Guavanaut posted:

Withdrawal is a tricky one, like someone who is driving while in withdrawal from alcoholism is more of a risk than that same person driving a bit over the limit, because having reactions that are a bit slowed is less risky than having an absence seizure while behind the wheel.

Guavanaut posted:

But legally one would be definitely illegal and the other one more tricky (did they know they were at risk of seizures? did their doctor tell them not to drive?). It certainly wouldn't be grounds to develop tests to ban everyone who's had a drink in the past 3 days from driving.

Guavanaut posted:

her talking about Class A drugs is dumb as hell, because the legal classification of a substance and its ability to prevent you safely operating a vehicle (or giving an expert opinion) the following day are completely unrelated. Randomized testing for any purpose other than whether a person is presently intoxicated is more about morality policing than health and safety.

ShaneMacGowansTeeth posted:

Woo!

https://twitter.com/ROMANSE/status/1307267399843020800

And next week, they're closing the carriageway in the direction I wish to travel

The_Doctor posted:

Even Copnor road is hosed. Christ.

namesake posted:

The positive side of everything being awful and impossible to reform is that it's also falling apart so core change is inevitable and you've just got to force the change to go how you want.

OwlFancier posted:

Reading the SCOTUS thread it does seem like in their position especially the only way forward is to utterly break the supreme court conceptually so that it will be replaced or reformed with something less stupid.

The Question IRL posted:

I've had clients turn up/brought to court both intoxicated or in withdrawal.

In my experience the ones who are intoxicated are easier to deal with because unless it's booze, they will be incredibly pliant and will just agree with whatever you ask them.

Now obviously it's easier to get instructions from someone like that. But you don't get useful instructions since the person is just agreeing with whatever you ask of them.

(In case you are wondering, lawyers have developed a code to explain politely to judges that their clients are wankered. We say that are client is too ill to properly give instructions. Which is true since addiction is an illness. )

But clients who are in withdrawal are much worse to deal with. They fight with you all the time, they freak out, they keep changing their mind and they just want to leave so they can get back to their fix.
And unlike with the person currently intoxicated, it's harder to establish or prove that they aren't in a right mind.

And that's just with clients. If the shoe was on the other foot, I wouldn't want to be operated on by a doctor who was still buzzing or someone who needed something to take the edge off.

The Question IRL posted:

Up until about 3/4 years ago the test for drug driving was a binary "was their drugs in your clients system. Yes/no." And it could lead to situations where people with long term habits would still show as positive days later.
Which meant there were lots of arguments about whether or not they were intoxicated at the time.
They revamped the system and the new Dräggers supposed just test for the presence of drugs at the time.

The Question IRL posted:

Except I suppose that most time the test for drugs at work place is just about contract.
You work just fires you if they find you with drugs in their system. They can't call the cops unless you have substances in your work cubicle.
I would assume that all Pratel is talking about is criminalize companies for not enforcing actual drug test policies in their employees.

crispix posted:

Has anyone tried using seaweed as a covid test? Just you find old people who swear by it to predict or determine all manner of things like it turns a colour if a storm's a comin or it gets goosebumps if there are... evil vapours and that

Unkempt posted:

I was 15 in 1979 and I'm going to say... it was different. Thatcher was the start (in the UK at least) of the hideous 'no such thing as society, government can do nothing for you, work hard to make money or you are worthless' attitude that has destroyed British (and American) society in the last 40 years. But there was, at least, at bit of hope that the course might be reversed and honestly Blair winning after 12 years of that poo poo felt pretty good. But now, we know how that turned out and the Labour party has been effectively destroyed by billionaire press people and their PLP lackeys and it's really hard to see a worthwhile future for the country, especially with the upcoming environmental nightmare. Thatcher was very bad but there was some hope for things to get better. I can't see that anymore.

Red Oktober posted:

Yeah, the idea that lifetime appointments can be made under a single president? That just seems absolutely crazy.

Convex posted:

Question for some of the more knowledgeable / experienced in the thread: was the Thatcher era as crushingly hopeless and cruel as the current situation?

crispix posted:

Has anyone tried using seaweed as a covid test? Just you find old people who swear by it to predict or determine all manner of things like it turns a colour if a storm's a comin or it gets goosebumps if there are... evil vapours and that

Red Oktober posted:

Yeah, the idea that lifetime appointments can be made under a single president? That just seems absolutely crazy.

Jose posted:

Lol

https://twitter.com/sarahvanpelt/status/1307218036588503043?s=19

Jedit posted:

It's less crazy than electing them. The closest thing to ideal would be a bipartisan commission that works to find the most neutral person on the bar, but even that has issues.

Guavanaut posted:

We don't care so much about the race of an MP that they could only realistically run in 'ethnic enclaves' and there's openly gay Tory MPs in rural boroughs, so being scandalized at Boris having a sex out of wedlock would seem more like a return to the 80s morality of curtain twitching to find the gays.

The other scandals like being nakedly corrupt are more to do with the fact that the press either don't care or only performatively care and there's nothing anyone who does care can do.

Regarde Aduck posted:

Well yeah it needs to be elections of non-lifetime positions. Like everything else. Usually. Maybe.

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

I was 19. I was at uni in London. Almost all my fellow students voted Tory in the 1979 election. When I asked why, the response was "because my parents always have". So much for universities being hotbeds of lefties.

I have to say 'the bins' was a pretty bad time- the rubbish piling up in central London's squares for weeks etc, so it's not really surprising the tories got in. And the second half of the 70s had felt like unrelenting strikes. Even so, the 3 day week was under Ted Heath's tory government even though the right often quote it as one of Labour's failings.

With her nickname of Thatcher Milk Snatcher (she had taken away - apparently unwillingly and under pressure from The Treasury) the free 1/3pt bottle of milk all kids aged 7-11 used to get - though it was Labour who first cut it to secondary school pupils).

She wasn't popular so she threw a war party (Falklands) to boost her popularity and that trick worked.

Graduate perspective:
I graduated 2 years after she became PM into a world of very high unemployment - all the folders for companies in the careers office were empty, noone was recruiting, IIRC the 'milk round' didn't happen, and I've said before, 500 of the 'top' graduates of 1981 were recruited by IBM to start work after graduation and were sacked before starting. I have discussions with this with one of my nephews who has just graduated and starting a masters. For graduates, it was as dire then as now (though he won't believe it!) but the major difference now is graduates have £00000s of debt hanging round their necks which most of my contemporaries including myself did not as we had 'grants'.

Other adults:
For adults in the workplace, Thatcher swore to bow the unions and the attacks were full on. The Miners' Strike of 1984/5 was the biggie with Arthur Scargill as leader of the NUM. And division was sown as an alternative to the NUM was started up, I can't recall the ins and outs of that too well. But anyway, turned out Scargill was right. He said the govt were planning to close the mines and they did. Whole communities that depended on mining were destroyed.
Mining wasn't the only industry destroyed, manufacturing was also wrecked, council houses sold off with no rebuilding, and "Working for Patients" was released - the start of the destruction of the NHS (this is when I started working as a temp in the NHS and eventually became permanent working on the dreaded "asset register", then the disaggregation of assets to the newly created Trusts that came out of it all).

And the poll tax.

Oh and there were riots in Brixton, Liverpool (Toxteth) and various other places - I worked in an alarm company for a couple of years (before NHS) during the riots and the company made a packet because with all the rioting, alarms were going off non stop all over the place.

Oh and this - might well have contributed to rise of terrorism in the Middle East (though the British have been funding/arming extremists in that region since the 19th century - see Secret Affairs by Mark Curtis).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arPP37g1Rmo

I was based in London during most of her reign and we did not have it as bad as northerners.

In some ways Thatcher was not as right wing as some in the Labour Party these days.

The 70s saw some strong female politicians including Labour's Barbara Castle. And though I despise Thatcher, I'm not sure that the first female Prime Minister could have been different in "having more balls than her entire cabinet" (who were all male). If it had been Labour to have the first female Prime Minister, it would have been the same though opposite politically obviously.

For women to break through back in those days (only 40-50 years ago), you really had to be almost a caricature of 'male', a super bitch - no scope for showing any kind of basic humanity or sobbing in the bogs or running off to complain to HR if a colleague pinched your bum. That really has only changed since the 90s.

Ed: apologies for this being a bit disorganized and rambly.

Convex posted:

Also please could you elaborate on the point that Thatcher was not as right wing as some modern Labour politicans? I'm curious what she might be considered a liberal on.

Convex posted:

Very interesting, thanks. I guess that the difference today is that we know exactly how cold and detached the Tories are vs. potentially at the start of Thatcher's reign there wasn't quite the precedent?

Also please could you elaborate on the point that Thatcher was not as right wing as some modern Labour politicans? I'm curious what she might be considered a liberal on.

Bobby Deluxe posted:

It's partly that, but more predominantly things like conspiring to break a journalist's ribs, and the failures as home secretary.

There's also a bit of a difference between having multiple affairs and having sex out of wedlock, and the former destroyed so many political careers in the 80s and 90s that 'retiring from public life to spend time with my family' became a proto-meme.

The Question IRL posted:

Electing judges is fundamentally a bad idea.

Guavanaut posted:

Beefeater1980 posted:

Boris is a piece of poo poo because he is a piece of poo poo not because he fucks around. It’s upsetting when someone you think you have some claim on fucks someone else, but that’s not something a reasonable person expects to have control over.

winegums posted:

Moralising about MPs having the gay in the 70s/80s was awful and wrong, but I think affairs display a degree of being untrustworthy that should shame someone, politician or not.

WDTATW have a great series of podcast episodes on the Major/Blair era (possibly Thatcher too I can't remember). It's amazing the number of politicians who resigned over scandals which nowadays elicit no reaction whatsoever. As much as the politics of the Thatcher years was poo poo, it felt that there were at least some rules to the game, whereas now it's full mask off, "do whatever the gently caress you want" time.

Beefeater1980 posted:

I will go to my grave believing John Major was a decent man who ended up Tory leader and proved that having a decent person as PM doesn’t do poo poo in itself, because the machine continues regardless.

Bobby Deluxe posted:

It was the back end of the Spitting Image years, but I remember their portrayal of him as being boring, and looking back on that dreaming of having the worst thing you could say about a PM be that he was boring.

Then it was revealled he was shtupping Edwina Currie, although it wasn't revealled until he was out of office IIRC.

winegums posted:

Moralising about MPs having the gay in the 70s/80s was awful and wrong, but I think affairs display a degree of being untrustworthy that should shame someone, politician or not.

WDTATW have a great series of podcast episodes on the Major/Blair era (possibly Thatcher too I can't remember). It's amazing the number of politicians who resigned over scandals which nowadays elicit no reaction whatsoever. As much as the politics of the Thatcher years was poo poo, it felt that there were at least some rules to the game, whereas now it's full mask off, "do whatever the gently caress you want" time.