g5e9dpo
The sort of shit that wouldn't look out of place in a Banana Republic, sans the brown envelopes (which probably just haven't been found yet).
:lol:
I'd love to know by what measure 24% of people think this is going well.
Not sure if it's political, or football, but I see today that Sven managed to pop his clogs whilst owing HMRC £7.25m. Elsewhere Ugo Monye's being taken to the bankruptcy court by the taxman over unpaid tax debts. Is there any cunt in the celebrity industrial complex who doesn't owe a fortune in unpaid taxes? Get Gary Stevenson on the case.
Paying to give Diego Garcia away whilst putting a bunch of twats on a 'soft power' working group is like a parody of hateful and useless government on autopilot.
I hold my hands up, I genuinely didn't think this lot would so instantly be as useless as the last lot. Fair play. Sorry Rishi, you were doing a great job.
The wanking around doesn't surprise me, but the complete lack of political skill really does.
Looooool
I guess we can put a line through "atleast they're not corrupt".
Well, that's that then. More of the same until Farage 2029. Yay.
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising, but a Labour minister being 'unaware of the circumstances in which a central London flat came into their ownership' is a bit beyond parody.
On another topic, can someone explain to me why Labour are falling over themselves to give away the Chagos Islands on terrible terms? It just makes no sense on any level.
Because it's the right thing to do?
If Iraq had a taken over the islands and literally chucked out all the people living there, the West would rightfully shit the bed.
Weren't we told by the United Nations to give it back in 2021 anyway?
:lol:
Far be it from me to question the motives of the Marxist stats people, but 30% of people wanting him to resign before he was even PM does make you wonder who on earth is answering these questions and what, if anything, is motivating those answers.
Pretty sure they do a test question on this where they ask if the fictional cabinet minister Simon Perkins (or whatever) should resign, and the answer's always 10% say he should.
Inflation down. Where's all the haters now?
The Foreign Office want to because they are retards, but David Cameron blocked them. The only explanation is that it will get them a pat on the back from people Starmer socialises with.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
My current policy agenda is majoring on jail for anyone who buys from the Chinese drop shippers, but I might be able to slip in something about torture for those advocating regression of British interests abroad for the sake of it.
Lock up everyone under 30? I guess it sort of solves the housing crisis.
Along with everyone over 60, ideally.
I'm deadly serious about that one. The fact that they are legal is insane. Undercuts every small business in the country.
What happens when you hit 60? Are old people the good guys then?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
:D
Does she solo this stuff or is there a team of people with their head in their hands behind it?
Liz Truss still being relevant might well be one of the great mysteries of the modern World.
I think she's only relevant in the sense that she is desperate for money so constantly pimping herself out to US outlets.
That's an excellent picture. :D
Yeah she’s not relevant she just comes across as desperate.
The delivery isn't great, but she's not wrong.
She came up on YouTube the other day doing something with Sargon of Akkad, who I remember from the days of the Atheism vs Theology debates (cringe days indeed). Apparently he's pretty far right these days. Kicked out of UKIP for saying there's not enough beer in the world for him to rape Jess Phillips :cab:Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
That seems an odd path to take for someone from the Atheist side of the debate, but regardless, Truss knocking about with him tells me she has essentially taken the Russell Brand approach to being in shambles, and is now heading as far right as she needs to go until someone pats her on the head and says she didn't break the economy.
Sadly it is where the money is.
I know a fair bit about Liz Truss and I have it on good authority that she is desperately, desperately unintelligent, to the point where it's amazing she got into any kind of white collar work at all, let alone a politician, let alone somehow having become Prime Minister. It's not even like Trump who is portrayed as stupid but obviously has a sort of malign cunning that has got him to where he is. Truss I think is just a completely empty shell, and ended up where she was purely because Tory MPs are weird as fuck public schoolboys and have this odd sexual thing about right wing women leaders (they all fancied Thatcher rotten), and they somehow ended up projecting that onto her. She isn't even right wing of course, she's just a blank sheet of paper, like a glass of water with no water in it.
Anyway, if you're that stupid and it catches up with you and you find yourself hoyed out of being Prime Minister after three weeks, and then lose your seat, what is a girl to do? The answer is just chase the US cash because the money is there and enough of them don't know who she is that she can sell herself to the vast right wing ecosystem there as 'The Woman Who British Socialists Love To Hate', or whatever. Lovely cash that doesn't need any intellectual expenditure (which is just as well because she isn't capable of it) and cash that of course just isn't on offer in this country. She'll appear with Darth Vader, Hitler, whoever if the money's there.
Farage also loves the same cash, absolutely adores it, but because he's accidentally become an MP and now a party leader, and because he's got a lot more about him than Truss has, he finds himself in a slightly more difficult position.
This is like something I would make up as a lol 'country is finished' complaint.
Imagine if they could tax the rich. Free Ooni pizza ovens for everyone!
That headline picture is fantastic, by the way.
This is actually the scourge of local government let's say an air-fryer costs £60 and they are giving away 6000 of them. That's £360,000 pissed up the wall. All because someone is a pensioner and for no other reason. It's just absolutely batshit.
The local version that irritates me is the local police station giving people free faraday bags for their car keys: if you can afford a decent enough car that you have keyless entry then you can afford £10 for a bag.
It actually intends to save them money because it's much cheaper than an oven.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
It's not the council's business whether old people save money or not. It's the council's business to run services.
Assuming a stubborn pensioner won't just return to the oven because, "It doesn't taste right in the air fryer." Or they can't figure out how to work it. Or they sell it back.
It's to help them because the fuel allowance was cut.
Jesus Christ aim your disdain at the ultra rich.
Pensioners are the ultra rich. It's under 30s who need that £360,000 for, you know, transport to get them to work, and so on. Old people cooking food simply is not important at all.
The idea that pensioners are all rich that seems to infest this forum is cloud cuckoo land stuff. Are some? Of course. Should the rich ones get a state pension or a free air fryer? Absolutely not.... but the idea that they're all shitting gold having stolen our futures is the sort of stuff the BNP would have built a manifesto on were we talking about non-white people.
I assume the ones being bought air friers are not at the wealthy end of the age cohort. But yeah, I largely agree, and most of the shit the elderly get needs to be means tested like the fuel allowance now is. Vince Cable can stick his bus pass up his arse.
Pensioners are the wealthiest age cohort in the country. But they are also have the highest level of inequality.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Have they ever not been? They always should be as they've had far longer to accumulate wealth.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Though it's changing rapidly, here anyway. We're coming into the first generation of large-scale renting pensioners now.
Then I would question the logic of them getting the most governmental help. Or, atleast, help others aren't entitled to. Alot of it stems from war veterans / widows reaching retirement age with fuck all to retire on. That obviously isn't the case anymore and their benefits need looking at because of that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
Why do I not get a bus pass, but they do? Why isn't my wage triple locked? Why do they get fuel allowance if they're poor, but poor Yevrah wouldn't?
Age is a very stupid way of deciding what benefits people are entitled to. Everything should be means tested.
What happens then? Do they get housing benefit and we just funnel more money into landlords' pockets?Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggles
They end up with their kids/in a home/in a tent once their landlord sells the house to an international investment company.Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
This shit is mental too. If I wanted to buy that house, it would cost north of £350k. But for over 60's? £258k. Fuck off.
Most, but definitely far from all pensioners are not in a position where they are hard up. Those who are hard up are generally those who are not lucky enough to own their own home or for whatever reason are single. There was a comment piece in the Times over the weekend explaining how the triple lock is almost like a cult now. Which it is, nobody dare go near it because it will be massively unpopular but nobody is turning around and saying that this is going to make the State Pension unaffordable and we need to do something about it before it spirals out of all control. But, as with everything that is the next government's problem so can be kicked down the road.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
I can use two examples from my family. My dad no private pensions to talk of. But, he bought his house in the early 90's for about £60k because of where he lives it's now worth probably £750,000. If he was desperate in retirement he could sell that house and downsize but he doesn't want to. Fair enough but if he ever moans about being hard up I will immediately point back to him that he does have significant wealth no matter how it was achieved. My in laws receive £24,000 State Pension, my father in law then receives just under £30k from his final salary pension as well as having a house worth about £400k and another £150k worth of investments. Could his State Pension be means tested slightly? You fucking bet it could and it wouldn't impact on his standard of living in the slightest.
That's where this comes from, there are people who genuinely do struggle and should be given far more support but there are also millions of people who own their own homes and have significant assets in one way or another who absolutely should not be receiving as much as they do from the state.
Isn't that essentially shared ownership? There are schemes for younger people to do that too, no?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
You can do it under 60, but you won't get a preferential rate.Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
https://i.ibb.co/rmZjKCQ/Screenshot-...-Rightmove.jpg
You can do part-ownership under 60, but the like for like property would be priced at £385k and you would buy whatever %age you buy against that price.
Those lifetime lease things seem a right scam. You are paying two thirds of the apparent market price of the house to not own it. It's just like paying 'a lifetime' of rent upfront.
Oh they absolutely are, you just get scammed a bit less if you're old.
Part owners at our age are being taken the piss out of. Even if you starecase up to 100% ownership, you own nothing. You just own the entirety of the lease. They still own the land and you pay ground rent and maintenance and insurance and whatever the fuck until you die. BUT all the responsibility for repairs is yours as if you did own it.
All the downsides of being an owner and all of the downsides of being a renter, with none of the benefits.
I'm a shared owner (I have 60%) and to be honest I'll take it over full renting any day of the week.
But you are renting Jim. In the eyes of the law you own 60% of the lease, but not one single brick.
I don't know the ins and outs of shared ownership, but that seems intuitively less of a rort. Other than lifetime surety of tenancy I don't see what benefits you get. You see it on massive houses in the country round here. What sort of over 60 needs a £1.2m [reduced from £1.8m] 5 bedroom country house? And surely anyone with £1.2m to drop on a property isn;t going to 'buy' something they won't eventually own. I just find it mind boggling.
Jim's being conned but is in denial about it.
Yeah, and I'm going to die before the lease is up, so I'll sell my part of it. In the mean time, I pay about £700 less a month to live here than I would do if I was renting it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Whatever the merits or lack of of Ed Miliband's 'Mansion Tax' proposal, I always remember lolling at the government claiming millionaire pensioners having to sell their homes was equivalent to burning them out of them whilst - entirely correctly - using the exact same logic to forcibly downsize housing benefit claimants with extra bedrooms.
Also with pensioners. They are fucking obsessed with not paying tax, literally everyone I see when they retire wants their cake and eat it in terms of having a big pension pot worth a few hundred grand or savings and not wanting to pay tax on their income, or capital gains tax or inheritance tax. This is most likely driven by seeing the mega rich getting away with paying fuck all in tax for as long as they can remember. Actually getting it taxed and doing away with all these loopholes that have existed to help the mega-rich but now literally anyone and everyone is trying to get away with using them would help massively.
As it stands as well part of the issue in this country is self-employed(me included), when everyone was PAYE the government just collected the money and there were no scams to get out of paying the taxman. Fuck me the stuff you can get away with being self-employed is incredible and again we are only being driven to do that because it helps big business.
I often wondered how my dad could stop working in his mid-40s and still have money to fall back on. Then I remember he started work at 14. They live longer, they work longer, they save harder.
Rachel Reeves going full anti-bat. What a legend.
Twitter is in full meltdown over it too. :happycry:
Yeah, I see the greens have predictably gone mental. Unfortunately they display the same level of ignorance as regards the issue as they level at those they accuse of being at war with nature display. Neither the bats, nor the idea or even the legislation protecting them is the issue. It is the fanatical nimbys and the Kafkaesque administrative burdens they have created who have put them on this front line by rather hijacking the issue.
Get the ecologists up against Boydy's wall/in the gulag.
'The Greens are always wrong' is the most surefire bet in politics.
Also backpedalling on Trump. Big day for Labour.
Indeed. Extend to all ecologists, not just politicians.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
I'm awarding Giggles the e-victory on that one.
Taking on the bats? I never thought I'd see that day. I wonder if Labour haven't been emboldened a bit in recent days by Trump's start to his second term. Whatever one thinks of him (hello RL) he seems to have tried to do more in what, two weeks, than Labour have in six months. Maybe it's dawned on them that as the party in power, they should actually use that power a bit more.
It's been a big month for the World as it looks like we are finally seeing the beginning of the end of the lunacy street we've been walking down for so long.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
:drool: fuck the green scam.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
They have said they will support Heathrow expanding 'in line with legal environmental and climate objectives', which means they want to offer short-term reassurance to 'investors' but will then sit and do nothing when it eventually gets judicial reviewed into the bin by Chris Packham.
Steady on. RFK's in charge of health who <checks notes> appears to be against vaccinating children against childhood diseases.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
I'm normally against political violence, but if anyone stepped up to pop Ed Miliband from the oh-so-grassy knoll I'd buy them a brie and bacon baguette.
I was strong armed into watching the yoghurt-knitting bio-doc about Chris Packham and his autism a few years back and he's possibly the worst person in the country. He's an absolute fanny.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Seems a bit harsh, particularly in a country where Richard Tice is around at least some of the time.
Richard Tice doesn't claim to be a punk whilst simultaneously being too scared to have his curtains open because the sight of the trees swaying in the wind is to much for him
Seems to fancy his step-daughter as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Don’t blame him. She is definitely shameful lustage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Isn't the edge of the purple kingdom there basically the line that the Vikings got up to?
"Stats for lefties." :D
It's literally from a yougov poll. "Stats for lefties" is just an aggregator twitter account. You can click the handle through to the yougov account and see them posting their own poll results.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
We'd have to go independent if that happened lmao.
I think Reform in its current form would be useless in government. Farage is probably less interested than Johnson was in actually doing anything, and he is more than likely surrounded by absolute plebs (unlike very early phase Johnson), so it would be more ineffective government via Telegraph article. Hopefully if they remain in the lead because the Conservative Party stick with Idi Duncan Smith then money will follow Reform and allow them to build some sort of policy unit with a raft of mega stuff ready to go a la Trump.
Tell you what though Sir Beer Korma finally getting his lockdown comeuppance would make my year.
The poll results should at least wake the incumbents up a bit.
I just think it's dumb there's an aggregator called that. "Man, I really want statistics that's right for me."Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
Still, a minority reform government. :drool: That would barely hold on for a week.
I know a lot of people really were just anyone but the Tories which has accounted for Labour having such a massive majority. But they have really impressively managed to cock things up since winning power.
Events will force Labour to become basically a centre-nationalist government (the very last thing they want to be) and they will win because of that.
They have, but equally, Free Gear Kier immigrant Farmer Starmer is a bit of a perfect storm, in that his name breeds memes so easily and some shadowy figures out there have been hoarding dirt on him for years, just waiting for him to get in power.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke Emia
Followed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
:D
Thought you didn't like stats.
I don't really understand the need to do voting intentions 5 minutes into a new government except out of boredom.
Just seen that 2 Tier Kier has been upgraded to 4 TIER KIER.
https://news.sky.com/story/starmer-a...covid-13302244
I'm not sure anyone gives a fuck about lockdown breaches anymore, mind.
I think the unspoken implication is he was shagging her.
I'm not sure her poor choice in men is of much interest either. Unless there's footage of him kissing her incredibly clumsily, anyway. In which case I look forward to watching him eat Kangaroo bollocks in a year or so.
Isn't it an open secret Starmer shags about as does most of Westminster?
They still have a bar you can smoke in, that's open all night, right? It must be rampant and wide-rife.
It's an open secret he has a lovechild and his wife is a potemkin wife.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
The little known fact I have on Starmer is that he's the son of a toolmaker.
He certainly is.
Is it?Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
“Boydy adds to his dossier”
Surely you're across this one.Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
:D
Stop it.
Lol
This story about Lammy wanting to open talks on slavery reparations is insane. We won't be paying them, obvs, but why would you even float it or entertain the idea.
We HAVE been paying them. What's Foreign Aid otherwise?
Regardless, Lammy is a deeply stupid person and it's embarrassing that he is representing us in any way.
Because he believes in it and will attempt to find a workaround that doesn't involve immediate cash transfers? This is why your 'events' theory is mental by the way. These people are pathological.
You can believe in whatever you like, but the black cause is deeply unpopular among non-blacks and he'll get about five minutes into it before he has to be sacked to save Starmer's credibility. It's another world away even from Miliband's treacherous wank, which is already succumbing to events.
Slavery reparations, closer ties with Europe, probably across the board failings on improving living standards or public services, are they deliberately trying to gift us a Reform government next time?
They're all in on "it's just the economy, they'll stop moaning if they feel better off".
Several problems there. The main 2 being, they're wrong and that they have no chance of turning the economy around THAT much in 4 and a bit years.
Ah the old Joe Biden but number go up strategy, although without doing any of the stuff to make number go up. Perfect.
Except for the part where Joe Biden had a great economy where number continued to go up, that's pretty spot on.
If Joe Biden had genuinely had a great economy then most 'ordinary' Americans would have voted for him.
They didn't.
There is a flaw in number go up, even if number does go up. Trump and the new right aren't going to be the answer, but if everyone else is just going to go around clapping their hands above their head and shouting growth, growth, growth, well, what are the options?
Biden won an election comfortably.
Growth in US and growth in Europe are completely different animals, they have natural resources and the global reserve currency, a trained monkey could make number go up there, as Trump proved last time and will do again this time. Here you have to be strategic and also extremely pragmatic, something that neither side of politics have adjusted to at all and are still playing the game like it was played when they were student politicians in the 80s and 90s.
Wasn't Biden only on the ticket once and won?Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Am I being a moron or have you forgotten he wasn't the candidate in the last election?
Yeah, was conflating the two, forgot about Harris.
As our friend Gary of Economics has taught us, GDP cares not whether there's a billion in the hands of one man, surrounded by the destitute, or a billion divided evenly between the group. They GDP number is the same either way. That's why "number goes up" doesn't work.
It's also why Reform will probably win the next election and why they will fail miserably. Then, they'll decide pausing migration wasn't enough and the deportations will start, which also won't work.
Even framing the interest rate lowering as 'more money in people's pockets' is bollocks if inflation's just going to bump prices up.
Easily done, to be fair.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
It is based on the fact that most people are on fixed rates. Also that the money banks use for mortgages is based on swap rates which don’t actually correlate that much with what the base rate is doing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
I love how 'number go up doesn't work' keeps getting repeated here when the number is not going up.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
True to an extent, but growth mainly requires understanding that it is companies who generate growth nowadays, not government. If you want growth in your precious lands, you need to convince companies that it is a good place to invest, instead of thinking that government can fix every single issue, which you have decades of experience showing that they simply can't.
The number has been going up in America and they've just elected the Tronald on an anti-immigration ticket.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Whilst I find his argument a bit reductionist and perhaps alarmist I think you can see a lot of sense in what Gary says.
I particularly liked his hit piece on growth, mostly because it was really a hit piece on idiots like Mark Carney.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMXWUeH5Y48
If that is the kind of place people get their info from, I don't even know what to say.
Quick scan of the transcript because lol I am not going to watch that:
Middle class living standards are not falling in the US and I doubt that they are falling in the UK. Italy and Spain I don't know, maybe, but I doubt it.Quote:
we get messages all the time saying
2:02
living standards are collapsing here in
2:05
the US in Germany it's definitely
2:07
happening places like Italy and Spain
Sure, half of the kids over there are either freezing or starving to death every winter.Quote:
The Last 5 Years specifically we have
2:43
seen really a collapse in the living
2:45
standards of the average British family
2:47
this has happened at the same time as
2:49
the enormous growth inequality we we've
2:51
reached a situation now when you know
2:53
about half of the families in the
2:55
country struggle to simultaneously feed
2:58
their kids and turn the heating on
I'll stop there, come on now.
Because it isn't cold enough for them to freeze to death over here. Instead they have issues with mold and poor health.
I visit people literally every week who live in their coats, breath visible in the air, huddled together under blankets, because they can't afford to have the heating on.
Can you not all see that that bloke is a massive grifter? Maybe not, I don't know, I suppose it's always bewitching when someone positions themselves against the lizardmen.
The average British family isn't middle class lmao.
He simplifies things for his audience, but I struggle to disagree with most of what he says.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Maybe's he's one of Spikey's regulars. What with his bobble hat with a t-shirt/undershirt combo.
Starmer is currently trying to give all of his deeply unpopular tax rises to Mauritius to appease five of his mates. What does 'credibility' even mean to somebody like that? If the spastics at the Foreign Office can convince him that preferential arrangements for Barbados will increase our pretend 'soft power' they will fall over themselves to go with it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
As for Miliband, he is keeping it shut about Heathrow because he knows it won't happen. The rest of his ruinous agenda is untouched.
The Financial Times couldn't find anyone he worked with able or willing to substantiate his origin story. Proper knobhead.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Didn't the FT hit piece conveniently dance around the substance of his origin story? I've not read his book. It's completely immaterial anyway although emblematic of the way things are done - ignore the substance and try to find a small detail which is going to be fundamentally impossible to really substantiate to paint everything else with.
Fair play if he is grifting. I don't think he is, and I don't think he's really getting grifting right if he is unless you view the whole thing as a giant performative charade.
Hypothetical question: Let's say that a wealth tax is set in place and the rich just take it; no closing factories, moving money abroad, none of those scary things they claim they would do. Thanks to this, the tax revenue that the UK collects goes from ~700 billion gbp to, say, ~1000 billion gbp. What do you think your government would do with the extra money that would make your lives better?
Cut taxes for working people?
Why can't they do that right now?
They haven't got any money to pay for anything?
Such as? Maybe they could pay for less shit?
Also they could lower your taxes, but do you think that they would?
It probably goes on infrastructure projects.
We spend £200 billion a year on universal healthcare which is also a national religion to the same extent that, say, the US constitution is to them. You can't do anything about tax while that's running.
Such as? If those infrastructure projects are worth doing (as in, they will bring more revenue in the long term than what they cost), surely they could build them today?
They could yeah. I'd say things are in a weird place where society needs both the Musk DOGE folk to take a knife to a lot of the bureaucratic state, but equally, at least in Britain, there is a need for wholesale reform of the tax system which is just stupidly fragmented and, whilst progressive on its face, really quite regressive in reality.
I'm not really that bothered. I'm in the I'm alright Jack camp, but I can see there are certain systemic problems which could really do with being fixed in some way and that the consensus of the last 40 years probably isn't going to solve them.
Might need to run a poll on what's more dull, RL on America or Pepe on Britain.
If we're serious about the electric car/less cars on the road, its ... unfortunately high speed rail on a nationalised network.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Fair enough. I'll stop now.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
He seemingly did quite well for himself in a past life, which would be enough to consider what he says; but so did thousands of others, so there would be no reason to hype him up when you could find any one of his peers to disagree with him. His gimmick is that, because he was the World's Best Trader, he has some esoteric knowledge that the other traders (and anyone else for that matter) lack, making him uniquely able to give you a TRUTH.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
That's sort of how punditry works isn't it? Roy Keane gets millions a year to deliver my mum tier analysis for the same reason.
Great, now I feel mean. You're meant to bite back you bastard.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Fucking coward.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Where are these voices and do they do a better job of describing the world we live in?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
A lot of his bluster seems quite self-deprecating. These people aren't geniuses, but they are rewarded as if they are gods, for mostly just shuffling things around as needed.
His former peers are presumably making money and living their lives, but Pepe off of the TTH has just corrected him so there's one person to listen to.
People can believe whatever they want to believe. I think his views of the world post 2008 are fairly compelling, but like most of the various 'crises' facing humanity there's no real appetite to do anything about anything, and perhaps there is nothing that could be done realistically, so we rumble on in a befuddled stupor, which is completely fine with me.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c897ew0ekp4oQuote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Mind boggling.
I dread to think what proportion of the NHS budget is spent providing B&B to people who are medically fit but can't be discharged because of a lack of adequate social care. If you walk into any random geriatrics ward in the country at least half the patients will be medically fit awaiting social care, some of them for weeks. Then they'll get hospital acquired pneumonia and the whole process gets nuked and starts again.
Many of them are for completely ludicrous reasons as well, like their toilet roll holder is broken which is unsafe so they can't be discharged until it's fixed.
If you tally it all up I bet it's like 20% of the budget.
One of the benefits of being in paeds actually is generally being able to avoid that shit.
We did have a few chancing parents refusing to take their kids with covid home until they were testing negative during the pandemic, but that was about it.
Do not miss spending an hour of my morning writing "MFFD awaiting POC" every day.
Almost everyone on YouTube is a grifter. It’s the nature of the beast.
He's a sensationalist.
https://i.imgur.com/iBiLj6x.gifQuote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
If one's aim is revenue rather than good videos, then yes. Plenty just make good videos.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
This Labour MP sacking is entertaining stuff. If you're going to get cancelled, why not go out in style by wishing death on specific constituents of yours.
Yeah, I should have clarified. Almost all of those chucking out videos on the regular are grifters.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
His videos aren't even monetised. Deliberately so. That's why there are no adverts during them. He also isn't sell Huel or a subscription to anything else like the actual grifters.
I'd love to know what he's grifting exactly?
See how absolutely unfunny and creepy that cunt is. Can we get the Hello HR meme for Trump Vs Labour MPs ?Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
In that case, fair play to him. 'Dr' John Campbell could take note.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
The stock market went up. 50% of the country don’t own stocks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kikó
Did you just ask what the government could do if they increased tax revenue by almost 50% with no economic fallout whatsoever?Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Even in the simplest terms if they just split it up and gave everyone a cheque for using that income that would increase the average yearly salary by 15%. If you don’t include London then it would increase it by 20-25%.
See Panorama right now.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Rent control leading to poor housing availability and conditions? Nah, that cannot be possible!Quote:
Christine, and husband Paul, 74, have a protected tenancy which keeps the rent low, at £440 per month. They did not know who their landlord was. All communication was through a letting agent.
Aye, it'd be fine if they were paying market rent like everyone else in the story.
I've never even heard of a protected tenancy.
Sounds like they are going to be quite rare:
Quote:
Your property may have a protected tenancy if:
the current tenancy began before 2007
the property was built or converted for letting before 1956
the property was first rented out before 1978
a tenant was living in the property in October 1978
And if you are paying market rent and there is mold, can't you just, you know, move?
Also, I don't know how it is over there, but here you could withhold rent until they get that shit fixed. Breaking a lease over black mold is also fine.
In most cases no, I don't think you can. Perfect market conditions are not present, which renders the alternative courses of action also somewhat redundant.
That is not to say there is a simple solution to this.
Yeah, especially if you're particularly tied to an area (family, schools, etc). I can't imagine the 74 year-old would fancy another move at that age.
Does this stuff really spread so quickly that you can't keep on top of it with adequate ventilation and cleaning?
Case in point...
Never had a problem with mould, to be honest.
By which I mean, having been a landlord in the past, greater regulation etc generally only drives up costs of responsible market participants, and doesn't help solve the actual problem. Driving up costs can drive out landlords, which reduces stock, thus further exacerbating the issue. I suppose the obvious end goal would be to somehow drive down property values to make ownership more viable [or have adequate stocks of social/government housing], but in reality as responsible, small landlords are driven out, they are replaced by Blackrock [or whoever] and nothing gets better, and mass house building to be owned by the public sector is a long lost fantasy. I've been thinking for a while as to how you could make changes to help the poorest renters. I reckon Council Tax, which I guess is our version of property tax, should be one of the main ways to do it. Back in lax tax fantasy land [Guernsey] it was broken down into 2 parts - a tax on the land/size of the property itself and a tax on the occupier for things like collecting the bins. The former was much larger, and swelled massively in recent times, and was always the responsibility of the landlord. In the UK all of the council tax, which goes to pay for all manner of things, is the responsibility of the tenant, which seems perverse to me, as it goes towards paying for all sorts of shit above and beyond collecting the bins. Yes, transferring liability would perhaps drive up rents, but I'm not sure, and even if they did, the occupier would likely not be any worse off.
We just basically need to build a fuckton of decent housing, but like everything the existing infrastructure has been sweated [?] with little investment and now it's all a bit falling apart.
Scumbag.
The conditions people live in. :sick:
In fairness I probably should have sold my flat in London as it basically saw very little gain in value after 2012. It actually lost value on the 2014 valuation I had when I sold it in 2022.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
If I had sold it then and bought a house it probably would have tripled in value.
Flats are a mugs game.
Oh is a wickle baby upset at not making enough money at the proletariat's expense?Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Not really, I think what it showed was the market essentially broke in early 2010s and there was a total disconnect at that point between property values and what you could get a mortgage for, which probably hasn't really changed all that much. Well, in Central London in my experience but probably more nationally now. One of the main drivers was the lack of credit availability for normal people, and the people that could get the credit, which was absurdly cheap, well, they probably bought a lot of the property.
Also, want to hear another mad thing? If you own a property in Guernsey as a non-resident, and rent it out, you get tax withheld at the maximum applicable rate [20%] by law. There may be some forms of double tax mitigation available, but I don't know. The tax gets collected and then you'd fight to get it back. If you own a property in the UK as a non-resident, you can apply to be a non-resident landlord, which requires you to complete a self-assessment form if you qualify [most would], for which you get given full personal allowances and all allowable deductions, and if you own the property jointly then you get both allowances. There are nuances to how it works and I don't think you can fully take the piss with it, but even as a basic thing it's fucking mental, in my mind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Alright Peter Rachman.
The whole [tax] system is completely ballbagged, it's hard to know where you would start trying to fix it.
Mold is a tricky one, because atleast half the time it's caused by tenants not heating their homes (poverty). Which is obviously horrible, but not necessarily the landlords fault. If they're on Universal Credit, for example, their rent is often paid in full, but it doesn't stop them being skint.
It's usually pretty easy to tell though. If it's around the windows and doors, and in the corners, you need ventilation and heating. If it's covering the walls and ceilings, the property has a serious issue that the landlord has likely been painting over for years, evicting anyone who dares complain, because fixing it would be a more expensive pain in the arse.
Labour must be thick as fuck pushing all this 'we have got rid of more illegal immigrants than anyone since 2018' stuff as a flex, surely the main people who want that would never vote Labour anyway.
My friend bought a house in London for relatively cheap because they had to keep the previous tenant because of this reason. They built her a flat at the bottom of the house so that she can continue living there at a relatively low market rent. So if you want a cheaper house, find an immovable tenant is my advice.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
The people in the street they talked to on Newsnight [in Spikey's endz] were funny about those videos.
Well, good, but it's not enough. Maybe if they put them out every day . . .
I can sort of understand why Starmer is pissed that using actual laws to make actual progress [as some would see it] doesn't get much, if any, recognition, but, as you say, who is this going to win over?
And then move them into a Fritzl dungeon?Quote:
Originally Posted by Kikó
Was that the one with the rogue tranny out of nowhere? If so, Basilslum is NOT my endz.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
:D
Yeah, the rogue tranny was certainly a surprise inclusion.
That's the price you pay if you want to live in London.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
I for one welcome our new AI overlord.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8edn0n58gwo
All your data are belong to US.
Trust Sir Beer to cuck for the Trumpmeister. What a truly pathetic boy licking nation we are.
Sadly 50% of us will love it.
Edit: boot licking.
:D
Freudian.
Trust Europeans to want to ban shit before they even understand what it is.
:lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
If France, China and India are on one side then Britain should be on the other. Excellent from Sir Keir.
Having worked in Property Management most of my life, mould is one of those contentious issues which is difficult to prove either way who's fault it is. To the outside world anyway.
The Landlord has to demonstrate that they are doing everything possible to give the tenant adequate ventilation. Trickle vents, etc.
I've managed properties privately for years and some flats have never had issues with mould, however suddenly it appears all over the place. When I walk past the flat, the windows are all closed in winter and if I ask to do a random check on the flat, the heating is on full blast with wet clothes being dried by the radiator. You tell them the reason why mould happens and they complain that they shouldn't have to open their windows, 'because it's sooooooooo cold.'
So the Landlord is then forced into installing an MVHR to assist the tenants. You're then relying on the tenants to switch on the MVHR. They say they are using it but it's not working, then complain about energy costs and that they shouldn't have to switch the MVHR on, or it's not really working and that they have it switched on all the time (although it's not on when I attend). Being difficult in every way.
Damp/rising damp is something different entirely, but tenants don't seem to understand that. They go to citizens advice or to solicitors and complain about health/breathing issues and it becomes a complete nightmare. So many opportunists out there who are trying to get money out of private Landlords from this.
Being someone in the middle, I've definitely experienced far worse from tenants than Landlords.
Of course, 'personal responsibility' is the answer.
Either that or get a PFI contractor in to manage the situation.
Goes nicely alongside that local council hitpiece I read the other day about how a lot of the swingeing cuts being made to budgets/services largely mirror in magnitude the [insane] pension contributions said councils are simultaneously making, which are being funded out of significant rises in council tax. No, you can't have your bin collected, but yes, you can pay for my final salary pension and yes, I did get bumped up several pay bands in my final years of working and no that has nothing to do with inflating my pension.
Havertz has torn his hammy in Dubai. Fucking hell. :lol:
Starmer in pieces.
:moop:
Bedenoch going big on the UK immigration services commissioner doing his job working from home in Finland at PMQs, it does sound a bit odd.
Appointed in 2019.
Starmer could barely contain himself.
Is she/her staff actually retarded?
Yes.
Obviously a bit salty they weren't able to run the NO MORE FISCAL HEADROoM WHERE'S THE GROWTH!?!?!!! story they likely had tee'd up.
What a load of nothing.
This kind of microscopic scrutiny of all details of people in public life really needs to stop.
I see they also have an ancillary hit piece to go with that one with what I would call an interesting headline choice.
She's obviously pissed someone off somewhere. Christ knows how, she must be one of the most boring characters ever to grace the British political scene.
Thought this was quite interesting on the mould business:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUNkyV9vl4s
Debate raging in the office at the moment. Gen Z Brit is passionately defending the NHS. Romanian and Algerian equally passionately telling him it's the worst health system in the world and a complete joke. Now the Indian has just arrived and weighed in on the side of the NHS. 2-2.
I'm staying quiet.
I know RL won't agree but I quite like Chippy Wes Streeting. He seems driven. No idea if he's any good but he has that slight air of the madman about him.
He speaks like Marjorie Dawes.
Just read a scorching new Cummings substack in which he advocates for 'regime change'. To this day, can't get enough of the man.
That Brewdog twat is trying to be a poundshop Elon Musk and proposing a 'Shadow Doge' initiative in which he encourages people to 'flood public institutions with FOIs' in the name of er, efficiency savings. Because no-one's ever thought of that before, local authorities are in a constant state of re-orging for cost purposes.
How is he regarded as an entrepreneur? Brewdog is absolutely loaded with debt and will probably fold. He's a mega cunt.
My experience with Romanians is they don't like the NHS because it won't just give them whatever random non-medically-indicated shit they want/their "doctor in Romania" has recommended.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
Child presents with an obvious viral rash and it's all:
"Well I showed the rash to my doctor in Romania and they said they should be tested for all known allergens and it's ridiculous you aren't planning to do that".
I mean that is correct though.
I have a friend that broke his leg in Romania. He spent 4 days in Romanian hospital, with no painkillers beyond paracetamol and they botched his surgery so bad that he ended up with one leg significantly shorter than the other.
Not doing it is correct, yes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Basically why we don't trust you lot.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
:thbup:
I don't know if this should be in the DOGE discussion, the house thread, the news thread or here, but as someone currently going through the planning process with HDC [current update, application in for 2 weeks and not even yet validated, great work chaps, efficient] this sort of shit is both maddening and a bit terrifying.
CIL is going to end up as one of those many other national scandals we have. It's completely insane in its operation, like properly Kafkaesque.
The self-build exemption form is hereQuote:
You must apply for the reliefs or exemptions that apply to your development by submitting the correct form. You must also submit an Assumption of Liability form for all claims, apart from the self-build residential exemption, before we can grant the relief or exemption.
It literally says at the top of it that you have to do the assumption of liability form as part of this exemption process, even though the council guidance says you don't. If you get any minute aspect of the paperwork wrong you end up getting fucked. It is almost designed so you get it wrong. It is supposed to apply to large developers, but if you look at any local area planning map you will see that almost anywhere a big developer is developing stuff they are doing it on land that is designated as CIL exempt. If you look at pages 13 and 14 here you will see my local area. The zero rated/purple areas are where literally all of the new major housing schemes are/were [it is obviously a bit out of date now but don't think it has been updated]. It's just another one of those things where the headline is making big developers pay, but the detail is just fucking the little guy. Top work. Get Elon in to dissolve the cunts.
It's like he's trying to ensure Reform win the next election.
I've seen far too many BBC breaking news alerts today about Starmer says this and Starmer says that about Ukraine. He should shut the fuck up. I'm not fucking dying for Ukraine.
What does he think an American 'backstop' and 'security guarantee' is that they haven't already ruled out? It sounds like European treaty-brained mongs thinking they can pull the wool over the Americans with fuzzy language, which obviously they will love.
As if you'd get called up.Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
Presumably it's the price for not being tariffed to fuck by Uncle Sam.
Utterly insane that there's seemingly only one man in the whole political landscape who is trying to stop that absolute shitshow.Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
Yev while I agree on the larger point I think you’re being completely mental on this. Your one guy happens to be the one guy who would face absolutely zero repercussions from Russian aggression being rewarded.
Please please look at the deal they offered Ukraine.
Trump thinks Russia and Ukraine are the same country. He's a lunatic like Putin.
People need to look at the history of these two countries. Cossacks. Holodomor (more deaths than the Holocaust btw). Orange revolution. As starting points.
There is a lot of history where Ukrainians have tried to be wiped out in the past by Russians. It goes back centuries, and they see it happening again.
Ukraine are somehow still standing because they're a proud nation who've been fucked time and again and see themselves as different to Russians, who they view as sneaky and untrustworthy like most of Europe does.
And most importantly, they're mentally and physically strong fighters against the aggressor, who has always been threatened by their genuineness and spirit. They are also the breadbasket of Europe. So that's another thing. Money.....
I don't like Starmer but I see why he's supporting Ukraine. You let Putin take a vast country like Ukraine, you might as well give him Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Moldova. Etc. Then you're looking at another USSR situation. It's a different type of war nowadays with more technology which is why Putin is going hard for it.
And why Europe has to protect Ukraine, who do not have the same type of technology or weapons that Russia has built up over the years in preparation for this. His little Lenin/Stalin moment in history before he pops his clogs. Similar to Trump. Stuck in the cold war era mentally but mutual respect of that. Rocky IV. Old school mentality from both. Why can't we find young leaders nowadays? Trump and Biden. Fucking hell. Is that the best USA can give us out of 334 million people?
Anyway, Putin complains about Nato aggression but we all know it's the other way around. Trump doesn't want to support Nato, and that's what is dangerous. But if he gets a deal with his egomaniac despot mate Putin, everyone will see he's the main man who solved it all. Messed up situation.
Is this the same guy who believed Putin because he took him in a room away from his handlers and said he didn't do anything?Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
People seem to forget Russia were running regular naval and aerial sorties along our sovereign borders prior to Ukraine, I wouldn't be naive enough to think if Trump gets it agreed they just leave things as they are that is the end of it.
Reform will be on about 40% when those 11% budget cuts kick in.
I just want to know who the 21% voting Conservative are. Baffling.
Any indication as to what that looks like in seats?
An absolute hung parliament tastic shit show I’m guessing.
South and west of London will never, ever vote Reform. Basically the old Saxon kingdom of Wessex will always be Tory or at most Lib Dem.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Viking kingdoms are the Reform voters.
There was another poll the other day which had Reform on 29% which I think someone had worked out as probably being a majority. I think a Reform majority will happen.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
I don't even mean "why aren't they voting Reform?". I fully understand not wanting to vote for them. I sure as shit wouldn't. But why would ANYONE vote Tory after the last 14 years? Who were they good for, exactly? Certainly not anyone that wanted a (small c) conservative government.
Lab 209Quote:
Originally Posted by yevrah
Ref 151
Con 156
LD 62
Because you want generally right-wing / conservative policies but don't want them delivered by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Personally think there is a lot of water to go under the bridge, Tories and Reform both need something that the other has if they are to beat Labour, so I would expect a merger or at worst a pact. Wouldn't be at all surprised if the Tory/Conservative brand was ditched and they merged into some bullshit name like Rule Britannia (probably not that, but you get the idea).
Christ, that would be awful. Absolutely nothing would get done.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
I dunno, I'm sure they could all agree to make the place even worse.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
That already appears to have cross party support.
The energy policies Tice announced the other day are genuinely retarded - not as in they merely sound ineffective, but actual mong logic like windfall taxes on existing subsidies - so they still aren't any sort of serious party, but they could easily finish the Conservative Party off once it becomes a choice and they look like the more likely one. On the other hand, the Conservative Party will have to switch leader before long, and Jenrick is better placed to reverse the trend, so who knows.
Anyway, another Labour minister making their job experience up lol. No wonder none of them wanted to probe Reeves' lies.
Because some people (the elderly, Jimmy) treat political parties like football teams and vote for the one they support, no matter what.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Same way I'm still prepared to have my eyes raped by Man Utd twice a week, they'll still vote Tory whilst they burn the country down.
I voted for Keir Starmer's Labour this time. Not one of my prouder moments.
Jimmy the bald(ing) fraud.
Where's Tommy Tugger at? Exiled by Thick Kemi?
Does a pot plant with a red rosette win where that punchy Labour MP is from or is there the prospect of an interesting BELLWETHER by-election on the assumption he gets recalled/biffed?
Got to be a solid chance for Reform in a by election there. Although the recent Trumpy/Musky stuff probably hasn't helped them.
Sounds like Sir Kier's mission to Washington is going to be rather overtaken and subsumed by events.
I'm not sure why he's bothering, really. Trump isn't going to listen to him. Why would he? At best he gets another pat on the head and told he's a good boy. At worse, he gets humiliated like Macron did.
Lol that's terrible take.
Did Macron get humiliated?
Kier should be landing in Boston Harbor with the King in tow.
I reckon we could take back at least a few of the Thirteen Colonies. New New England.
I reckon Trump would sell us Maine in exchange for maybe three courses off the Open rota. Trump Sandwich has a nice ring to it.
That Macron/Trump exchange made Trump look like someone with special needs and Macron his exceptionally patient support worker.
Well, yes, but I think it's fair to say that the intent behind brushing dandruff off Macron's shoulder wasn't positive.
I’ve just seen James O Briens current hair and it did psychic damage to me. My word.
He had a big plaster on his head so I assume it's to cover up whatever was underneath, I fail to see how it could be worse than the hair though.
Would you consider having Hitlers hair worse?Quote:
Originally Posted by Disco
Petition to ban twitter links.
Censorship, it's all the far left has any more :nuts:
What is going on with Reform and Rupert Lowe?
He said that the party needs to be more than a Nigel Farage ego vehicle and become more professional, so Nigel Farage has kindly proved his point for him.
I had - clearly incorrectly - assumed, that the set up was Farage and Tice pandering to the Centre Right, with Lowe being left alone to sweep up the votes from the further right.
Fuck knows what the plan is, if not. They won't win the next election without a Rupert Lowe figure saying the stuff they won't say though.
You think there’s a plan? They’ve fluked their way into this position due to the incumbents not dealing with the huge piles of steaming shit over the past decade or so, and have no clue how to handle it.
I thought they'd atleast have a very basic plan for how they're going to balance the obvious issue they're going to have in keeping both lapsed Tories and the Muslamic Ray Gun mongs happy. And the set up with Lowe seemed pretty good with that in mind. But no, clearly not. Thankfully they're actually this stupid.
Wait, Rupert Lowe was the right wing wacko?
I've obviously not being paying enough attention.
Richard Tice has to be one of the worst front men ever for a 'this is why your life is shit' narrative.
Well, he's been part of the Elon Musk MUSLIM RAPE GANG circle jerk and has been banging the drum for ethnicity backed crime statistics. In our current climate, that's pretty far right.
Outside of that I've not really been paying attention.
By enough, I've mean zero attention other than thinking wait isn't that the guy who owned Southampton at one point a few years ago.
Tice is awful in every way. Boomer Facebook memes come to life as a massive twat.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
:dc:Quote:
Originally Posted by Disco
Kanye West just out there openly saying his new album will be antisemitic.
Kanye West going off his medication and then saying wild, dumb shit to promote his album?
A truly seismic poltical moment.
I’ve had half a pint, I’m not in the business of finding the right thread.
https://i.imgur.com/qdRkFuN.png
This man blocked me years ago because I said him using his 800 thousand follower account to actively tag and tweet about how Hertz car rentals was ruining his ski holiday wasn't very man of the people. And now he looks like a bald drunk, the lesson here is to be nice to me.
He blocked you for that? :D
https://i.imgur.com/DI94fzo.png
Blocked within 30 seconds.
Its impressive, despite being a destestable arsehole I think I'm only blocked by 3 people on the entire website: James OBrien, the Run The Jewels Rapper, El-P and Barney Ronay.
What did you do to piss off El-P? :D
That one I feel fully justified on. This was old school Twitter. He spent years on that very same feed mocking rappers who would use Twitter as a promotional tool and jerking themselves off with retweets into doing exactly that once Run the Jewels popped off.
I quote tweeted this
And then said something along the lines of "When they become what they hate :("
and got an immediate reply of "Go fuck yourself you frowny ass fuck" and got blocked.
I can't not read that quote in his rap voice. Wonderful.
Actually @Shindig I just remembered my 4th block which you may be interested in. Austin Walker of 'I'm super smart and a deep thinker about video games' fame. I tweeted at him a song I made of Africa by Toto using only Yoshi noises and he also blocked me within 12 seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Utvjk2qtw
Well, that was insufferable.
Quite, it's the opposite of the El-P one, he was the justified one.
Someone posted a quote from Limmy in response to one of my tweets, I said I had no idea what they were talking about, and they tagged Limmy. I was blocked before I even clicked on his profile.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
Blocked for not knowing who the fanny is. :happycry:
I enjoy Limmy's content but I have heard on good authority from good sources in Glasgow he is a cunt in real life.
Who is Limmy?
A Scottish streamer. Come on, even I know this.
In fairness who isn't.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lofty
Mildly depressing that he's a streamer first, these days.
He is that now but that's not why he's famous.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
He didn't ask for an account of the battle of Bannockburn, he asked who Limmy is. Correct answers only.
I still don't really know, but at the time he had some kind of show on the BBC (3 or Alba, not one of the proper channels). I think he's basically a shite Karl Pilkington.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
https://youtu.be/P_0qXhN_72c?si=hRqj_U7-pA-H6KeL
Hilarity.
I've heard 'the name' but would have probably guessed Linehan as it was mentioned in the context of someone being a mong on twitter.
I don’t think I’ll be watching any more of his stuff if that’s the standard.
This is how I'll justify my addiction to Trans porn from here on in.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
The local Reform bloke just stuck his leaflet through the door. Three bulletpoints:
- Freeze immigration and STOP THE BOATS
- Scrap Net Zero to cut your energy bills
- Reduce waste and cut your taxes
Three things that distinctly seem impossible to do. Why would scrapping net zero lead to cheaper bills? Energy suppliers are private entities. Are you going to nationalise the energy sector, Nigel? Are you going to mine the channel? Reducing waste sounds like a green policy. How does that reduce taxes?
The leaflet ends on an incomplete sentence. "We take our county back, then our"
Have a word with the printers you used in Southend for that, Andrew Husband/Husband, Andrew.
It doesn't matter whether it does or doesn't or whether there's any logic, all that matters is morons like Giggles will vote for it and there are a lot of them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
They'll be as effective as this white fella clambering up Westminster with his little flag.
Rishi Sunak gave a great interview this week and the part about the PM - and government as a whole - lacking the power to get anything done was very interesting. Reform would have zero chance of making anything at all happen under the status quo, which is good, but pretty concerning on the whole, because the country needs lots of change, even if it isn't the change Reform want.
Illegal immigration is especially difficult to tackle because you have the most desperate people trekking across continental Europe. No deterrent is big enough to stop them and it has been going on for as long as people have been able to travel. You can't realistically imprison them. Deporting them is a long and stupid process. Even then, they'll be back again.
It's a long and stupid process because we have made it one.
Refugees aren't illegal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
Illegal immigrants aren't that desperate.
Also it's the legal immigrants that are the problem. Everything else is irrelevant.
Limmy is (was?) great but very inconsistent. His BBC Scotland sketch show has a solid hour or two of absolute GOLD, but then also a lot of patience testing wank - I guess that's partly the nature of sketch shows.
He's basically given up actually making stuff now, and just streams for a few hours a day on twitch. It's inconsistent like the sketch show, but it's much more pronounced. I have absolutely no idea how anyone can actually watch it live, cus he's constantly stopping what he's doing to thank people for subscribing/donating. I don't blame the cunt for doing it, but i don't wanna fucking watch it. Thankfully some mentalist has been making little highlight videos for years, some of them are pretty good.
The highlight channel must be unofficial because they once put some editing over his story about going to a festival with a lad from work who went on a bad trip after too many Garys and the editing was hilarious with disco lights and music between cuts, got taken down pretty swiftly though. Possibly because it was funnier than Limmy's original story.
Mark BoE Carney the new PM of Canada. :happycry:
Can we nuke them?
Was it him who came out with the immortal idea that people should stop asking for pay rises? A true great if so.
No, that was Andrew Bailey. Not that you could slide a Rizla between any of the cunts.
Former Goldman Sachs executive the problem is you just aren't productive enough lets keep printing the money and holding interest rates at zero Mark Carney somehow being the good guy seems like the world is fully inverting on itself.
Oh Andrew Bailey is a 100 times more incompetent than Mark Carney ever was.
I don't know. Reddit seems to think that this Carney lad is the best economist to have ever walked the Earth and that he did an excellent job in England, so I will side with them.
I mean he did rightly say Brexit would be a fucking disaster but nobody listened to him.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
I guess he understands country economies so he'll wipe the floor with the clown leading your circus.
He also sleep walked us into the nightmare what was keeping interest rates at 0% for absolutely no fucking reason.
Put them back down.
They can't unless you want 10% inflation again. Absolutely fucked it.
Hmm...can't afford any of the "not inflated" goods because my mortgage is so high...
Sort of seems like a meeting of the parliamentary labour party should include all members of the parliamentary labour party.
I suspect we are going to be in this ‘spikeflation’ cycle for quite a few more years I can easily see it going back over 5% this year if not higher, falling away and then having another cycle of higher inflation in 2027. That’s even if they don’t cut interest rates any further this year.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
It cannot be underestimated how bad a decision it was to keep pumping money into the economy until late 2021 even though they could see inflation was already running wild.
No idea what the benefit cuts will bring but I would propose the following:
Bring back face to face assessments. Those observations are crucial to the process. We've been carrying out a small percentage since Covid and that really should be increased.
This is also interesting:
Yeah, I saw that yesterday [?] - isn't it to do with tax relief changes or something? Like you pay business rates instead of council tax or something mad if the property is unoccupied and stuff about debt interest?
Corporate landlords, ie really big ones like Blackrock, are definitely what is coming for the UK rental / property market, which can only be bad for most people.
Ed Sheeran has caught me off guard on that list.
Okay, so my main issue with the disability benefit reforms is how that encourages people to work.
These people speak their brains.
The first lass clearly has a job already and is using PIP to subsides the fact she has to deal with the costs of living near London. The second woman is a bit off-base with the mobility bit. You might drive him round but it's his claim. As for her surprise he took a top award, it's degenerative disease. The paperwork they provided would've directed the assessor to a top award.
PIP will never give you that. It's just money. I think there should be a signposting aspect to it but that's not going to bring down welfare costs.Quote:
Tracy, 44, watched Liz Kendall's speech at a community café in Salford. She is unable to work after a brain injury.
"I would love to be back in work, but I would need the right support," she says.
I need to find a way to leave this dump.
You'll never leave TTH.
Where you gonna go?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spikey M
Do not question my quarter baked plans, m8.
@randomlegend - is this what you were talking about before?
Nice to have a doctor on staff in a restaurant, tbh. Bars should get some as well.
Why do they restrict training positions? Is it cheaper to import?
The people most seething about this are generally the same sort of people who claim that foreigners built the National Health Service, who think that foreign medical staff are done for malpractice more often because of racism, and who think that a government health monopoly is good because it can use its purchasing power to lower costs. It's hard to see how they could have painted themselves into more of a corner really. Oh well.
Because manufactured shortages are the government's specialty.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
No they aren't.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewis
Yes. You should see the training competition graphs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Boydy
They are restricting training places because consultants are expensive.
They want the NHS to be an army of Noctors (nurse practitioners, PAs, paramedics practitioners, etc) "supervised" by a small number of consultants who basically act as liability sponges.
So what is the agenda at work here? I mean when it was the Conservative Party doing it it was obviously all a scheme to run it into the ground so that their rich mates could benefit at our expense, which is why you were right to say that their voters are immoral; but why are the people that you voted for doing the same things?
Tbf to RL the people that he voted for in this instance are also doing the same things on everything else hence why everyone thinks they're shit.
I mean, if it saves money and the outcomes don't degrade too much, then it could be a good thing for everyone but medicine students, but I am sure that RL will tell us that it is actually more expensive and will cause millions of deaths, so either they are stupid or they are evil.
Why not both?
I suspect what will ultimately happen if this path is allowed to be continued upon is you'll end up with a truly two tier health system, where the poors have to get by seeing the Noctor brigade whilst those that can afford it pay to see an actual doctor.
GP surgeries have already started to backtrack on the PA experiment though, and some hospital trusts are following suit. Lewisham have just removed PAs from their A and E entirely because they were unsafe, to give an example.
It's almost like medicine is actually hard and can't be learned in two years by people with humanities degrees from mickey mouse universities.
The breadth and depth of what you need to know and be able to do is enormous to be able to practice medicine safely. I am an actual doctor with about 7 years of post-graduate experience - most of that in a very good paediatric department - and I remain extremely aware of the fact that a kid could walk in tomorrow with something I have literally never heard of and wouldn't know how to manage. What I am confident I could do is recognise that fact and go to the right place for help. That takes a lot of training.
Meanwhile you've got PAs with two years of medical training or experience of any sort seeing undifferentiated patients in A and Es and GPs up and down the land, and they simply have no idea what they don't know and are completely unable to do this, even for relatively common things which fall outside their extremely narrow "knowledge" base. They have a huge amount of unwarranted confidence, almost universally in my experience. It is a scandal in the making, I'm telling you.
In my experience at the GP, Noctors >>>>> Doctors.
I have no idea how the hierarchy of doctoring works, and I think it has changed since it was explained to me once upon a time in the 2000s [SHO what?], but is it not possible to have an army of doctors, not an army of consultants? If there's a training based conveyor belt that gives the latter, is that not a problem? In a field I'm more familiar with most trainee solicitors, for example, don't end up as partners, I don't think [most barristers don't become KCs etc] and most of the mundane legwork, which is almost all the work, is done by the lower down the pecking order folk. Is it possible to have a system where you have x % trainee doctors, y % normal doctors and z % senior doctors/consulatnts whilst maintaining a balanced amount of overall doctors? Or does the senior group grow over time leaving you with only the choice to stifle the lower groups if you want to maintain an affordable system?Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
Obviously there are other issues more broadly, for example the trainee solicitor probably gets paid more in year 1 than the however many years qualified medical consultant.
Yeah, patients often think this because they don't actually understand what they need (and more importantly don't need) and what good medicine is.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
That's not to say there aren't crap doctors, but patients often get a lot of satisfaction from interactions with the noctor brigade because they simply give the patient what they want.
Extremely common examples would be antibiotics for patently viral infections or referrals to specialists or for scans that are not warranted.
This is why they often actually end up costing the service a lot more money overall even if they are paid less, and that's before you even start getting to the mistakes they make which GPs/doctors then have to spend time mopping up.
Yeah like my knee that was lacking cartilage and ligaments. Doctor just waved me off, at least the noctor rolled up my trousers and looked at the fucking thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
Also, noctors say things like "hello, how are you?" and "goodbye" which seems to be lacking amongst your lot.
Essentially acute care kind of does work like that already, but the majority of those non-consultant doctors doing the legwork of the acute care will be on training programmes to become consultants.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
The numbers for that wouldn't seem to add up; how can the system need all those non-consultant doctors to become consultants when day to day you probably have a ratio of 5+ non-consultants per consultant in order to deliver your acute care?
The reason for that is elective care is almost entirely consultant delivered, because that's where most of the more complex diagnostic medicine and long-term decision making on management is done, and that requires a consultant.
I think your analogy pertaining to solicitors doesn't really fit. The majority of solicitors won't become partners, but they will (to my understanding) become essentially autonomous practitioner's with their own case loads etc. I would say that makes them similar to consultant doctors. The partners are more akin to GPs who are practice partners (i.e. have a stake in the business of the GP practice) rather than salaries GPs. Hospital medicine probably has a less obvious comparator but I guess it would be people like the service directors for the various specialities.
What's been the actual outcome with your knee? Have you been offered any intervention which is going to make any significant difference? It's a very long time since I did orthopaedics, but I'm guessing probably not?Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
I agree the analogies to other fields are problematic.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
I don't really understand this though.
Is what you are saying that, essentially, we need trainee doctors and non-consultant doctors to largely run 'acute care' [is that A&E?] and we then need that system to feed out the qualified older hands to prop up the rest of the health system in consultant roles? Again with the x, y and zs, if you are a trainee for x years, a qualified doctor for y years and then a consultant for z years is it not necessary for the z number to be no more than, and really probably a lot less than x and y? Is that the case or are you a consultant for much longer than either of the other roles? What percentage of the system is elective care? It just feels from the outside, with no real knowledge, that this is a system doomed to become disastrously top heavy.
Professional diagnosis: fucked.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
Had one surgery which has restored pain-free day-to-day stuff. I will need a second (bigger) operation if I want to play sports again. Next booked in with the consultant in May and I think we will probably decide on going ahead with it.
I had a Chinese consultant type as a neighbour who worked at the local hospital. We called him the Chocter.
Ok, so simplified structure of medical training.Quote:
Originally Posted by niko_cee
Go to medical school for 5 years, then you are a doctor.
Every doctor who qualifies in the UK then has to do 2 years in what's called the "foundation programme", where you rotate through a range of specialities every 4 months. You may have heard these doctors referred to as F1/2s or FY1/2s.
Traditionally, after this everyone would apply for speciality training, whether this be GP or a hospital speciality (there's a bit more complexity to this but it's not that relevant). This lasts between 3 years for GP up to 7-8+ years for some hospital specialities. For roughly half of this time you'll be a Core Trainee and the other half a Speciality Trainee.
The term SHO is officially gone but very much still in use and would refer to any doctor above F1 but not yet a registrar. A registrar would be anyone who is in a training programme and has reached Speciality Trainee level but is not yet a Consultant.
Once you complete those years and fulfill all the requirements of your training programme, you are a consultant in your speciality (or a GP if you did GP training).
In recent years, more people have not gone directly into training programmes but have either taken fixed contract jobs in a specific speciality or just done locums. In these roles you don't progress up the training ladder. Initially people were starting to do this as it was possible to make a lot of money, but the market no longer exists for this.
Now large numbers are simply not getting into training so are forced into these fixed contract jobs. This is due to explosion of competition ratios from the enormous number of international medical graduates coming in.
So yes, career wise you will be a Foundation Doctor for 2 years, a core/speciality trainee for 3-8ish years, then a consultant for the rest of your career (ignoring any gaps in training).
Acute care is essentially all the stuff that happens when someone presents to hospital unwell. So that's A and E, but it's also all the care of people then admitted to the hospital for ongoing treatment and investigation under a speciality.
So if you present with bowel obstruction, you'll be admitted under general surgery and have an emergency operation. Then you'll be cared for on the ward post-op until you're well enough to go home. This is all acute care.
The on the ground work here is predominantly done by non-consultant doctors. All the initial assessment of the patients, the institution of initial management (IV fluids, antibiotics, etc), the organising of initial investigations, etc. Senior registars are able to act as the senior decision makers for much of this care and deliver much of the more complex stuff, like doing the actual operation for our bowel obstruction patient. Consultants are there as the senior decision makers for things beyond the registrar, and will also do ward rounds at varying intervals (may be every day, may not, depends on speciality) where they see all their patients and make decisions about their ongoing care.
Elective care is all the planned care, and this is predominantly consultant delivered. So that's all the outpatient clinics. All the planned operations in surgical specialties. Multidisciplinary case discussions around the management of patients with complex or serious problems like cancer. Diagnostic procedures like endoscopies. Complex radiological investigations and reporting. Morbidity and mortality reviews. Etc etc etc.
Then there's all the adjacent stuff like management and teaching.
I can understand from the outside why it might seem like you've got all these doctors, how can you possibly need them all to be consultants, but there is more than enough consultant level work to go around. Most places are short of consultants.
:lol:
Good, I'm glad. Maybe the GP you saw was indeed just crap. Not examining a joint when someone has come with a joint problem would certainly not be my practice.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
GPs are incredibly hamstrung by the fact they often only have 5 minutes appointments though, whilst the noctor brigade often get 10 plus. GP is an unbelievably hard job. As a med student I've sat in with duty doctors (like the on-call GP for the day in a surgery) where they've had 100 patients on their list for the day. A hundred.
My solution:
- Let everyone who wants to take the tests/courses/whatever take them. Have them every month, hell every week. Allow retakes.
- Flood the system with doctors
- Since there are so many, you can pay them less
- The people of Britain can be treated by full-fledged doctors as opposed to 'noctors' for less money
- Everybody wins
My suggestion. Don't be so fat and unhealthy.
Huh? You want to run 10 years of medical training weekly?Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
I agree. Let's form a coalition.Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic
Taking about those tests that done people were mistakenly told that they failed and it ruined their lives. Let them retake them asap, no need to wait six months or a year or whatever. Also, those ten years could probably be eight or even five. Make people specialize earlier if needed.Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
Are you telling me that people have to wait months for an appointment and then they only get to see a doctor for five minutes? Because if so, lol at that. Also, what kind of totalitarian system does not let doctors choose how many appointments they want to take?Quote:
Originally Posted by randomlegend
No, these appointments are handed out daily, you just call first thing and try and get an appt.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
I see. So these are just the gatekeepers to the real care?
Yeah, like triage. Mostly useless. And they are further gatekept by the dangerous Karens on reception (Koctors) who know miles more.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Not really. They're who you see for non-energencies. Obviously some times they'll refer you for "real care", but more often than not they're chucking antibiotics at a cough that's lasted more than 10 days.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Those are things doctors would love.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
The exams being run more often will never happen though. They are barely able to cope with the administration as is (hence examgate). They also cost a lot of money and we have to pay for them.
Exams are also a very small part of how we are assessed. I have a portfolio with a huge number of requirements I have to fulfill each year to progress. Having someone pass the exams definitely does not equate to them being a capable consultant.
Yes. Hospital speciality appointments are longer but in GP that's the reality.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
The duty doctor is like the on-call doctor for the surgery for the "urgent" appointments people call up for on the day. Things that need to be seen but probably don't warrant A and E.Quote:
Also, what kind of totalitarian system does not let doctors choose how many appointments they want to take?
A GP's normally list will not have that many patients, but they are still packed in back to back 5 minute appointments.
I would not be a GP for all the money in the world.
They are the gatekeepers to specialist care, but they are also an extremely important speciality in their own right. They manage a lot in the community.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pepe
Being a generalist is a very, very hard job. You can get literally anything walk through your door and in five minutes be expected to work out what to do with it. That's fine if it's someone with an obvious viral infection or whatever, but you will get the unicorns occasionally and picking them out so you're not the GP in the daily mail who "MISSED MY DIAGNOSIS that ten people in the whole world have" is tough.
And with that, I never vote Labour - or, most likely, for anyone - ever again. I wish Mr Farage the best of luck in finishing off whatever is left of the country in 4 years time.
What, not even if they promised policies you agreed with at some point in the future, presumably under new leadership?
Not sure what anyone was really expecting of the more of the same but just more competent ticket.
The best bit is the diehard tories who defended the same policies under a blue rosette will be rabid about this cos it's the red team.
And it turns out they aren't even 'more competent'. You cannot help but to lol.
In fairness I'm just kind of settling for no obscene corruption at the moment. That'll do me.
I'm just after a government that can outlast supermarket vegetables.
Corbyn was right again...
Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way round. Maybe we should aim for vegetables that outlast governments. Food waste solved overnight.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shindig
How does one game the outcome of this and the US stuff ala the chap in the Big Short?
It feels like I should be taking the tax hit and putting what's left into that rather than a pension.
He was right about everything. I hope it was worth it for these cunts that stabbed him in the back. It's funny that they've turned out to completely fucking shit at being in power but I'm sure the cushy directorships they get from their donors afterwards will make it worth it. They won't even have the shame to be embarrassed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
The unions should be withdrawing their funding from the Labour party. Corbyn should be setting up a new party and the socialist campaign group (and any others on the left wing of the party who can't stomach this Tory shit any more) within Labour should be leaving to join it.
The Labour party doesn't work in working people's interests any more and it'll be dead and buried come the next election anyway.
Maybe he can team up with Bernie Sanders, discover the elixir of life, and rule transatlantic politics for the next half century. Either that or the left need a new figurehead who's under 75. Perhaps Gary Economics will do it, good for the channel views.
He's said he doesn't want to do it enough times he must be nailed on to do it at some point.
Gary's Economics vs Mine's a Pint Nige would be interesting at least I guess.
You joke but I don't think it's all that far away that a major (I guess that includes Reform now) party parachute in a YouTube/podcast personality and win on the back of it.
Indeed and I wasn’t joking. There seems to be a wilful refusal on the part of the traditional incumbents to acknowledge how much the internet has changed things, the effects of which are not even remotely finished yet.
The parliamentary system makes it a ballache for celebrity politicians, as Farage is finding out. It's not like the US where you can just jump in to run for any old shit and get elected to quite a lot of power. You have to bring loads and loads of people with you at various levels. Which is how it should be, really.
I liken those incumbents to the board of Blockbuster video. Similar conversations must be being had with heads in the sand all over the shop.
It does, but there’s only so long that can hold out for. First step will be some nightmare three or four party coalition that can’t agree on anything let alone get anything done (no change there then rofl), at which point we’re basically Belgium, everyone will see how shit that is (probably somehow worse than this) and we’ll be off to the races.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
I mean, UKIP tried that with Carl Benjamin and Count Dankula. Not exactly major but these are the people they'd go after.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
The problem will always be that at some point, no matter what political system one uses, simply gassing (which is what celebrities do for a living) will run into the hard reality of actual political work which, for all we moan about MPs, the majority of them actually do pretty well and effectively. That means sitting on committees, reading A LOT of very dry material, being bored, having to listen to other people, these are things anathema to those in the grift economy. Look at Reform, they have 5 MPs, at least three of whom are ego-driven celebrity politicians, and it's lasted about twenty minutes before they've fallen into civil war.
US system is much less robust than ours in the sense that someone like Trump can get voted into, and then wield, a huge amount of executive power simply by gassing. As long as we have a monarch that will never happen here.
And yet we got BREXIT.
'cos that was a public vote.
*sucks air in through teeth*
Lol @ the vape bit though.
Politics is dead.
Why is Starmer out there saying there needs to be a 'deadline' on Russia negotiating a peace agreement? Why would they go along with that, and how are we making it happen exactly? Nobody seems to be asking too many questions of this deranged shit, presumably because idiots think it makes him look like a serious person.
The approach is all such a mess, held together by this dumb arse notion that allowing him to take any more of Ukraine is akin to Hitler marching through Poland, and it staggers me that so few people can see so.
I see he's also talking about increasing sanctions, so back to the point I made when Trump suggested the same, why in the actual fuck haven't we done that sooner? Until the orange one rocked up sanctions was literally all we had.
It's genuinely embarrassing.
So if I can explain the sanctions thing, it's dumb but for the wrong reasons.
The point of sanctions is to place them on powerful people, refuse them further access to economy outside of the country, so they apply pressure within their country to the leader to change the leaders apporach. The problem being is that the only reason these people are 'powerful' is because Putin has siphoned the money/assets that make them powerful, there is no pressure they can apply to Putin that will not result in their seizure of said economic/asset power followed by a swift fall off their balcony. Fine. However, because they do not want to scare off the non sanctioned people from laundering their assets through London, they refuse to seize what those sanctionees currently retain here.
A raw example is the sale of Chelsea. There is currently 2 billion quid from that sale in a bank account in London that has not been touched since. On interest alone that account has accrued 240 million quid since the takeover. There are hundreds of multi million properties owned by sanctioned individuals that are either empty or their rent is being paid into a trust because it would be illegal to transfer the money to them (tbh I bet this is being transferred anyway using a series of well paid British law firms to launder that money and get it where it needs to go but the Chelsea sale is too high profile to touch)
As with every decision made from both a Conservative or Labour angle, the people in charge are both too cowardly and too owned by the people actually in charge (the people with money) to do anything. So now the Western World is saddled with managed decline while China central plans its way to victory.
Thanks for the explanation, that is genuinely pathetic and makes this whole thing even worse. Spunking billions up the wall on military aid when our economy is flatlining and we haven't even used the money from the sale of Chelsea to contribute towards it. I swear this whole thing was packaged as "Russian assets seized". What a crock of shit. I think I might actually be angry.
Gary's Economics on QT.
Gary Economics on QT.
QT has Gary’s Economics on.
Bruce seething her tits off.
This is also making me angry. Fiona Bruce in particular.
These parties are all absolutely dead, aren't they? All they have is "wealth taxes don't work".
They won't work, but they are sort of the intellectual end-point of the current failed, zero-sum, can't-process-second-order-effects way of looking at things that characterises all of our politics, so they will have to come up with better reasons to oppose them.
Not sure this is entirely true. Sanctions are quite arbitrary and being on a sanction list doesn't necessarily mean you've actually done anything wrong other than being in some nexis of someone who is (even loosely). It then makes sense to not go and start auctioning of their homes/possessions.Quote:
Originally Posted by phonics
The hard thing about sanctions is we're not all on the same page internationally and Russia can still sell things like oil at discount rates to India who can sell to us. Going through third countries is difficult to stop. It does make Russia's economy poorer and their ability to trade harder which is the point.
Back to Ukraine for a moment, I've been reading some articles yesterday and this morning and it's getting pretty obvious we'll see "peace" agreements within a month or so.
The US have sent their full detailed plan for pillaging Ukraine's resources post-war and while theirs a lot of scoffing from Ukraine at the moment, they'll probably agree to it given a bit of time and amendments.
Starmer has been waffling (which although looks silly to us, but for the majority of the electorate who are largely pro-Ukraine and ignorant to details, it's a decent move) but it's Macron's comments that give more detail. He's talking about the "peace force" - whatever that is - being ready to go around 3-4 weeks. It's been made pretty clear that they won't land in Ukraine until some kind of peace agreement is signed so again that's an indicator something is fairly imminent.
Even Putin this morning has kind of changed his attitude. There's pressure mounting and he knows that (hence the big push for extra land recently). He's made a comment about installing a UN-monitored government to replace Zelenskyy. Again, he wouldn't be doing that if he was bedding in for longer-term conflict which he has the upper hand in.
Lastly, European markets are planning for a noticeable drop in oil and gas prices. I think that's a fairly big side effect of sanctions against Russia being rolled back.
Putin has also give Trump the tentative thumbs up to go after Greenland, which suggests he's probably about to get a load of extra land in this Ukraine deal.
Longer term, if these attitudes keep up, Taiwan is probably a bit fucked too.
Why did nobody mention Gary's Economics was on QT?
He was on a podcast with that grifter CEO cunt and another guy.
The other guy posted on linkedin saying how he was surprised at how crap he was and gave ten reasons. Wild take but no surprise the business chodes agreed with him.
He was pretty shit on QT, unfortunately.
He appears to struggle against any kind of push back.
That's unusual for an internet celebrity.
Man famous for wittering at camera unprepared for opponent that answers back.
Mick Lynch barracking that absolute tit senseless on QT was peak stuff, she seemed to have forgot you only get to the top of a union by arguing with cunts constantly for decades.
Mick Lynch what a hero :cool:
Gary Economics has a lot of good points but he's generally rubbish at marshaling them under pressure. He's not some great orator or debater, he's an angry maths nerd.
He really fluffed the closing bit though, which should have been his if you want change you're going to have to fight for it and it won't be easy shtick. Or the tax wealth not work slogan, which probably fits better with modern slogan based political system we live in.
I say again though, he looks like he's heading towards another breakdown.
And you know his fans will fluff him up in the aftermath.
The problem with him is that he only has about 3 points and everything comes back to those three, which is nowhere near nuanced enough to pwn a professionally drilled politician.
And Lynch is an excellent example of someone who had the depth and ability to articulate it. Such a shame he retired.
I think his bigger 'problem' is that no one really disagrees with him all that much, it's more shrugging yeah, but what can we do and then the it never works brigade turn up sirens blaring. Or should that be Blairing?Quote:
Originally Posted by Yevrah
There is no room for nuance on QT, you get about 2 minutes to articulate your worldview, and he has to spend most of that time telling those of you who don't know who he is is and what he did [promote the brand], which eats most of those two minutes.
Pretty much all of the answers given to that first question were terrible, and that was him done for his area of interest.
Anyway, Aussie election next up. Can the world's best Labor [sic] government be toppled by a bald retard in hock to the mining industry?
Wasn't there an FT hit piece debunking his back story as the toppest trader ever to have traded a while back?
Aye, but I think that probably just lent more credence to the backstory. Establishment hit piece against anti-establishment figure. Who would have thought?
I think it was less cynical than that though, they just wanted the clicks that writing something about him would bring as he's the media hot property of the day.
Wasn't there a Daily Mail poll the other day where most of their online acolytes were in favour of a wealth tax?
Everyone wants a wealth tax, as long as it's on someone else's wealth.
More money* for the government to squander. What's not to love?
*Usually leads to less revenue, but we can keep dreaming.
You know there's over 650,000 millionaires in the UK? Tax them to the fucking hilt.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimmy Floyd
It's not even more money necessarily, it's the same money from different sources, but yes, it is a distant dream in a world where profit shifting, abusive IP licensing practices, tax havens and whatever the likes of the double Irish was are the norm. A world we have created. A world it is, at least theoretically, possible to change.
Marine lol Pen barred from public office for 5 years.
Let's hope it plays out better than the US LAWFARE did.
Did I miss something?
The French national front were 'embezzling' money from the EU Parliament and using to run national campaigns / their national office or something [something as Nigel from the Pub points out is pretty much the raison d'etre for the whole shebang and endemic at all levels] and so now she and some others have been 'found guilty' in the dear Fifth Republic and automatically barred from holding public office for five years, during which time La France will have to choose a successor to President Biscuit, presumably, or can he stay / stand again? Horreur!
Everyone would be up in arms if Erdogan was doing it, if you were being cynical.
All of the far right of Europe have come out in support of Marine Le Ballpoint