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Guavanaut posted:Back in the day when they'd come into your yard and collect the bins, proper gents, mind you if any of these modern bin men came into my yard I'd have to demand ID. Not because I'm racist, I'm not, I've got the not racist card signed by Trevor Phillips, but some of these modern bin men you see... Not sure you'll be able to take him, he looks like he has a big old stash of adrenochrome to call on. Happy New Year goons, hope that your 2021 is less loud, bright and moving slightly anticlockwise than mine has been so far.
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Jan 1, 2021 11:25
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ronya posted:the Tories hung themselves on the hope of Test and Trace to resolve the risks they were taking - if anything they were too optimistic on the potential to identify a light-touch solution Total elimination probably wouldn't have been possible but if they'd got the first two of test, trace and isolate right then even if the third was patchy it would have kept the R number right down.
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Jan 1, 2021 20:02
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therattle posted:Yeah, I think that’s right. Children were being infected and hospitalised from the start, and an apparently unique to children side-effect of infection has been known since at least May: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1257526692144222208 Forcing children back to school has been known to be unsafe since the first lockdown, and anyone calling for it is either incompetent to make that call, or malicious bordering on monstrous. Starmers "no ifs, no buts" call - particularly as it was made in the Mail - is definitely the latter, because it was reacting to chattering-class moaning about the kids being under their feet and small-business psycho whinging that their wage-slaves weren't at their immediate beck and call, not on what is safest and best for the children.
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Jan 2, 2021 14:40
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Jakabite posted:Is there any reason to dislike Paul Brand? He seems like a solid source of good information without any obvious bias (obviously there’s no such thing as no bias at all but you know what I mean). He's regularly in a room with Robert Peston but has not, to my knowledge, smacked Peston upside the head.
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Jan 2, 2021 15:33
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Umbra Dubium posted:Well there was that thing about third world countries asking for the copyrights on the vaccines to be waived so they could produce it themselves. That was on the conventional vaccines (none of which I think have made it out of P3 trials yet) that are makeable in conventional vaccine manufacturing facilities, not the mRNA ones (Pfizer, Moderna) or the modified virus ones (AZ, Sputnik), which require sophisticated and specialist manufacturing. Given that the two main inactivated-virus contenders are from China I can *certainly* see them implementing a Belt And Road And Hypodermic Needle policy, and making Very Serious People bloviate even more about their growing influence in the world and wondering how they can combat this with more aeroplanes that are too expensive to leave the country.
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Jan 2, 2021 20:34
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https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1345459896335085572 And the Boxing Day Sales have started.
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Jan 2, 2021 21:02
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Jose posted:i read the replies and lmao The Sun has published pictures of celebs in hospital multiple times, not to mention all of the other spectacularly illegal and unethical things they've done to let us know that someone from Big Brother is shagging someone else from Big Brother (and of course lectured us all on the importance of a free press). But of course none of that threatens the Establishment.
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Jan 2, 2021 21:05
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a pipe smoking dog posted:Remember that annual parliamentary elections is the one unfulfilled demand of the people's charter. Annual elections would be disastrous because there's basically no *good* policy that can be set up and have its positive benefits felt in that short a time. It'd be a recipe for at best complete inertia because nobody would ever propose a policy that would have long-term benefits, and at worst would just be constant culture war bullshit as governments chase the biggest headlines.
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Jan 3, 2021 10:20
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ronya posted:my sense was that Pratchett's writing changes to become more verbose in a tell-not-show way in the last few books, and the layered references and humour of the unsaid diminish. The author voice no longer trusts readers to infer characterizations or jokes and must outline them instead For me the decline happened earlier than his diagnosis. By Thud basically all of the main characters had such massive suits of narrative armour that they started to come across as Mary Sues, incapable of ever making a mistake or finding themselves in a situation they couldn't handle. Now possibly this might have been related to the very early stages of his disease but it's a problem that almost all long-running series have - the author (and audience) get so attached to the character that it becomes impossible for them to be written into an actually interesting story. Granny Weatherwax goes from being a witch scared of her power to the most powerful user of magic on the Disc, Sam Vimes goes from someone trying to be a good copper despite believing ACAB to a literal god of justice, and Moist von Lipwig - a character I always assumed Pratchett introduced because he was aware of the problems with the other main ones - takes just three books to go from con man trying to hide his past to some weird avatar of Good Capitalism. Interestingly the character that *started* with that level of invincibility - Rincewind - never made a comeback in the late books. He was in a lot of ways my favourite character because he was aware that he was basically unkillable but hated it because he was much more aware of the narrative rules that kept him alive but in really dangerous situations. Also the potato joke at the start of Interesting Times is one of the best throwaway gags in the series. (Incidentally this is why all superhero movies are poo poo, and I will not be taking questions on this)
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Jan 3, 2021 10:35
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Jippa posted:I od'ed on the trump thread in gbs after the election and haven't followed it for ages now. When does he have to leave the whitehouse? I want to read it during this period. 6th is the official confirmation of the election results in Congress, 20th is Biden's inauguration.
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Jan 3, 2021 10:36
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Recoome posted:isn't Drax a bad guy out of a James Bond book/movie? Moonraker? Fleming used the names of his posh mates for a lot of his villains. Goldfinger was named for the architect Erno Goldfinger whose cousin was a golf pal of Fleming, Blofeld for a school friend (whose son is the cricket commentator Henry Blofeld). Drax is named for Fleming's former commanding officer Reginald Drax, whose full name is the too-British-to-be-real Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, KCB, DSO, JP, DL, who's the grandfather of that MP. It's a pretty spectacular example both of the ridiculousness of the British ruling class and just how bloody small and incestuous it is.
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Jan 3, 2021 12:10
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OwlFancier posted:I would struggle to even define what "british humour" is tbh. Well it's changed a huge amount and of course been homogenised massively in the era of international mass media, but I'd say it's a combination of low-key self-deprecation, surrealism and anti-authoritarianism. The Goon Show is probably the purest example, and this is always my go-to example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bVHNF7sDds&t=306s (Don't worry, you don't have to listen to the whole thing, I've queued it up to my favourite joke. For those who prefer text: quote:enry Crun: Of course the show was written by an Irish man born in India and named for characters in an American cartoon but that's also very, very British. I'm not saying it's a superior form of humour to any other, but it's certainly something you can point at and say "This is British humour". It's also notable that none of those things currently exist in the things that The Libs love to point at in contemporary British comedy, which is chummy with authority, relentlessly "real", and of course desperately self-aggrandising - everyone in it is the cleverest person in the room and much, much better than any of the seven acceptable targets for joking about.
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Jan 3, 2021 15:10
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Miftan posted:Oh for sure, there's so much of it some of it is bound to be good. I remember Parks & Rec being good, but South Park has always been edgy teenager humour from what I recall. Those are the things that consistently make it overseas. Have you ever sat down and watched what's on 90% of their comedy channels? Infinite sitcoms that are just.. 20 minutes of ads and 20 minutes of what I can only assume is someone filming a really bad improv group? Having been a member of several really bad improv groups, how dare you? Our most tedious iterations of Henry still have more actual humour in them than an entire series of the mechanically-extracted comedy product that the American networks turn out.
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Jan 3, 2021 15:13
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Incidentally it's worth looking out for Avenue 5. It's Armando Iannucci doing sci-fi, so you've probably already got the shape of it. Some of it is *way* too on-the-nose but I think that's just his normal reality distortion field making Americans even more ridiculous.
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Jan 3, 2021 15:19
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OwlFancier posted:As far as I understand it, the reason for the multiple vaccine shots is to make sure it actually takes because it can take multiple doses over a period for your immune system to actually "get" what the vaccine is trying to tell it. AIUI the mechanism seems to be that the immune system has a threshold below which it doesn't bother to "remember" the antigen, possibly to avoid autoimmune problems, allergies, etc. Most infections that actually cause harm are enough to cross that threshold but because you don't want the vaccine to make you as sick as the actual disease you either have to find a way to trick the immune system into thinking the innoculation is as bad as the actual disease by using adjuvants that provoke a larger immune response, or have a booster shot that provokes the original response to flare back up. The amount of time the "memory" of the original antigen sticks around varies from person to person and vaccine to vaccine, which is why this dosing regime is so risky - even if the >85% protection from the first dose sticks around for a few months for an unknowably large number of those people by the time they eventually get the booster it won't actually provide lasting protection, meaning we will have to restart from scratch (and we also have no data on what happens if people who *do* retain the memory end up getting a third and fourth jab, and/or with an actual infection mixed in there too). It's an absolutely massive gamble to be taking with an entire population simply because they don't want to lock down any more.
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Jan 3, 2021 16:40
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Assuming of course they don't bury the studies or avoid doing them lest it show them to be loving it up.
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The Question IRL posted:I have a bone to pick with this thread (and other people online) over Avenue 5. ...is this some meta-commentary on sarcasm or humour, or did you actually watch a different show? The twist is literally the entire main storyline where you discover that all of the crew aren't just incompetent, they're literally just actors playing parts to reassure the passengers, and the whole ship is actually automated and a bunch of less-photogenic people behind the scenes are just tending to the machines. It's a wee bit heavy handed as a metaphor for modern society and politics but we're apparently long, long beyond the point where subtlety works
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Jan 3, 2021 16:45
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stev posted:The long episodes are really bloated and generally a lot less funny. Miami Twice is particularly bad. Man, I don't think I've taken my wankhat off all day between Pratchettchat and Sitcomchat. Basically - although I absolutely *loved* Buster Merryfield's performance as Uncle Arthur - Sullivan should have ended it when Lennard Pearce died. Not that Granddad was a good character or anything (although the Spanish Civil War story was brilliant) but just by that point Sullivan was painted into a corner. He had to show some kind of growth and change, because Del was pushing 40 and it was getting increasingly difficult to believe Rodney was the kind of ill-defined early 20s he'd been for a decade, but the only real way they could do that was breaking up the dynamic between them. All good sitcoms are basically about people trapped together - in a family, in a job, even literally in a prison - and them getting married splits up that dynamic (which is why most of the stories contrive some way of getting Rodney back in the flat, or otherwise sending them all off on a jolly somewhere). Mind you I think Sullivan was pretty much out of ideas by that point anyway. He had a production budget matched only by the big period dramas and he used it to contrive trips to Miami and building a massively-detailed wine bar set for 5 minutes of dialogue and an admittedly nigh-perfect bit of physical comedy (which could have been done in the Nag's Head just as easily). The utter dross that were his other attempts at sitcoms after OFAH suggests that he was just out of ideas generally. and the good bits of Rock and Chips were actually, like the good bits of OFAH, were well-observed character stuff rather than outright comedy - I always thought he could do one of those Euston Films/ITV comedy-drama shows and do it well, but I suppose he was getting mad bank being tied to sitcoms and the Beeb so why would he risk it? As much as it hurts, I have to give Ricky Gervais some minor props for deciding when they offered him a 3-series deal after the first series of The Office to turn it down in favour of one series. It's odd to realise that at one point he actually had that level of self-awareness (and the nuts and bolts of writing and comedy) that he knew exactly where the limits were. Massive amounts of cash and adulation seem to have done a very effective joke at wiping that from his memory, though.
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Jan 3, 2021 19:28
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ronya posted:the UK is doing remarkably well on the vaccine rollout thus far Israel's per-capita numbers are very skewed by who they consider a "person". e: I can't find any actual evidence but I'm willing to bet my place in the vaccine line that the same thing is happening in Bahrain.
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Jan 4, 2021 10:12
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Jose posted:So the judge agreed that assange committed the crimes he was accused of just that he'd kill himself if extradited. Great precedent I mean nobody denies he did what he was accused of, and the inhuman conditions of the US prison system absolutely should be reason to deny extradition. In fact I think that's the only legal grounds to oppose extradition he had. Worth noting this is only a preliminary ruling that will definitely be appealed though.
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Jan 4, 2021 12:24
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gh0stpinballa posted:what are the crimes The actual charges are under American computer crime laws (which are, somehow, even more overly broad than the UK Computer MIsuse Act) and the Espionage Act. The things he's actually accused of are publishing confidential US government and military documents (I *think* they dropped the BoA charges but can't confirm with a quick Google) and assisting someone in accessing protected military networks (he helped Chelsea Manning to bypass the security on some of the files she leaked). Like I say, nobody actually denies he did these things, or that they are a breach of US laws - the legal argument is over whether or not he should be extradited to face trial for those, and the moral argument is over whether he *should* be prosecuted for them.
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Jan 4, 2021 14:01
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Guavanaut posted:Surprisingly Ireland uses more electricity per capita than the UK (but much less overall). That's a factor of population size and density, and rollout of other fuel sources for heating and cooking. Ireland never really had a gas infrastructure outside Dublin so gas cooking and heating is much less common there than it is here, so even if all other factors are equal they're going to use more electricity. Also densely-packed cities generally consume less electricity than towns and villages, and most cities in Ireland have had a massive boom of shittily-built modern housing in the last few years. Ireland could be a massive exporter of electricity - they've got way more wind and tidal power potential than GB - but for some reason they've never really fully tapped that potential. NI has almost as much wind power as the Republic despite the massive disparity in size.
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Jan 4, 2021 14:11
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The Question IRL posted:2) The lack of gas cookers is a major thing in my house. We couldn't get a gas cooker and went with an electric one. LPG cookers are a thing, but - as much as I love a gas hob - I don't know if I could be arsed going through the extra hassle of swapping out bottles (or the expense of getting someone else to do it) - I suspect if you priced it up an induction hob would probably work out cheaper, and be better in almost every way (the only advantages of gas over induction being cheaper initial outlay and cookware and being able to light a fag off it).
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Jan 4, 2021 15:00
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TheRat posted:
Hoo boy. And bear in mind I don't even *like* wind power for multiple reasons. quote:ultrafucks untouched nature I've got extremely bad news for you about every single thing human beings have done since the neolithic. quote:kills birds Ditto, but also [citation needed] because the effects of wind turbines on birds are very marginal, especially compared to the more generalised damage done by fossil fuels. House cats definitely kill *way* more birds than wind power. Turbines *are* bad for nocturnal hunters and bats, but luckily the vast majority of UK wind generation is miles offshore. quote:makes an incredibly maddening humming noise for miles and miles around I've literally stood directly underneath these bad boys and the noise of them was barely noticeable above the actual wind. This is an objection I've heard loads of times and I've never seen anyone actually able to demonstrate it. quote:disrupts tv and radio signals Again [citation needed]. They're very thin structures which are earthed. I suppose potentially you might get some weird multipath effects off them and if you were still on 405-line black and white telly that would certainly be an issue, but any digital system is going to shrug that off without even noticing it, unless you already have such a weak and indirect signal that a lightning storm 300 miles away is also going to gently caress it anyway. quote:can't be recycled at all Again, bad news about everything humanity has ever done. Also they're mostly GRP, which while not recyclable, can certainly be disposed of in better ways than just dumping them in a hole. Even if we do just dump them in a hole, that's still a million times better than the waste problems of literally every other power generation system we have available to us right now or even in the forseeable future with the *possible* exception of concentrated solar power (the kind with mirrors and a heat exchanger - photovoltaics have loving *horrifying* environmental impact in both manufacture and disposal).
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Jan 4, 2021 15:25
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Borrovan posted:They've been talking about building a massive tidal lagoon in Swansea for years, the web site says that construction is due to start in, uh, 2016, just as soon as somebody starts giving a gently caress about funding investment in green energy and/or Wales I like the idea of tidal power but for some reason it never seems to work out. I think the most damning thing is the Dutch, who would seem to be the most ideally-placed to exploit it with minimal outlay and hassle, have never bothered beyond a tiny pilot scheme. Although maybe they just have a cultural preference for wind power.
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Jan 4, 2021 15:34
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NotJustANumber99 posted:I have one of these right now. Its rubbish. https://twitter.com/BenKentish/status/1346106654736211968 (It's just going to be even more confusing lockdown rules but I bet seeing those words gave everyone that same little "What crest is going to be on the lectern?" thrill we all got in 2017-2019, didn't it?)
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Jan 4, 2021 15:53
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So we've had a colour-based lockdown system (remember that?), two different word-based ones, and are now in a number-based one. Where does he go from here? Smells? "London was today placed in forgotten gym bag lockdown, with the rest of the south-east in slightly fishy and Cornwall remaining in underventilated cupboard". (I originally wanted to do sounds with the Day Today "can you sum it up in a sound" clip but the smells one was funnier to me, sue me)
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Jan 4, 2021 16:06
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sebzilla posted:Clearly our power needs should be met by constructing two enormous dams across the Irish Sea and running hydro power from the newly formed lake. Bonus score for making them dual-function as bridges. That is actually a proposed megaproject - the tidal movement in and out of the Irish Sea would be enough to power most of Europe. As for Gibraltar, you're way late - Germans always have the most interesting ways of improving the amount of space available for people to live in.
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Jan 4, 2021 16:16
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Ewan posted:If parliament is being recalled on Wednesday, is that the earliest that this new lockdown can come into effect? They can move the whole country into T4, without further parliamentary action but anything beyond that needs a vote, and I *think* that closing the schools would actually be within the DoE's remit without any vote needed. To me this suggests that they're going for a full March lockdown and/or - given that they've been cranking up the "it's you stupid proles that are the problem" rhetoric of late - that they're going to go further to the way France was in their first lockdown and require (self) documentation before leaving the house at all. But seriously might as well just examine chicken entrails to try and guess what way they're going to go.
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Jan 4, 2021 16:21
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Jose posted:doomed to failure because he wanted to join europe and africa properly and not just iwth a dam I think he might have had some plans about dealing with that problem.
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Jan 4, 2021 16:21
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keep punching joe posted:https://twitter.com/nickeardleybbc/status/1346113547319865344 Yeah this is the completely different "How hosed are we" scale, not the "Will you be able to get a haircut" lockdown scale. (The fact it wasn't at 5 before Christmas proves how pointless the whole loving thing is)
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Jan 4, 2021 16:35
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Guavanaut posted:Yeah if the Joint Biosecurity Centre can't predict emerging exponential threats then what is it actually for? When my mate was a kid they installed central heating in his pre-war mansion flat - his parents put a telly in the fireplace because that was where all the furniture already pointed and otherwise they were left staring at the big slab of plasterboard the council had put in to block them. And yes, they did have one of those VHS tapes of a roaring fire. As tellys got bigger his dad just knocked bigger and bigger lumps out of the fireplace to accommodate them, until someone from the council visiting for an entirely different reason noticed this and told them that a) the chimneys were actually load-bearing and b) the surrounds were lined with asbestos. It was certainly one of the more novel ways to get a new council flat, I suppose, and to share the joy everyone else in the block got one too because apparently the rules with asbestos are that you're allowed to ignore it until you have to do something about it, then you have to do *everything* about it.
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Jan 4, 2021 16:59
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OwlFancier posted:If you don't like looking at wind farms that's a problem with your aesthetic sense not the wind farms. I mentioned the Dagenham turbines and they're kinda freaky - the extremely flat terrain around there (and low-rise buildings making it impossible to see the bottom of them) makes it impossible to judge their size (which is huge, like jumbo jet wingspan huge). This size and the fact it means the blades seem to be spinning far too slowly gives them a really weird, ominous look, especially because the distance means they don't "move" right when you move around. Then when you get up close, they're in the mostly-demolished old Ford plant and general wasteland along the Thames, and it does kinda make it look like they're somehow responsible for all the destruction around them.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:45
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https://twitter.com/DavidLammy/status/1346142295188533248 If it was anyone else I'd suspect this was a masterful bit of shitposting, but Lammy is loyal to the core.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:50
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Jakabite posted:What’s your alternative method of energy generation then? They did mention hydro earlier, while berating wind for destroying nature and wildlife, which... erm...
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Jan 4, 2021 19:51
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Guavanaut posted:These also look awesome. Concentrated solar *is* awesome and we should definitely be paying Saharan and other desert nations an absolute shitload to put them up everywhere. You don't want them anywhere not-desert because a) unlike PV they're pretty binary - they can't generate any power at all if cloud cover gets above a certain amount and b) they are actually as dangerous to bird life as some people think wind turbines are - bird sees a nice big place to roost and gets Death Star-ed. The only real problem with them is that - because you do have to put them in deserts, where people tend not to be - you have to have a load of lossy and unreliable very-long-range power transmission kit to actually get the juice where it needs to go. I've also no doubt at all that if it does happen it'll actually turn into a couple of hundred mini Volta Dams that somehow manage to completely gently caress over people living for hundreds of miles around.
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Jan 4, 2021 20:13
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Pistol_Pete posted:The big tower in the middle's for focusing the collective power of the panels like a gigantic laser beam, right? Don't disappoint me! Alas no, you'd need an extremely complex mirror (that could change shape constantly) to do that. Now, with most of them, they *do* have steerable mirrors on the ground so you could theoretically use them to destroy aircraft (or at least make the pilots extremely hot and probably blind) but you're not really able to use it like a wizard's tower to wipe out the competing power plants. Hmm, but if you had a flying parabolic mirror...
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Jan 4, 2021 20:19
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Woo i'll be getting my training for volunteer vaccinating soon You're supposed to stab them with a needle you fool.
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Jan 4, 2021 23:08
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Just near the Excel there's a really weird situation because they plonked down a massive international conference centre and about 20,000 homes right through one of the main utility pathways into London which leads you to what I'm sure has to be a fairly unique phenomenon - at least in a built-up area - where a public right of way goes *through* a pylon, letting me get this rather trippy photo: There's all sorts of other oddities about the area once you know what you're looking for, like the weird kinks in the DLR and Crossrail tracks and the big gap between them and the centre itself to avoid building over the massive gas pipe into east London (fed from the LPG evaporator plant up the road at Gallions Reach that just adds to the fascinating melange of smells coming from the sewage works) and of course the abandoned industrial buildings across the dock from Excel that are all that's left of Beckton Gas Works and are definitely there for heritage reasons and so film buffs can point out where the sniper scene in Apocalypse Now was filmed and not because there's so much asbestos, cyanide, and other fascinating byproducts of Town Gas production in them that if you removed them the whole lot would just fall over.
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Jan 4, 2021 23:28
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Guavanaut posted:He is, the band is to identify him as a volunteer. 
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Jan 4, 2021 23:30
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Comrade Fakename posted:The chocolate cream in the middle of a Ferrero Rocher is literally just Nutella, so you could quite easily make Nutella fudge, I imagine. The original Peanut Lion bars were effectively just 4 Rocher welded together but with peanuts instead of almonds and were god-tier chocolate. Now they're just a Lion Bar with a couple of extra peanuts and are terrible. I'm fairly sure the change came with the Nestle takeover, so that's another crime against humanity to lay at their door.
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Jan 5, 2021 01:03
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