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Bobstar posted:I first learned about coin bags when I walked into Natwest and asked for "some of those paper tubes you put coins in" and they looked at me like I was strange.  E: Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel that imagines a fantastical society whose benevolent government provides all its citizens with free televisions TACD fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 20:35
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endlessmonotony posted:Food safe bags are £1/200 when bought in bulk by the way. Exactly. The whole austerity, sanctioning of uc etc is designed to punish people for being poor. They were going to bring in sanctions for people in low paid work because they were supposed to look for (non-existent) higher paid work. Don't know what happened with that.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:36
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TACD posted:Suddenly having flashbacks to when we arrived in the UK and I first tried Smarties, and now realising I have no idea if they still come in tubes or if they even still exist. Smarties are still around, right? Not in the UK, no. lol Brexit
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Jan 12, 2021 20:36
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Watched the first episode of the sopranos, its all on sky box sets and i don't need to tell you its great but i particularly enjoyed the music choices!
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Jan 12, 2021 20:37
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I'm not sure they're being penalised for being poor because that suggests the toffs would find it acceptable if they managed to no longer be poor. Could you imagine if a poor managed to become wealthy somehow, and began to mingle with the upper class, getting their disgusting poor genes all over the punchbowl? No no, that simply wouldn't do. This is less about penalising and more about just ensuring they know their place
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Jan 12, 2021 20:39
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I'm so tired of event and prestige TV, I have the same fatigue I have about marvel movies. They're good, I guess? I dunno, tiring.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:40
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OwlFancier posted:The US uses those too I think, hence the phrase "a roll of quarters". The weird shape of the more useful coins (20p/50p) is probably more of an impediment. * At the point they were introduced. ** Each one might be a bit off, but 1lb*** of pennies should average out enough that you can calibrate shop scales with them. *** A pound of pennies in this case would be £1.28 of copper coins, fitting neither the decimal nor pre-decimal system, because Britain.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:42
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JollyBoyJohn posted:Watched the first episode of the sopranos, its all on sky box sets and i don't need to tell you its great but i particularly enjoyed the music choices! R.I.P Very Reverend D. Wayne
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Jan 12, 2021 20:44
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TACD posted:I honestly was having trouble believing anybody would go to the trouble of spending time / money to chop up the veg but The loving catering 3-pack of biscuits is what gets me. You can very clearly tell that this is a office and university type catering company not a company that works with families. Those 3-packs of biscuits were in every loving meeting and training I went to when I worked for the University.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:52
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They put them on the tea and coffee tray of Novatels and Travelodges and similar too.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:55
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Guavanaut posted:They put them on the tea and coffee tray of Novatels and Travelodges and similar too. Lol what kind of posh poo poo chain hotels are you going to where they give you free biscuits?
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Jan 12, 2021 21:00
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Travelodge does, it's one of the nice things about staying there, the bed is usually reliably sleepable and you get tea and coffee and some biscuits. In possibly my biggest guillotine statement to date I have only ever stayed at travelodges and hiltons, because I know someone who works for the hiltons so they get mega discounts, and I am happy to report the hiltons also have free biscuits.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:02
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It definitely used to be a thing, you get two tea bags, an instant coffee sachet, one of those UHT milk things and a tiny packet of biscuits. This was true as recently as a couple of years back in Manchester, though I can imagine further south they just steal your shoes and ransom them back.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:04
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thespaceinvader posted:Lol what kind of posh poo poo chain hotels are you going to where they give you free biscuits? oh my bud you should become a union steward when the world is less beplagued. whenever you go to a conference they stick you in the nice lovely chain hotels - mine even had a sauna once!
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Jan 12, 2021 21:05
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Yeah I think we could do with, as a movement/body of thought or whatever, do with getting past the idea that 'the cruelty is the point'. It's over-simple and isn't going to help us take down the system that encourages this sort of behaviour. Obviously it's fine as a throwaway sentiment but it's ultimately unhelpful as it encourages those on the left to be intellectually lazy, which to be honest we already have a big enough problem with.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:06
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I don't get the whole rationing out a weirdly small amount of pasta thing. You can buy 1kg of pasta from Sainsburys for 58p. And presumably if you are a bulk purchaser you can get it for even cheaper. So even 4kg of pasta is going to cost you just over £2....
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Jan 12, 2021 21:08
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Jakabite posted:Yeah I think we could do with, as a movement/body of thought or whatever, do with getting past the idea that 'the cruelty is the point'. It's over-simple and isn't going to help us take down the system that encourages this sort of behaviour. Obviously it's fine as a throwaway sentiment but it's ultimately unhelpful as it encourages those on the left to be intellectually lazy, which to be honest we already have a big enough problem with. This also won't help us take down the system so I don't see the point
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Jan 12, 2021 21:09
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Ewan posted:I don't get the whole rationing out a weirdly small amount of pasta thing. You can buy 1kg of pasta from Sainsburys for 58p. And presumably if you are a bulk purchaser you can get it for even cheaper. So even 4kg of pasta is going to cost you just over £2....  Jakabite posted:Yeah I think we could do with, as a movement/body of thought or whatever, do with getting past the idea that 'the cruelty is the point'. It's over-simple and isn't going to help us take down the system that encourages this sort of behaviour. Obviously it's fine as a throwaway sentiment but it's ultimately unhelpful as it encourages those on the left to be intellectually lazy, which to be honest we already have a big enough problem with.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:11
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Jakabite posted:Yeah I think we could do with, as a movement/body of thought or whatever, do with getting past the idea that 'the cruelty is the point'. It's over-simple and isn't going to help us take down the system that encourages this sort of behaviour. Obviously it's fine as a throwaway sentiment but it's ultimately unhelpful as it encourages those on the left to be intellectually lazy, which to be honest we already have a big enough problem with. I mean... a lot of the time the cruelty literally is the point though. Like the government spends a fortune to kick people off welfare rather than just spending that money on welfare, the cruelty is the point. I don't know how else you can explain or think about that?
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Jan 12, 2021 21:11
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Ewan posted:I don't get the whole rationing out a weirdly small amount of pasta thing. You can buy 1kg of pasta from Sainsburys for 58p. And presumably if you are a bulk purchaser you can get it for even cheaper. So even 4kg of pasta is going to cost you just over £2.... Presumably it helps with the creative accounting to generate a good whack of profit. I.E. you charge for repacking, shipping associated costs, etc., a couple times more than it costs you and hey, what would you think, extra profit! e: ^^ It's profiteering is the point IMO more often than not, rather than cruelty. Workfare to get cheap labour for your mates, cutting benefit expenses via sanctions and "medical" disability exams, so on and so forth. The cruelty is just a side PR benefit for your voter base. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 21:12
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Jakabite posted:Yeah I think we could do with, as a movement/body of thought or whatever, do with getting past the idea that 'the cruelty is the point'. It's over-simple and isn't going to help us take down the system that encourages this sort of behaviour. Obviously it's fine as a throwaway sentiment but it's ultimately unhelpful as it encourages those on the left to be intellectually lazy, which to be honest we already have a big enough problem with. Hiring someone to split up bags of pasta isn't in any way efficient. At best it's someone very stupid wanting to mimic the expected amounts of pasta consumed during a school meal; but there's also a lot of cruelty involved.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:13
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Ewan posted:I don't get the whole rationing out a weirdly small amount of pasta thing. You can buy 1kg of pasta from Sainsburys for 58p. And presumably if you are a bulk purchaser you can get it for even cheaper. So even 4kg of pasta is going to cost you just over £2.... Tories grudgingly realise they might need to feed poors. Tories give contract to crony. Crony skims lion's share of money for self. Crony dumps task onto procurement. Procurement is totally unused to this kind of buying, since they're usually a catering company. Procurement probably makes effort to tell Crony, but the money's already been socketed in the Caymans and anyway gently caress you I've done my 5 hours this week I'm orf until Thursday next. Procurement fucks it up, kicks it down to middle management. Middle management has pallets of random shite arrive with little to no warning. Middle management kicks it down to ground level staff. Ground level staff are given a big random pile of assorted shite and told to divide it amongst [x] with 0 guidance and, since nobody knows what the gently caress they're doing, you end up with these incredibly odd divisions.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:15
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https://twitter.com/DailyMirror/status/1349086379926544384?s=19
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Jan 12, 2021 21:16
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what happened is a tory's mate was given the contract and immediately skimmed some significant fraction right off the top for consultancy fee. this fine citizen then turned and gave this smaller amount to their company coffers, and in doing so skimmed some of what was left. the manager of the company (who's salary of course skims a little more) assigned some intern or otherwise exploited worker to go buy as much food as they could with whatever was left. (it wouldn't astonish me if there was a skim here too, but i'll leave it out due to solidarity with this poor bugger) they go and buy their 30 quid worth of food with the 5 or 10 quid left, buying the cheapest and most bulk food they can. and save even more by using free packaging they can either swipe or buy at significant discount from the many businesses that are failing right now - no one's buying slurpees. there was never any kind of oversight on packaging for suitability, nor was anyone calculating how little was being given out, expecting people to be grateful instead. these things would cost money and such would be inefficient. e: beaten lol
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Jan 12, 2021 21:18
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OwlFancier posted:I mean... a lot of the time the cruelty literally is the point though. Like the government spends a fortune to kick people off welfare rather than just spending that money on welfare, the cruelty is the point. I don't know how else you can explain or think about that? No, it isn't. This evokes an image of some cackling Baron of Evil gleefully poring over stats about people dying and saying 'yes! yes!'. This isn't what happens. The majority of people in government have at least some belief that they're doing the right thing. Now they might have gross and terribly informed ideas about people, but they aren't caricatures - they were exposed to dramatically different ideas to most of us, grew up in environments that would never dispel these ridiculous ideas, then got catapulted by their privelege into postions which allow them to carry out public policy based on these philosophies. That's why it's so important to take down the philosophy as well as the people. The welfare example is perhaps the most easily explainable. If you genuinely believe that people on welfare become dependent and lazy, that seems like money well spent. Now that's obviously bullshit, but that doesn't mean it isn't an earnestly held belief by a majority of the government. Barring a few exceptions (Patel, who I genuinely do think is a psychopath), the worst that could be said about them is that they don't care about the people their policies affect and care far more about the policies enrich themselves. Now don't think this is me letting them off the hook - if anything it's worse. A genuine enjoyment of cruelty is more like an illness than anything else. I agree with what someone said earlier - that it can actually be helpful to characterise them that way because the left does have a huge problem with overthinking things and generally being far too academic and verbose. But in the context of a discussion between informed leftists, outside of having fun, I don't think that characterisation is actually useful. If we're going to bother talking about their motivations, we need to actually interrogate them with some rigor rather than just concluding they all enjoy pain. It's an easy conclusion to draw but doesn't stand up to any analaysis. We can do better. E: RE: bags of pasta. How do you know it isn't efficient? A person costs about £8 an hour. I'd say your average person can split a good 200 bags of pasta per hour, at least. That probably makes a hefty saving. That £8 an hour is probably getting paid whether you split the bags of pasta or not too. I doubt anyone was hired specifically to split bags of pasta. You're also assuming that these people are all that smart, and aren't just assuming that less pasta per person = more efficient. The point is we don't know and saying 'it's just because they're bad people' is extremely poor. They are bad people but I doubt that's their motivation. CoolCab's explanation is more realistic than 'they enjoy starving children'. Jakabite fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 21:24
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thespaceinvader posted:Lol what kind of posh poo poo chain hotels are you going to where they give you free biscuits? erm have you been in a Travelodge recently? because calling them "posh" is just about the wrongest thing imaginable
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Jan 12, 2021 21:28
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Jakabite posted:No, it isn't. This evokes an image of some cackling Baron of Evil gleefully poring over stats about people dying and saying 'yes! yes!'. This isn't what happens. The majority of people in government have at least some belief that they're doing the right thing. Now they might have gross and terribly informed ideas about people, but they aren't caricatures - they were exposed to dramatically different ideas to most of us, grew up in environments that would never dispel these ridiculous ideas, then got catapulted by their privelege into postions which allow them to carry out public policy based on these philosophies. That's why it's so important to take down the philosophy as well as the people. The welfare example is perhaps the most easily explainable. If you genuinely believe that people on welfare become dependent and lazy, that seems like money well spent. Now that's obviously bullshit, but that doesn't mean it isn't an earnestly held belief by a majority of the government. Barring a few exceptions (Patel, who I genuinely do think is a psychopath), the worst that could be said about them is that they don't care about the people their policies affect and care far more about the policies enrich themselves. Now don't think this is me letting them off the hook - if anything it's worse. A genuine enjoyment of cruelty is more like an illness than anything else. I don't think any of that is incompatible with observing that cruelty is the point. Just because the people doing the cruelty don't think they are bad people, does not mean that what they are doing is not cruel. It does not mean that we on the receiving end are wrong to parse it as cruelty, or to observe that it is not the system "not working" somehow, that there is a disconnect between the desire of the people at the top and the outcomes at the bottom, but that it is the system working as designed and effectively enacting those desires. There literally are people working for the DWP cackling about having met their kick people off benefits quota. They might think they are doing some sort of justice by punishing the undeserving but that is still cruelty. If you can't call anything cruelty if the person doing it thinks they are in the right then that leaves you in what I think is a ridiculous position. Our society is built on cruelty, it is not wrong to point that out, nor is it wrong to argue that even if people at the top think they are doing the right thing, the effects of it are plain in front of our faces and we recognize them as cruel. You don't get to identify as a kind person, that judgement is one made by others. Just because people don't recognize their desire to see others punished as cruelty doesn't mean it isn't. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jan 12, 2021 |
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Jan 12, 2021 21:31
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Jakabite posted:overthinking things and generally being far too academic and verbose ... what. You're not thinking about things enough. You're certainly being far too verbose. The cruelty is the point. What they've done makes absolutely zero sense to people who would work for £8 per hour, so the orders are coming from above from people who want to dehumanize the poor.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:31
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but i love being academic and verbose, what else are we good for. this is not the marketplace of ideas, this is a place where we pontificate on our ideological convictions with passion and occasionally jokes. i do not begrudge people for articulating their ideas with sophistication, even when it becomes a little absurd.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:31
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also it's very important to develop these intense ideological frameworks and learn to develop our ideas, otherwise we might make extreme allegations that cause us to look very silly, and be laughed at.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:34
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CoolCab posted:also it's very important to develop these intense ideological frameworks and learn to develop our ideas, otherwise we might make extreme allegations that cause us to look very silly, and be laughed at. You just can't stop bringing up a post made in February of 2020 that doesn't even say what you claim it says, huh? Seriously, to anyone believing this poo poo, go check out the original post. Or y'know, don't, it's the exact same derail.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:35
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i'm sorry i don't consider it polite to link to certain post histories from a harm reduction perspective?
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Jan 12, 2021 21:36
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CoolCab posted:i'm sorry i don't consider it polite to link to certain post histories from a harm reduction perspective? You're deliberately being a contrarian who can't stop doubling down on being racist, so maybe "polite" was beyond your reach all along. Jesus this derail sucked then and it sucks now, I'll stop it.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:38
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Saying that something is the point of an action implies that the main or primary goal of carrying out that action is that something. Cruelty can’t be the point if it isn’t intentional. It’s more a by-product. The action is cruel but the cruelty isn’t the point of the action. We might just disagree on the finer points of what a point is. endlessmonotony... fine, if you want to take literally the most surface level analysis of things and not interrogate any further as to what the systemic motivations behind cruel actions might be then okay, but there are people who would quite like to and find that useful. ‘Bad thing done because doing bad thing fun for bad person’ might be comforting in some way but isn’t actually how anything works. Also I know I was being verbose, I was putting a caveat to my post that I realise that snappy slogans like cruelty is the point have their uses and should probably be used more by the left, but aren’t that useful in our little echo chamber.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:38
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endlessmonotony posted:You're deliberately being a contrarian who can't stop doubling down on being racist, so maybe "polite" was beyond your reach all along. god you really are a tedious prick
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Jan 12, 2021 21:41
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think good! construct interesting ideas and post them, and maybe some jokes. that is posting, and to post is virtuous.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:42
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Jakabite posted:Saying that something is the point of an action implies that the main or primary goal of carrying out that action is that something. Cruelty can’t be the point if it isn’t intentional. It’s more a by-product. The action is cruel but the cruelty isn’t the point of the action. We might just disagree on the finer points of what a point is. Still too many words. Explaining how a well-meaning person arrives at splitting bell peppers and repackaging pasta that wouldn't be immediately recognized as being inefficient and stupid by anyone willing to work for £8 would be an impressive feat. They may think they're helping the poor by making it miserable to be poor, so people work harder to not be, that's the only one I can see; they think they're cruel for a reason, their reasons are bullshit, and they're still being cruel on purpose.
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Jan 12, 2021 21:42
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Jakabite posted:Saying that something is the point of an action implies that the main or primary goal of carrying out that action is that something. Cruelty can’t be the point if it isn’t intentional. It’s more a by-product. The action is cruel but the cruelty isn’t the point of the action. We might just disagree on the finer points of what a point is. If someone says that people should be punished harshly for a crime, to the point that many people would consider it "cruel", would it be wrong to call it that if they disagreed and said it was actually justice? Like, I just don't see why the person making the claim gets to override everyone else and have their identity as a nice person respected? Cos that's basically what it is, right? In practice? We call people racist when they do racist things, even if they do not identify as racist, I do not see why we would not do the same thing with cruelty? Especially as I think that is a very emotive point for us to latch onto. I don't see the point of looking at children being made to go hungry and say "actually this is just inefficiency in the governing ideological process" rather than just calling it monstrous and validating people's anger about it?
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Jan 12, 2021 21:44
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Guavanaut posted:The only current UK coins that are legally* weights are the 1p and 2p, which as they're 1/8oz and 1/4oz exactly** probably isn't even the case post-metrication. The new 10p is close enough to a US quarter that you could probably even use the same rolls. They're near-identical, I've accidentally tried using a quarter/10p piece in the wrong country back when I went between the two reasonably often 
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Jan 12, 2021 21:45
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fun to think about how 80 years ago the state managed the feed the country despite there being a war on but now the free market can't do anything but poo poo itself
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