|
Do you prefer the extended summer thread format? This poll is closed. |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| Yes |
|
126 | 44.21% |
| No |
|
39 | 13.68% |
| I'm Scottish |
|
120 | 42.11% |
| Total: | 285 votes | ||
|
ThomasPaine posted:e: My partner's dad is an engineer and has told me at length about how his skills were in such demand when he entered the job market he was able to go back and forth between prospective employers and essentially make them bid on him, so he started off on an absurdly good salary. He's significantly more wealthy than my own parents and still pulls a lot of completely out of touch bullshit and I wonder how connected these things are. I have mentioned this before somewhere on these forums, maybe even in an old iteration of this thread, but I once interviewed an old chap who spent his career in the Coventry motor industry, starting off as a machine operator making bearings and progressing up via being a trained machinist to foreman then shop manager. When he was in his late teens the economic boom of the late 50s, the growth in the motor industry and the effect of mergers and consolidation within the Rootes Group meant that Coventry was really short of trained manufacturing labour. So he - who left school at 14 and had a string of polytechnic night classes to his name - went from business to business essentially interviewing them to see what they'd offer him, then went round a second time to tell them that such-and-such a firm was offering him [x] so could they increase their offer to [y] and so on. It was like listening to some tale of a land of make-believe where the normal power structures were completely reversed. Especially having done the thankless, futile late-2000s thing of trudging around businesses asking about vacancies and handing out paper CVs (at the insistence of my boomer-aged parents who last looked for jobs in 1973, it should be said) while also doing the (equally thankless and only marginally less futile) online/corporate recruitment portal applications stuff, hearing tales of how it was (for a select few in certain industries, granted) in the days of full employment, social mobility and meaningful economic growth genuinely had an effect on my political views.
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2021 18:06
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:35 |
|
|
willie_dee posted:In more regional news It really is. It's actually fascinating to see - the Colston statue was deliberately and explicitly put up by a group of Tory businessmen who wanted to set Colston up as the ideal civic benefactor (rich, mercantile, Tory, Anglican) who they could then claim to be acting in the tradition of (and which would also act as a counter-narrative to all that pesky socialism going on in Bristol at the time). When the statue was there, lauding Colston as a 'wise and virtuous son', the same vested interests and conservative groups were fiercely against any moves to remove or relocate the statue, or even reinterpret it where they stood. It had to stand in its original place and form, right in the middle of the city, where everyone could see it and absorb its message. After all, it's "history", and that's so important to learn about. The moment it was graffiti-ed and thrown in the harbour, it ceased to be a symbol of its original narrative. For ever more, the statue's claim to fame is that it was removed by a popular protest seeking social justice and carrying out direct action. Even it was restored/replaced and put back exactly as it was, the Myth of Colston has been busted. He'll always be the Bristol slave-trader whose statue was torn down and thrown into the harbour. So now the same interests that fought tooth and nail to make the statue as visible as possible are desperately organising to try and prevent the statue being seen by anyone.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2021 16:38
|
|
|
Crankit posted:they can be launched, but their targetting data has to be precomputed, so some company in the US has to do that for us if we want to fire it somewhere different to the current set of targets that can be used. Given that MoD training establishments can't even make local changes to their instructional PowerPoint presentations to correct typos, factual errors or outdated information because they're part of a 'package' procured from an external supplier on a ironclad contract which means that the MoD has to pay for every change they request, even if it's to correct errors on the part of the supplier, it doesn't really surprise me that they've got the same deal for Trident. It's probably the same company. "To request an update to the presentation which still shows the Type 42 destroyer as being in a active service, press 1...to request a new target coordinate set for Trident, press 2..."
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2021 20:31
|
|
|
Jel Shaker posted:wonder what the venn diagram would look like with “olds who reminisce to yoofs about scrumping when they were young” to “olds terrified of yoofs and fruit trees in a public park” I was going to say exactly this. Same with the pedestrianisation of Princess Vicky Street - people mingling, market stalls, cafe tables, local independent shops. Just like the Good Old Days! But no, gotta be able to drive all the way from Redland(! - it's a half an hour walk!) to park right outside the import wine shop.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2021 09:57
|
|
|
NotJustANumber99 posted:i am increasingly dyslexic or a wishful thinker but I read that as an enforced four day week. poo poo.  I was preparing myself for another example of "it's Crazy Maoist Communism when Jemeery Korbin proposes it but Common Sense That Gives People What They Want And Another Brexit Bonus when Boris does it" madness
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2021 20:58
|
|
|
Not immediately relevant to anything (other than on-going culture war BS) but it made me laugh: https://twitter.com/LauraAmalasunta/status/1404885232168341513
|
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2021 12:51
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:This is an interesting article: A good read, thanks. When I did a spell working as a sub-editor for a proofing firm (predictive text wanted to say 'farm', which might have been more accurate) I clashed several times with the news senior sub over whether 'the international community' was a weasel word or not. The house style guide required us to remove or rewrite weasel words and it was clear to me that 'the international community' nearly always meant 'America and its allies', and was therefore at best a weasel word or was just blatantly misleading. His main argument boiled down to "yes, more countries supported [thing] than condemned it, but all the important countries condemned it." I suspect my response of "so should I change 'international community' to 'important countries' then?" was why my as-and-when contract suddenly became very empty of working hours.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 09:57
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:The British gunboats are probably a bit of posturing and a bit of “oh gently caress collective security needs to be a real thing again”. I mean where I live, people get a lot spicier with boats but that’s because there is still a massive spat going on over who owns all the islands in the South China Sea. Well get the Milk of Magnesia out then, because HMS Defender is only one of eight ships in the multinational Carrier Strike Group being sent to have a good poke at the freedom-of-navigation beehive that is the South China Sea. 65,000 tons of British sovereign territory sailing from Singapore to the Luzon Strait.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2021 11:38
|
|
|
Beefeater1980 posted:Yes but if anyone out here took exception to that it would get sunk in an instant; the point is to show that America’s allies might get involved if things get shooty so it’s not safe to discount them when tallying up “can China safely invade Taiwan yet” which is The geopolitical issue round these parts. Oh I know that - that's the entire purpose of the Carrier Strike Group, and why it has more USMC planes on it than Fleet Air Arm ones this time round. I'm not for a moment suggesting that the CSG is some ploy by the UK to retake Hong Kong and seize control of the Spratlys. Like the show-down off Crimea this is all "we have a right to transit this bit of sea - how far are you willing to inconvenience us while we do so?". Literal showboating. But this is the first time in modern political history that the UK has had a full-size strike carrier to do this sort of thing with, and it's a major milestone in the reshaping of the RN from its Cold War form of primarily being for catching Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic back to a more expeditionary and global force - the reopening of the base at Jufair, the expansion of the depot at Sembawang and the forward-basing of patrol ships East of Suez. This is all about diplomatic and military credibility, and now the UK wants to be seen as having that again in the Indo-Pacific.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2021 12:21
|
|
|
Bobby Deluxe posted:Presumably blue force were also allowed to edit rules.ini Red force (under Van Riper) basically 'won' by exploiting both loopholes in the computer-based simulated bits of the exercise and the operational constraints of the real-world bits of the exercise, plus some extremely lax oversight by the observers. Due to it not being a real war the USN amphibious landing forces couldn't block civilian shipping lanes with a continuous back-and-forth flow of landing vessels and hovercraft, so the landing ships were placed inshore of the lanes, right in the visual sight of Red Force and within range of their low-tech shore-based missiles, and inside the minimum effective range for the Blue ships' anti-missile systems. In a real conflict all the USN ships would have been many miles way over the horizon. Van Riper's use of motorcycle couriers was unrealistic - he just declared to the observers that he was sending all his orders by courier so there would be no radio traffic to detect or intercept...but continued to send and receive messages at the same rate, speed and reliability as if he was still using radio. The computer simulation let Van Riper mount powerful anti-ship missiles on tiny RHIBs that were, in reality, not physically capable of carrying the missile and its launcher, let alone the targetting and other support equipment. The computer simulation also couldn't cope with the fact that the Blue Force ships were right off Red's coastline - in effect they were seen as occupying the same gridsquare, so the attack boats (with their impossible missile armament) appeared instantaneously amongst the Blue fleet, with no need to cover any distance to approach them and no chance for any close-in weapons to be deployed. It basically made that entire engagement come down to the simulation's outcome dice-roll which (because Van Riper was using an impossible number of impossibly fast boats carrying impossible missiles) ended in disaster for Blue. The 're-setting' of the war game and the re-floating of the sunk fleet is normal - war games aren't mock battles, fought from beginning to end. They're to explore strategies, test ideas and equipment and train units. If the primary purpose of the 14-day exercise is to stage the land-based phase of an amphibious landing against an opposing force and the secondary purpose is to test and train the maritime elements in continued support and supply of the landing force in the days and weeks after the initial landing, that's all rendered pointless if Red Force manages to sink the entire Blue Force on Day 1. They don't just tell the guys on the 'sunk' ships "you're dead now, just chill for the next two weeks". They either 'refloat' the sunk ships or restart the entire exercise taking lessons learnt into account. In the case of MC2002, it was that Red Force was, if not exactly cheating, not playing the part of a useful opposition in the context of the exercise. What a boring post for the top of the page: the Type 83 destroyer is the designation for the Royal Navy's next destroyer class. Presumably it is 1.86 times bigger, better and more British than the the Type 45. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Jun 24, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2021 14:22
|
|
|
Bobby Deluxe posted:Just imagining Van Riper sitting there eating an apple with a poo poo eating grin on his face. He failed - badly - at the job he was given during MC2002, which was to play the role of a conventional opposing force, and his behaviour afterwards was...less than mature. But the reason why he went all Kirk-on-the-Kobayashi-Maru-Test on the exercise was because he felt it was a waste of time. The script (and wargames pretty much are fully plotted-out performances rather than dynamic scenarios, hence why, at a top-end level at least, you're not supposed to play them 'properly') called for Red Force to play the part of a large conventional military with technology and tactics typical of a large Middle Eastern country. Van Riper's point was that the US was never going to fight such a war and that future conflicts involving US ground forces were almost certainly going to be hugely asymmetric but against irregular, unconventional forces that played 'sneaky'. That doesn't excuse him abdicated his role once he assigned it, or rule-lawyering the game to play it the way he thought it should be played and to make his point in public, but by all accounts he didn't do it just for shits and giggles. Guavanaut posted:Lmao When the American Volunteer Group was searching for pilots to go and fight the Japanese in China and Burma (before the US entered WW2 - this was 1940) some of the pilots were told by recruiters that it would be a complete doddle because all Japanese pilots wore spectacles, couldn't fly proper aerobatics due to an inherent lack of inner-ear balance and they couldn't fly at night because they had no night vision. This was the Japanese Army Air Force which had torn through the Chinese Air Force and the Soviet Volunteer Group in eastern China, had firebombed most of the large Chinese cities and was forcing the Chinese government to keep moving its capital city further and further west with a sustained and devastating air campaign.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2021 14:57
|
|
|
Clarence posted:Leader would like a quiet word outside. I've been fascinated by Leader since I was a kid - my Dad had loads of transport-themed cigarette cards that he'd collected when he was a kid (because it was the 50s and there was nothing wrong with tobacco firms hawking promotional products to seven-year olds) and they were framed and hung in the downstairs loo. One of them - in the steam engine collection, in amongst all the normal-looking steam locos - was Leader. The whole thing is just such a bonkers idea, from both an engineering and a project management point of view. Oliver Bulleid was clearly one of these brilliant out-of-the-box thinkers who really needed to have some sort of limit or oversight put on him otherwise he just came out with stuff that was conceptually brilliant but entirely impractical. Leader started off as the Southern Railway board saying "Huh, we need a simple, light steam loco to haul empty coaches in and out of Waterloo because the ones we're currently using are 60 years old - a tank-engine version of the Q1 would be good" and Bulleid takes that suggestion and comes back with a twin-bogie twelve-wheeled...thing...with sleeve valves (a technology that had never previously worked whenever tried on a steam loco), chain drive and that weighed 150 tons. And then - all the more extraordinary - the SR board went "Cool!" and not only agreed to build it but ordered five of them off the drawing board, and then authorised the conversion of an existing loco to trial and develop the sleeve valve technology while the Leaders were actually being built. I assume that the whole thing was either everyone at the SR thinking that, with nationalisation imminent, it would all be someone else's problem so why not let Bulleid try out his crazy scheme, or it was a deliberate gently caress-you to the lefties in Whitehall. .
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2021 12:42
|
|
|
ThomasPaine posted:I saw an old clip from the weakest link from years ago and bloody hell some of the jokes have not aged well at all There was a clip doing the rounds on twitter (maybe ITT as well?) a couple of months ago where Anne Robinson spent a good few minutes just heaping abuse on a contestant because they were a single mum to two teenagers. Robinson basically badgered her into defending her kids because the ' ' ' joke ' ' ' was that they obviously had a string of ASBOs. I didn't watch much Weakest Link when it was on but seeing it now it's shocking how spiteful and insulting the tone was, even if that was just part of the show's gimmick. It was also a horrible insight into a) how the UK has a really lovely attitude to children in general and b) how poo poo so much of the cultural narrative was under New Labour. Obviously, if it's a single mum raising teenagers the mum's going to be a lazy benefits scrounger and the kids are going to be delinquents blitzed out of their minds on alcopops smashing in bus shelters. And that was quality prime-time family viewing.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 28, 2021 23:06
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:As a woman, I always found (and still do) the description of 'smart casual' very confusing. It's this stupid hangover from the days when dress codes were for the upper classes and those that wanted to ape their ways. Proper 'formal' wear (for men) is a morning suit before 6pm and white tie evening dress after 6pm. 'Semi-formal' is a business suit in the day and black tie in the evening. 'Casual wear' was what you wore in the countryside and involved tweed. In this world 'smart casual' meant a blazer, shirt and trousers but not a proper matching suit. The sort of thing you'd wear while travelling betwixt town and country, or when on your yacht at Cowes. And that's not even getting into what the equivalents for the ladies are. But because hardly anyone these days lives their lives like they're in Downton Abbey all these things have taken on different meanings for normal people, where the most formal thing most folk will ever wear is a Moss Bros. suit to a wedding and casual is, well, both really casual and really varied. I suspect it's all wrapped up in classism and a way of belittling people without the insider knowledge or means to play the ephemeral and deliberately flexible rules - "Oh, aren't you a scruffy git because you thought 'smart casual meant new dark blue jeans and a plain polo shirt. It actually means a two-piece suit of non-matching colours with an optional tie! Haw! Haw! Haw!"
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2021 16:18
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/UKLabour/status/1411640934081523718?s=19 It'll be interesting to see how (or, more likely, if) this lands. IIRC the last two Labour manifestos had pretty much exactly the same policy but couched in industrial policy/creating skilled jobs/sustainable growth/social investment terms rather than naked  We're Backing Britain rhetoric.I suspect this will fall into the "why not go for the full-throated patriotic/nationalistic party rather than the one which does it at 7/10s?" hole.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 4, 2021 12:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:35 |
|
|
happyhippy posted:It's a vacuous statement. It is thoroughly vacuous. It would be too much to expect StarmLab to announce policy, announce policy that could be good and do so in a grounded and tangible way. They're on one and a half out of three here, I suppose. OwlFancier posted:I also frankly do not remotely trust a blairitie with the idea of "skilling people up", the country is full of overeducated people stuck in lovely jobs, and if lovely jobs need doing they should still be paid well. This too.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 4, 2021 13:17
|
|