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noticed on the way into work this morning that they still have those signs up saying FREIGHT TO EU PAPERS MAY CHANGE 1ST NOV wonder if they'll still be there tomorrow e: a Greenland shark can live more than 335 years before it's caught by some Nordic type, gutted and buried on the beach to ferment into something that apparently tastes like piss or blue cheese XMNN fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Oct 31, 2019 |
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Oct 31, 2019 20:35
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Oct 31, 2019 20:35
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Just donated to Labour and Momentum. Let's do this. Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail, Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deed shall still prevail.
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Oct 31, 2019 20:37
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Got a Lib Dem leaflet in the post and it doesn't even contain a single bar chart. what is the world coming to
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Oct 31, 2019 20:39
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Every time I think about BoJo and Corbyn debating I feel an overwhelming sense of confidence that Jezza will trounce. Then I kind of feel defeated because I have no idea who actually watches the debates and how much sway they have and the fact that Sky and the Beeb will just say Johnson won anyway
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Oct 31, 2019 20:40
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Is it possible to donate to Labour/Momentum even when I'm not British? I'd hate to see the Tories gently caress the place up even more.
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Oct 31, 2019 20:43
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Ataxerxes posted:Is it possible to donate to Labour/Momentum even when I'm not British? I'd hate to see the Tories gently caress the place up even more. I imagine so? Money is money, I doubt theyll turn away your 
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Oct 31, 2019 20:45
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Calico Heart posted:Every time I think about BoJo and Corbyn debating I feel an overwhelming sense of confidence that Jezza will trounce. Then I kind of feel defeated because I have no idea who actually watches the debates and how much sway they have and the fact that Sky and the Beeb will just say Johnson won anyway I suspect the kind of people who watch a debate and support Boris Johnson won't be particularly fussed with the actual meanings of the words they say to each other, though. Boris will go "pfuff harumph" a couple of times and cries of LEGEND will echo across the land. This may just be pessimism on my part, admittedly.
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Oct 31, 2019 20:45
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Yes, but we aren't trying to win tories over.
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Oct 31, 2019 20:46
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Comrade Fakename posted:We definitely need computer touchers! Thanks for this, signed up and got added to the Slack. See y'all in #tech!
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Oct 31, 2019 20:49
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Ataxerxes posted:Is it possible to donate to Labour/Momentum even when I'm not British? I'd hate to see the Tories gently caress the place up even more. Donations of £500 or over must be from people on the UK electoral register. Below £500, it's apparently fine for them to come from anywhere.
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Oct 31, 2019 20:51
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bbc.txt https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1189990498657853440 https://twitter.com/TasminaSheikh/status/1189984061927890944
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Oct 31, 2019 20:53
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Angepain posted:Got a Lib Dem leaflet in the post and it doesn't even contain a single bar chart. what is the world coming to Same. But it was even more ludicrous because it said Jo Swinson was going to be PM.
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Oct 31, 2019 20:54
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knocked some (ersatz) mayonnaise out of the fridge and noticed it had something about fighting hunger on it I assumed it was some comic relief type thing about saving Africa until I looked closer  gently caress Tories (but not literally)
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Oct 31, 2019 20:56
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Like having a wardrobe fall on you with the key still in it.
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Oct 31, 2019 20:57
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I apparently didn't save it last time, does anyone have the picture of the facebook comments talking about all the Tory appointees to the BBC?
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Oct 31, 2019 21:01
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Angepain posted:Donations of £500 or over must be from people on the UK electoral register. Below £500, it's apparently fine for them to come from anywhere. XMNN posted:knocked some (ersatz) mayonnaise out of the fridge and noticed it had something about fighting hunger on it
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Oct 31, 2019 21:02
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Angepain posted:Donations of £500 or over must be from people on the UK electoral register. Below £500, it's apparently fine for them to come from anywhere. Thanks! That precisely the sort of thing I was concerned of. I don't have £500 to spend to that won't be an issue.
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Oct 31, 2019 21:04
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BBC News - Government rules £100,000 given to Jennifer Arcuri's company 'appropriate' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-50252635 Oh well that's alright then! Government rules its own corruption not corrupt, problem solved Front page headline of course is just 'Grant awarded to Acuri company 'appropriate''
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Oct 31, 2019 21:11
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Tsaedje posted:BBC News - Government rules £100,000 given to Jennifer Arcuri's company 'appropriate' Lol this is even more blatant than Argentinian style nepotism and goddamn that's saying something. At least we just sweep it under the rug and make the causes take forever and get forgotten, not "well we investigated and EVERYTHING IS LEGAL BYE"
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Oct 31, 2019 21:30
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mfcrocker posted:Thanks for this, signed up and got added to the Slack. See y'all in #tech! I am literally curious how many UKMT people are in there rn, I know I am. My initials are JD :p
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Oct 31, 2019 21:34
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https://twitter.com/LeftoriumThe/status/1189610675385126912?s=19 The Brexit party, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are now the "centre right". Labour are still Far Hard Left.
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Oct 31, 2019 21:36
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I wonder who the far right are? National Action?
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Oct 31, 2019 21:37
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OwlFancier posted:I wonder who the far right are? National Action? Also the far left, who are the real fascists
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Oct 31, 2019 21:37
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feedmegin posted:I am literally curious how many UKMT people are in there rn, I know I am. My initials are JD :p Whould've thought there'd be a bunch of computer touchers in here
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Oct 31, 2019 21:39
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OwlFancier posted:I wonder who the far right are? National Action? Gonzo McFee posted:Also the far left, who are the real fascists Nick Cohen's Hula Hoop theory; go far enough right, and you become the far left momentum thugs.
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Oct 31, 2019 21:43
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Jeremy corbyn is literally hitler according to some, so...
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Oct 31, 2019 21:46
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Well tomorrow I move away for work to live apart from my partner for the first time in 10 years. God drat this doesn't feel good. I'm feeling way more cut up about it than I expected. 
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Oct 31, 2019 21:47
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zhar posted:Jeremy corbyn is literally hitler according to some, so... Well Hitler was also a socialist and furthermore *farts*
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Oct 31, 2019 21:55
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Balfron Tower epicpost pt.3 - part one is here, and part two is here. Okay, I’m going to try and keep this one derail-less as far as possible, but I make no promises. I’ve also rushed it a bit because I for some reason set myself a deadline of getting this out in the same thread as the other two, and I always submit my homework at the last possible moment, which is why there’s no pictures or anything in this post and it’s even less edited than my usual. I’ll make it up next month with a really loving long, modem-murderer of a post that’s a spotters guide to London council house architecture - you have been warned. So to recap - Balfron Tower, big proto-Brutalist block, lots of people living in it fairly happy with their lot, transferred to a housing association because Blair bad. Poplar HARCA may not have set out to be villains. In fact there’s probably no real way for a housing association in their position *not* to be villains in one way or another, so I’ll get their excuses in first. Maybe if all of Tower Hamlets’ housing stock had been spun off to a single HA instead of a dozen small ones - because somehow they were supposed to compete, or maybe blah blah blah localism, who can really see into the mind of a lanyard? - and maybe if HAs weren’t forced to rely on their own resources and private capital to raise funds, and maybe if LBTH hadn’t been forced for years to spend its housing budget on paying private landlords who had bought up the stock LBTH had been forced to sell in the 80s, instead of on maintenance… *maybe* then a HA could have done a good job. As it was Poplar HARCA found themselves in charge of 12 estates (there’s an even longer and weirder story about *how* those 12 estates ended up with them but like I say, I’m trying not to derail here) with just over 9,000 homes and around 25k residents. These estates ranged from the pre-war mansions and terraces to late-90s yellowbrick flats but actually lacked any of the late-60s LPS blocks that most people think of when they say “council estate”. What it did have though were three extremely problematic estates, coincidentally neighbours, but problematic for very different reasons. I’ve mentioned all three in the last two posts but a quick recap. The Lansbury Estate is a brick-built 1950s low-rise estate centred around Chrisp Street Market. While it required the least work because of a big refresh carried out in the last days of LBTH’s stewardship, any work on the estate was massively complicated by the fact that most of it was Grade II listed, and the clock tower and structures around it Grade I listed because of their origins in the Festival of Britain - to my knowledge the only Grade I listed building on a council estate anywhere in the country, and one of only three Grade I listed structures in the borough - the others being the dock walls and surviving warehouses of the West India Docks, and, erm, the Tower of London. Approaching 70 years old, several of the buildings require repairs to their brickwork, and ironically the 90s redevelopment of the market area required extensive repairs. The Brownfield Estate just to the east contains Balfron Tower (and the contemporary adjoining Carradale House and slightly later, but identically-styled, Glenkerry House) with some later low-rises. These buildings were all structurally extremely sound but the interiors were in dire need of refreshing, with some having bathrooms and kitchens dating to the mid 70s, and many of the ancillaries such as lifts and entry systems were at or near the end of their lives. Complicating matters is that it’s also listed, although only at Grade II*. Robin Hood Gardens, across the East India Dock Road to the south, was a 70s late-Brutalist LPS mid-rise estate - a bingo on anyone’s “poo poo estate” card. It required by far the most work - the LPS joints required inspection and repair, the central heating needed replacement, and it desperately needed some community facilities - the GLC cheaped out on even a meeting hall, let alone schools or shops, in the belief that the local facilities were fine - then built a wall across the natural access to those facilities. Richard Rogers was also spearheading a campaign to get the estate listed, claiming it was “more beautiful than the crescents of Bath” but strangely refusing the offer of a free flat there from the tenants association. These three estates were Poplar HARCA’s largest, making up almost a third of their total stock. The HARCA was also desperately short of cash - the Global Financial Catastrofuck removing the only source of funding they had for large capital projects, and no real way of raising cash from leaseholders in the way other HAs had (for historical reasons they had far fewer leaseholders than most of their neighbouring HAs, and the egregious behaviour of some of those neighbours leading to court cases that looked to possibly shut that off altogether - but that’s for another post). Previously they had partnered with private developers to build blocks and estates in the north of their area, helping the developers avoid the s.106 precepts - the official bribe required by LBTH to cover the externalities of new housing. The developers got to sell the private flats, and the HARCA got the rents from the 40% social and “affordable” housing required to get planning permission for new developments. However, with the amount of available sites dwindling this trick was offering diminishing returns, and the renovations of these three estates was going to require considerably more ready cash than they could ever lay their hands on. They also wanted to build new social housing - I know they’re the villains of the piece but they do at least attempt to do the right thing even on occasion - but again without cash they had no chance. Their first plan was relatively simple, if a bit brutal(ist) - sell Robin Hood Gardens for demolition and redevelopment. It was in a prime position, nearest to Canary Wharf and sandwiched between several other new developments. They failed at the very first hurdle though. Legally (and morally, but when does that ever come into these things?) they couldn’t just evict all of the tenants in Robin Hood Gardens, they had to be able to move them somewhere - and they had nowhere near enough spare capacity in their existing estates. They mooted selling just the southern half of the site - but the 20th Century Society (who are a minor villain of this tale too, as we shall see) threatened to sue. Plan B was to apply to central Government for discretionary funds to do the works. This might have had a chance but it took almost a year for them to put the application in… in June 2010. Presumably someone in Whitehall is still chuckling about that. The fun and exciting new Tory Government did offer them a Plan C though. Changes to the law allowed social landlords to remove the social housing designation of their properties, and then sell them onto the open market. Just let the full ramifications of that sink in for a while. However this was the only way they could hope to raise money. Had they reluctantly done so with, for example, their new buildings at Langdon Park - which would have raised the most cash at the time - these posts probably wouldn’t have happened, except maybe as a bitter aside. They had a much more ambitious plan in mind, though. Their fundamental problem is that the real money - if you’re looking for maximum cash-in-hand, up front - isn’t in selling existing housing. This sounds weird, but let’s not forget we’re dealing with late-stage capitalism here. If you want the money fast, you sell off-plan to hedge funds, brass plates, offshore investors, and other assorted scum. They buy and sell them purely as assets and so aren’t actually interested in existing stock, they just want to see a glossy prospectus and a hole in the ground. This of course wasn’t an option for Poplar HARCA, for reasons already mentioned. They needed to sell some of their existing stock, which means people that might actually look at the buildings, and nobody was willing to pay huge money for a flat in St. Paul’s Way even if it was in an interesting rare example of a red-brick mansion block. The 20th Century Society slithered in with a solution, though There’s disagreement over whether they specifically suggested this or just gave HARCA the idea with their loud trumpeting but whatever - they had been heavily involved with the “rehabilitation” - read “gentrification” - of Balfron’s younger brother, Trellick Tower in west London. Unlike Balfron, Trellick was mostly leaseholders rather than tenants, and those leaseholders, along with the 20th Century Society, had campaigned to reverse the image of Trellick, allowing it to catch the wave of gentrification that Notting Hill had gone through. Said leaseholders saw the value of their flats rise almost a thousand percent from the late 90s. Those are the kind of numbers that wake up any good neoliberal - particularly a neoliberal that happens to own almost 300 flats in an almost identical building. There was a small problem though - Trellick had been in Notting Hill, an area that Hugh Grant and his loving hair had helped to smash from a solid working-class area into a place almost entirely inhabited by people in red trousers with jumpers over their shoulders. Poplar - even with its proximity to Canary Wharf - was never going to get that kind of bump. Enter “placemaking”. You’ve probably not heard the term (in fact feel good about yourself that you haven’t, it’s the language of neoliberalism) but - if you live near the centre of any UK city or even large industrial town - you’ve probably already seen it happen, or will soon. Like all of Satan’s works it is superficially alluring, offering a way of turning depressed areas into vibrant, well-heeled ones. At even the slightest examination though it reveals its true face - it’s nothing more than gentrification, except now lab-grown and far more potent. The gentrification of Hoxton, to take a local example, took almost 30 years. That sort of timescale is no good for the thrusting and dynamic 21st Century though - and of course requires you to actually do some basic research rather than plugging numbers into a spreadsheet. Placemaking aims to make it happen in just a year or two - or about as long as it takes to build your new buildings to ride the wave - and wherever you want it to happen. The pattern is almost a cargo cult of the way areas like Shoreditch, Camden and Paddington had gentrified following the nadir of urban degeneration in the late 1970s. Artists and students, attracted to both cheap rent and the starkest possible contrast to their predominately middle-class upbringings, had gravitated to these places. This gave them a sheen of cool that then attracted yuppies, desperate to prove that they were still hip and alternative despite doing photocopying in Mergers, Acquisitions and Death Squad Administration. The yuppies priced out the artists (and the remaining original inhabitants), which then brings in their bosses, attracted by the siren call of “number go up fast”. Before you know it, people are spending more money than most families will earn in a year for a table that looks like it was retrieved from a fire at a workhouse. Placemaking seeks to short-circuit this process by plonking down “creative hubs” and “innovation centres”. These might be museums or cheap office space but the gold standard is a satellite campus for a university. This gives both the publicity boost that they’re after but also provides a nice little captive market for homes in the area, particularly as satellite campuses tend to be for foreign students who may not be aware that they’re being completely hosed over. You can see this process in various stages of maturity (and success) all around London - just down the road from Balfron, at City Island (neither an island nor a city), Lego-like blocks cluster around the “box-it-came-in” new campus for the English National Ballet. A few stops up the DLR at Stratford, two different universities and a satellite of the V&A have buildings weirdly shoehorned into the former Olympic Village (and large fences to stop the actual culture of the area leaking in as it travels to watch West Ham games every two weeks at the former Olympic Stadium). Insanely it also happens in areas that are already seriously gentrified - on the site of the former Peabody Estate behind Centre Point in the West End Google were given effectively free office space in an attempt to polish the turd of the Central St. Giles development. Of course if you’re trying to do it on the scale of a single building you’re more limited in what you can do, but you can still attempt to wash off the price-poisoning working class grime, which is where artwashing comes in. This is one of those things that sounds like a joke, but not only does it happen, it apparently works. Remember the artists that moved into squats in Brick Lane in the 80s? Well let’s try and fast-forward that process. Give artists cheap rent to live in your building, and hope that their special pixie dust somehow drops onto it. It happened at Kingsgate in the Elephant and Castle, it happened at the New Era in Hoxton, and it happened at Balfron. Ridiculously, it seems to work! The Guardian and glossy magazines run by third-generation failsons write long, slobbering pieces about how this grimy pile of concrete is now inhabited by people who’ve been to university and are reimagining the relationship of urban spaces or some loving bollocks (and also get indignant that the local philistines object to poo poo like one of these artists wanting to drop a grand piano from the roof of the building - I don’t want to get too inverse snobbery but that’s not art, that’s just deliberately wasting loving money). When the process is finished, the Tory rags write about how much the GLORIOUS FREE MARKET has transformed the area and now incomes are much higher than they were, completely ignoring that this was done by simply throwing out anyone with less than six digits in their bank account out of the place - but it’s not like they’re people, is it? Of course, Poplar HARCA were again stymied by the crushing hand of regulation strangling innovation by imposing the most basic of moral responsibility on them. They had to get rid of all the poors, but they had to do actually get them to agree to it. While some wanted to move, and jumped at the chance to be rehomed elsewhere on the estate, many didn’t. The tactics the HARCA employed in moving them out would make a Dickens villain blush. Sometimes they were economical with the truth - telling tenants that they could return when the work was done if it was possible knowing full well that it would be “impossible” to let them return, because nothing would kill the urban cool image quicker than actually encountering people who worked for a living. Sometimes they just lied - they started the decanting process by saying that it was unsafe for the residents to remain in place while the works happened (despite such works being done on literally thousands of blocks with the residents in place). Sometimes they were just plain evil - conning one man with learning disabilities into accepting an offer for £14,000 for his share of a lease, when that share was worth at least 5 times that. After a while of course they just let the remaining tenants rot, refusing to carry out any repairs (claiming it would be uneconomical to do so, while jumping to repair damage caused by the artists starting to move in as part of the artwashing process) Eventually they sent in the bailiffs to throw out the remaining few tenants (as well as a few of the artists who had realised what was actually going on and had the basic decency to side with their new, albeit temporary, neighbours). Said tenants were then told that because they hadn’t accepted the offer of rehoming they had forfeited their entitlement to a new HARCA home and would have to make their own arrangements - and were then told by LBTH that as they had made themselves intentionally homeless that they went to the very bottom of the housing list. I had a longer rant here about the actual changes they’ve made to the building - with the enthusiastic support of English Heritage and the 20th Century Society - but this post is already approaching 3,000 words and to be honest is just making me too angry to carry on with. I’ll leave you instead with the words of my mate Ken, who’s on the residents association board of the estate. “What a bunch of cunts”.
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Oct 31, 2019 21:57
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goddamnedtwisto posted:*words*  guardian_faaaaart.txt 
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Oct 31, 2019 22:11
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mfcrocker posted:Whould've thought there'd be a bunch of computer touchers in here Communist Party of Great Britain (Standard-ML) Communist Party of Great Britain (PC) Communist Party of Great Britain (Unix) Independent Working Class Diagram Communist League of Legends RCP/IP
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Oct 31, 2019 22:14
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sinky posted:What I'm taking away from that is 1 like = one to Pray for poor little dick Murdoch
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Oct 31, 2019 22:14
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sinky posted:What I'm taking away from that is Bullshit Nils Pratley isn't a real person.
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Oct 31, 2019 22:18
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sinky posted:What I'm taking away from that is Easy targets that literally only Labour dares to criticise.
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Oct 31, 2019 22:19
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lmao please sanction spain https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1190008326295306240
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Oct 31, 2019 22:22
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Oct 31, 2019 22:22
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Going to be travelling to Edinburgh for the first time in a decade tomorrow. I'm scared because every time I have been there something awful has happened. I hope everyone is okay and continues to be okay.
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Oct 31, 2019 22:24
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no walkers squares smh
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Oct 31, 2019 22:29
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Monster Munch can’t win here! —>
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Oct 31, 2019 22:30
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