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Do you prefer the extended summer thread format? This poll is closed. |
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| Yes |
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126 | 44.21% |
| No |
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39 | 13.68% |
| I'm Scottish |
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120 | 42.11% |
| Total: | 285 votes | ||
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Nonsense posted:Thank a veteran. 
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Jun 1, 2021 01:43
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Guavanaut posted:WHO has adopted a new naming convention for the virus it'll be interesting to see which outlets follow it and when. Here's praying we never get to Ligma.
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Jun 1, 2021 12:25
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crispix posted:what's the little house? About £1200 a month in London.
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Jun 1, 2021 12:29
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OwlFancier posted:My kingdom for a very precise meteor strike, or possibly a big hailstone. I wonder how big a catapult you'd need to get a spark plug cap into the bottom of that from ground level.
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Jun 1, 2021 17:50
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Gyro Zeppeli posted:Welcome to London, 47. That's a lot of toilets to be looking after. I was right in the last generation where spamming out CVs in person was an even vaguely plausible route to a job (left school in 91, just in time for the massive global recession which nobody seems to remember) but the funny thing is my Dad - who *had* got every job he'd ever had by just walking up to the foreman and telling outrageous lies about his abilities and experience - never once pressured me to do so. I did, at my Mum's insistence, go hand out CVs to every shop on Tottenham Court Road (electronics retail being the only job I had actual experience in, or at least experience I was willing to put in writing) once, until she realised it had - between tube fare and photocopying charges - cost her almost a quarter of the fortnight's Family Allowance she was still getting for me, so it was back to ringing the least-obviously-an-MLM-or-people-smuggling-ring jobs in Loot every couple of days. This did at least get me quite a bit of work of varying degrees of interest and legality from kitchen portering to Christmas present wrapping to assisting a semi-famous pornographer, and meant that I had a 5-page CV by the time I actually got a regular job 2 years later. I think in a lot of ways that I've been spectacularly lucky since then - I've only actually applied for jobs 6 or 7 times in the intervening decades and been offered every one (apart from my current one, which I failed the interview for, despite having been the only applicant, to a job I'd written the job description for, and which I'd actually been doing for over a year. Of course all I then needed to do was threaten to *stop* doing the job and all of a sudden I was suitable again)
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Jun 1, 2021 20:52
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smellmycheese posted:Any chance we could stop the racist stereotyping of Northern Irish people as angry, violent simpletons? Sorry but according to Arlene Foster NI is irrevocably part of the UK and so its people are every bit as angry, violent and stupid as the people on the mainland. (Also the only person doing that is actually from NI and I think we're all in on the joke so maybe wind your neck in?)
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Jun 1, 2021 20:55
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OwlFancier posted:I assume "pornographer's assistant" went right at the top of the CV. It went to the top of *some* CVs, albeit with a little modification. So when I applied for a job with Canon customer service it became "Responsible for setup, care, maintenance, and upkeep of multiple lighting, camera and lens setups", and when I applied to Future Publishing it became "Cataloguing and indexing images from over 200 photo shoots", none of which mentioned that the cameras and the shoots were for magazines like Shaven Ravers, Fat and 50, and (when I was lucky) Fiesta. (Incidentally if I do have *one* bit of advice for jobseekers it's that - tweak your CV to the job you're applying for, even if it's just a matter of making sure the keywords in the ad appear in the CV)
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Jun 1, 2021 21:03
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:What on earth went wrong for them not to offer you the job?! Couple of factors, the main one being my own arrogance in assuming I'd get the job so at the interview stupidly I gave honest answers instead of the ones they wanted to hear. I have to admit, with a few more years of wisdom on me, that *I* wouldn't have given me the job on my showing in that interview. It's a fairly responsible role and I went in with a bit too much attitude - and given that, for me, the most important thing I can do is shield my staff from the bullshit of upper management* then I *have* to be able to play upper management at their own game, rather than trying to pretend they don't exist. * It is quite hilarious that I occasionally get complaints from my guys about how I don't appear to do any actual work which is... reasonable, but then if I go on holiday and they have to sit in on strategy and project meetings I don't hear any more complaints for another few months.
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Jun 1, 2021 21:47
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OwlFancier posted:I always assumed you didn't have a day job and just robbed banks on a motorcycle to fund your purchase of esoteric texts on london history or something. No money in bank jobs any more. Like literally, banks keep so little cash on hand these days thanks to plastic that you'd never be able to even make back the money on the stockings over your head, let alone the shootah. No, the bank job has gone the way of the payroll blag and the cash-in-transit robbery, victims of modern society, leaving the traditional Cockney way of life untenable and forcing us down the Trail of Tears that is the District Line to the reservations at Upminster. (Actaully I do remember reading once that even in their heyday, bank robbers didn't actually make *that* much money unless they happened to get particularly lucky - like turning over a bank might get you a ten or twenty grand but of course you had to then launder that or at least spend it slowly and inconspicuously so you ended up really no better off than you would have been actually working behind the counter in the bank)
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Jun 1, 2021 22:01
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Necrothatcher posted:Isn't this basically Zyklon-B? In a way (in that it produces hydrogen cyanide), yes, but Zyklon-B was basically just cyanide locked up in diatomaceous earth (cat litter), while American prison gas chambers work by dropping potassium cyanide (which can be safely handled, if kept dry) down a chute into a bowl of sulphuric acid, generating hydrogen cyanide. The caustic soda is used to neutralise the acid so it can be removed, not sure what the other ingredient is for (hydrogen cyanide gas can be safely neutralised with a bleach spray). Guavanaut posted:I've know people try that one with natural gas. Someone doing that is apparently part of tort law (and also the surrounding landscape).
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Jun 1, 2021 23:37
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Julio Cruz posted:were you a stuntcock? because this really sounds like you were a stuntcock Lol no, this was 90s print porn in the UK. There were no cocks - in fact anything even vaguely phallic - had to be below the horizontal and maintain a clear distance from lady bits*. That below the horizontal isn't a joke, by the way - the Sunday Sport had to pay a fine for publishing an advert for dildos that showed them pointing upwards. This was enough, under the extremely weird standards of the time, to qualify as an obscene publication, something that Graham Norton used to have a lot of fun with in his early standup - IIRC he was the first person in British television history to show a dildo pointing upwards a few years later. Footnotes spoilered for rather  content but only text. * Okay there were cocks of course, gay porn existed, but they had to be flaccid. Weirdly there were a couple of magazines - Whitehouse in particular - that specialised in "straight" scenes showing men and women in all of the positions that porn could imagine but with determinedly flaccid cocks (and dry vaginas for that matter**). I have absolutely no idea to whom this was supposed to appeal, but I do remember, when I first encountered them as a spotty youth, being *astonished* by the idea that it was possible not to have an erection when even being in the same room as a naked woman, let alone while three of them kneeled in front of you. ** So the rules were slightly different for print and video because they were handled by different laws, but basically the interpretation of "obscene" used for print from about the mid 70s up to the early 00s was anything that showed "visible sexual stimulation", which could be interpreted as either a verb or an adjective - i.e. you couldn't show either someone who was notably stimulated *or* doing something - or having something done to them - that was sexually stimulating. Obviously this completely excluded all penetration straight away*** but also erections - or even mild tumescence - was gone too, and even suggesting such a thing - by, say, holding a flaccid member upright, or like I say showing a dildo (realistic or not) above horizontal was out of the question too (there was a rumour this particular rule came about because of strap-ons, no idea if that's true or not). Of course being Britain the ways this was enforced got weird really, really quickly. A woman touching a flaccid cock? Fine. A man touching his own flaccid cock? FORBIDDEN. A woman touching her own vulva? Permitted. A man touching it? FORBIDDEN. A woman holding her vulva open? FORBIDDEN. A woman using her hands on her inner thighs to open her vulva? Permitted *but only if her arms crossed*, so her left hand was on her right thigh and vice versa. This was the weirdest of them all (and actually became known as "The British Pose" around the world - seriously like the FedEx arrow once you notice it in vintage porn you'll never stop noticing it). There was also stuff like if there *was* a dildo in the scene, regardless of angle, it couldn't be pointed directly at the vagina (and in those Big Muff Days that could be a tricky target to miss). Strangely they were absolutely fine with erect nipples being touched by either party and even showing stimulation. To be honest it's a miracle we as a nation aren't way, way more hosed up than we are. *** Weirdly penetration *was* allowed in R18 videos from the mid 90s, but it's still not officially allowed in print porn in the UK unless it's sold from a licensed sex shop. Sex shops could sell imported hardcore porn mags from the late 80s, but had to censor them with stickers to cover anything described above - and yes, some did try selling them with low-tack adhesive so they could be uncensored easily and promptly got prosecuted. Bill Hicks does an amazing bit about this particularly strange era in British porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzjr2Dfa8lg
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Jun 2, 2021 00:56
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Ms Adequate posted:it's gettin too 'ot like Assuming this isn't a reaction to my porn-free-porn post, Screwfix have got that portable air conditioner I've been telling you all about back in stock: https://www.screwfix.com/p/goodhome-takoma-mobile-air-conditioner/551hv#_=p although the price has gone up since last year.
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Jun 2, 2021 01:18
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Niric posted:Viz presents, Goddamned Twisto: pornographer's assistant Is there a word - perhaps German - for the combination of flattery and extreme concern I'm currently feeling?
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Jun 2, 2021 10:00
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Here's a bit of British military history I feel like this thread should be able to be proud of: https://twitter.com/TheDreadShips/status/1400042355860852741
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Jun 2, 2021 12:11
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nurmie posted:i'm a bit late, but this is great! thank you for making this Basically completely gave up on even *pretending* to appeal to/represent people outside of large cities, something that I should be allowed to tattoo on the face of every single person who tries telling me Blair et. al. have some special prole-whispering wisdom. New Labour strategy was pretty clear - rebuild their voter base by appealing to the aspirational working and lower-middle class in London, rely on the non-London working class and ethnic minorities (primarily concentrated in the cities of course) having nowhere else to go. Brexit only accelerated the attrition of those traditional heartlands - had nothing been changed they'd have gone blue just through sheer apathy within a decade or so anyway.
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Jun 2, 2021 15:34
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ThomasPaine posted:I wonder how geography has actually shaped the vaccine rollout. I would imagine Pfizer in particular is essentially not viable to distribute to small rural communities like the Western Isles because the nearest big hospital is hours away and what village clinic has the facilities to store things at -70c for any length of time? IIRC it's safe if kept in a conventional (-18) freezer for 24 hours.
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Jun 2, 2021 18:26
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feedmegin posted:This is definitely regional because over here in East London both my wife and I had a three week wait from booking. I was able to book next day at Excel when I missed my original second dose appointment thanks to  electrics. However this is a bit of a concern, especially when I got there and there was basically no queue and it was only running at quarter-capacity. A big part of this is probably because they're only sporadically doing Pfizer, which is loving stupid given it's within a 20 minute DLR trip of like 300K people under 30.
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Jun 2, 2021 20:50
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:So if they drop the gap between shots and I've already booked my second jab, is it possible to book a different date? Yes, but you have to cancel your original appointment with no real way of knowing if there are closer slots, which adds a certain frisson to things. Also my (13 year old) nephew is showing symptoms and has a positive lateral flow test, hoo-loving-ray. His entire family have been fanatical about distancing and precautions for over a year, but nice weather plus teenagers and that's all out the window.
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Jun 2, 2021 21:34
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Don't know where he is, but this is going on in Bristol: East London, we've been surge testing for it all week anyway.
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Jun 2, 2021 22:02
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This account is legitimately fascinating because it's both a very sophisticated bot but also the most absolutely obvious bot I've ever seen. It's sophisticated in that it's doing an extremely good job in selecting an organic mix of stories to signal-boost, really exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from a fubpee account - none of the tell-tale sudden bursts of "campaign" activity, no "Hi I'm someone in the UK who is suddenly extremely interested in this obscure local politics story from Australia", posts at a reasonable pace and pattern (humans never post on a regular schedule, you get bursts of activity), even a couple of "regionalised" posts that suggest they're a real person. Even the name feels authentic. However whoever's running it is also making the most completely obvious bot-tell mistakes. I mean first of all, joined last month and has a #FBPE screen name? Seriously? Literally no engagement - the account has *never* posted a reply. Hashtagging random words is a big giveaway, at least for someone claiming to be a young woman (boomers loving love doing that poo poo though). Weirdest of all are the posts that are very obviously "Paste headline of story" ones, complete with an image from the story... but no URL for it. Like that would actually take a lot more effort to do, either as a human *or as a bot*, than just pasting the URL. Biggest tell though? A fubpee account that's never once mentioned Corbyn. This post I think gives the game away because it's so specific; randomly searching text from its other tweets reveals that it's actually copying the text and images from random UK centrist and "soft-left" high-follower accounts. What I can't get my head around is *why* it's doing this. As an attempt at legend-building it's like wearing one of those Mission Impossible rubber masks but leaving your MI nametag on as you infiltrate the enemy base - a huge amount of effort to pass one particular sub-Turing test, but absolutely none whatsoever to pass any of the others. Also that stripping the URL quirk is *incredibly* weird. I could understand doing that if you were trying to build a corpus to train a bot to talk like a fubpee (and *there's* a techno-ethics question for the ages, surely such a thing counts as cruelty to an artificial life form) but it just makes absolutely no sense if you're then going to go to the effort of putting the image card in. I assume this is actually just some sort of trial run thing, testing ways of avoiding Twitters bot-detection, and the lessons learned will be used in other accounts later, it's just interesting to catch this sort of thing in the wild.
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Jun 3, 2021 08:09
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https://twitter.com/IoDThenAndNow/status/1400325058464190465 The past really is another country.
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Jun 3, 2021 08:34
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a pipe smoking dog posted:What the gently caress is going on with starmers hand? He's doing the Reeves Mating Dance:  Just another part of the long-term "Please god make it be the 90s again" thing they've got going on.
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Jun 3, 2021 14:15
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Crankit posted:Did you guys figure out how to minmax the vax yet? I thought somewhere on the forums I saw someone saying the policy on 2nd vax timing was changed, so should I be cancelling the appointment I have and rebooking to get an earlier one? Depends. There's evidence that the AZ vaccine gives the best effect with a second dose at 11-12 weeks, while the Pfizer doesn't seem to change much at all with the timing of the second dose. Bear in mind in all cases that it takes around 2 weeks for the immunity to fully kick in. So if you've had Pfizer first dose, and you're more than two weeks out from your second, I'd go ahead and cancel and rebook (2 weeks is the very longest wait I've ever head of for a Pfizer dose but you might have to hunt around for a really short notice one - it's annoying as hell that the website makes you pick a site then a date rather than giving you a choice of sites on a given date). If you're less than two weeks out from Pfizer second dose and very confident that you would be able to get a quicker appointment (local FB groups are handy for that sort of info) and really want maximum immunity on the shortest timeline, again, go ahead and do it. If you're on AZ I'd go ahead and just wait for the pre-booked second dose *unless* you're in a hotspot or at particular risk (i.e. the equation is, if your second jab is four weeks away, would you rather have 70% immunity in two weeks, or four weeks of 50% immunity but 85% immunity in six weeks - the actual numbers are different, this is just for illustration). As always, big disclaimer that I'm not a doctor, virologist, or even particularly smart, and you probably shouldn't be getting medical advice from someone with a name like goddamnedtwisto on a website most famous for Slenderman.
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Jun 3, 2021 18:34
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multijoe posted:I'm curious how things will look once the 90ish% of the population who want the vaccine are fully dosed, will it wither away from herd immunity or will it be obnoxiously infectious to the point it can still tag enough of the unvaccinated and breakthrough cases? Think of vaccination as very, very effective social distancing. When vaccinated you are as likely to catch it from an infected person a foot away as you were to catch it from someone 30 feet away (made up number but you get the idea). That's what herd immunity is - the probability that one infected person can infect another person drops so low that eventually it becomes a rounding error. Like TB it'll no doubt continue to lurk in the very poorest communities and wreak havoc periodically; the big unknown is still a) if there is a viable mutation of it that is still infectious *and* dangerous that can evade the vaccines enough to counteract that* and b) how long it'll take for that mutation to emerge and how quickly we'll recognise and move against it. * It's looking cautiously hopeful on this front, because both the mRNA and AZ vaccines target specific bits of the spike that are believed to be essential for the virus to actually infect a cell, which is the big advantage of these types of vaccines over traditional vaccines** - in other words in order to evade the vaccines the virus will have to mutate to such a point that it's considerably less infectious and/or dangerous, but at this point that's not proven. ** Think of it this way. A traditional vaccine, using a deactivated or attentuated pathogen, trains your system to attack the entire virus but mRNA and modified-virus vaccines - through different pathways - train your body to attack very specific, small parts of the virus. Now at first glance that seems a much easier type of vaccine to evade - after all surely all it needs to do is change those small bits and it's through. However by *only* targeting those very small bits, if they're carefully chosen, it actually considerably reduces the chance of a dangerous mutation. Let's say you wanted to train your immune system to attack my posts. Now of course you could choose to block only on my username, or maybe my avi/red text - but I can change those at will and my posts remain just as poo poo. You could choose to block this entire wall of text, but all I need to do is change a few words and I'm through. Train your system to attack only dangling participles, unclosed parentheticals, and of course really badly shoehorned-in rule-of-three lists, and the only way I can evade your block is to actually become a good poster.
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Jun 3, 2021 21:19
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Guavanaut posted:A delta variant to kill a few thousand people in a month has precedent I've said it before and I'll say it again, gently caress a Royal Yacht, we need a passenger-carrying Vulcan to rock up to trade talks in. Buzz it around while they're talking, and casually drop in "Yeah we were doing that poo poo in the 1950s, imagine what we've got now" (while frantically hoping they don't look into it any further, if only to make the noise stop).
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Jun 3, 2021 21:40
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Oh dear me posted:They will never bring back workhouses. That would involve the state housing people. Have you considered Serco workhouses?
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Jun 4, 2021 16:54
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crispix posted:pfizer vaccine gave me a special headache that felt like a spike going down the top of my head I've had a recurring headache like that for most of my adult life (or rather it's recurred throughout my adult life but only once every couple of months for a couple of hours at the time) - in fact it feels *specifically* like a pick going in the top of my head and curving around to come out under my right eye. With a long and undistinguished family history of strokes and aneurysms, and the "entry wound" being very close to a nice big divot in my skull courtesy of a knee to the head in a rugby match, it's always terrified me but nothing ever showed up on the MRIs I had. Now thanks to Covid, or rather regular Covid testing and a slightly misplaced swab causing that *exact* pain, I now know it's just one of my sinuses being annoying. Apparently it's a pretty common thing, at least according to a nurse I was chatting to about it.
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Jun 4, 2021 19:24
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Failed Imagineer posted:Yeah as soon as you described the path of the pain I knew it was a sinus thing. Probably correlates with barometric pressure to some extent. I wonder if there's exploratory surgery you can get to unblock some poo poo in there Funny you should mention pressure because it does sometimes come on when a thunderstorm is on the way (although that's probably selection bias, particularly as it's never been an issue with flying or even going up in tall buildings which give a much quicker drop to a much lower pressure). As it is, it's only a minor annoyance that goes away with a couple of paracetamol, but thanks for the advice.
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Jun 4, 2021 20:09
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ThomasPaine posted:We really do live in the stupidest country don't we Yeah, the Remain fleet showed a complete lack of discipline, failed to form a proper line of battle, let their main formation get alee of the UKIP fleet, and failed to use the Momentum squadron as either distraction or a boarding/pell-mell force to break up the UKIP line. It's no wonder the country is in the state it's in, poor Nelson must be turning in his grave.
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Jun 5, 2021 12:02
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:But isn't that how we defeated the Spanish Main with whatsizface Drake? - can't be assed to google - playing bowls on Plymouth Ho or whatever it was, by having speedy little boats nipping in and out in a seemingly disorganized manner instead of the more disciplined Spanish galleons? Drake refused to fully engage with the Spanish as they traversed the Channel because they were both outnumbered him and were more heavily-armed and had loads of troops on board, so a close-range battle would have been a slaughter. Instead he waited until they anchored at Dunkirk and sent in fireships to break up the formation, allowing 2 or 3 English ships to ambush individual Spanish ships - the English, being mostly Now personally if I were in charge of the Remain forces, once I realised I'd lost the gage, I'd have sent the Momentum flotilla in close to the rear of the UKIP squadron, enraging the fishermen - presumably both the best sailors and best fighters in the UKIP line - and hopefully pulling them away, then sent my main force into a reverse crossing-the-T on the UKIP van and forced them into a boarding battle - I'm certain Geldof and Church could take Farage and Hoey without breaking a sweat. Much like at Trafalgar the idea is to let chaos and entropy do a lot of the work for you.
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Jun 5, 2021 12:31
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Azza Bamboo posted:I'd have hidden the momentum flotilla in Poplar Dock and formed a feigned retreat into Blackwell Basin with the remain boats, to try and lure the kippers into Blackwell Basin. Once they're in, turn the remain flotilla around and get the momentum flotilla to emerge from Poplar dock at the sides. Listen I defended you over the Starmer thing but I warn you now, if you get London geography, hydrography, or particularly docks wrong one more time I will run you out of here like a common pygmy.
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Jun 5, 2021 15:46
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Long live the King Singers.
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Jun 5, 2021 17:43
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Jakabite posted:Hey twisto I meant to ask you actually, I’m back in London for a few days and wanted to do some good touristy stuff but maybe off the beaten track? My partner loves east London history and I know that’s your thing so anything to do with modern (last couple hundred years or so) east end history that you wouldn’t find online easily would be wicked. We like macabre stuff too, anything a little subterranean, generally ghoulish things. Well of course until about 1750 East End history was basically "This is a field", so it's all relatively modern. Off the top of my head, not all of them may be open when you're here: Macabre stuff: - https://www.bartshealth.nhs.uk/rlhmuseum - London Hospital museum, Elephant Man bones and surgical implements - Any of the half a dozen Jack The Ripper walking tours while you're in the area (not my thing so can't really recommend one over the other) - https://secretnuclearbunker.com/ - A little outside London (but still accessible by public transport, car's easier though) - if you're a fan of that particularly impersonal horror of the Cold War this is the place for you East end history: - https://www.thebrunelmuseum.com/ - Brunel Museum, not very macabre but very definitely underground. - http://www.eastendwalks.com/?page_id=2 - any of David Rosenberg's walks are right up this thread's street (pun intended) Also keep an eye on https://www.ideastore.co.uk/local-history-whats-on for Tower Hamlets local history exhibitions and https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/calendar/ for all sorts of interesting little exhibitions, talks and so on.
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Jun 5, 2021 18:39
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Beefeater1980 posted:I mean, it was both really, otherwise all the English ships would have been sunk in the storms too. Not really, they stopped chasing once they were at Scotland and turned back. They didn't have enough ammo to press home an attack and they just wanted to make sure the Spanish weren't going to suddenly sneak back to the Channel or attempt to seize a North Sea port, and once they were happy they weren't they all went back for prizes, medals and typhus (the other thing nobody mentions about the Armada is the undoubted winner of the engagement in terms of body count was typhus and other infectious diseases - at least 5,000 English soldiers died of typhus compared to around a hundred in actual combat)
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Jun 6, 2021 08:35
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DesperateDan posted:The detective originally on the case wrote a book based on the case files called the truth of the lie that goes through what's known- it's available for free and is well worth a read. One thing that's always stuck with me was a documentary about the Shannon Matthews disappearance where the detective in charge said that in missing children cases they always give the opportunity to the parent(s) to make an on-screen appeal and almost inevitably the more willing they are to appear on television to ask for the return of their child the more likely they are to - at the very least - have considerably more knowledge of the circumstances of the disappearance than they're letting on. Given the disappearance happened around the same time as, and the documentary was being filmed a year after, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann I can't help but think him putting it in this way was very, very intentional.
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Jun 6, 2021 14:56
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thespaceinvader posted:Either way, the thing i really want to know is where the impulse to constantly loving report on it comes from. Taken at face value the story - child spirited away while on holiday - hits a lot of fear-titillation buttons in people's brains, and the critical mass of coverage it reached over both that and other interpretations of the story means it will always be "news" if you can get even the most tenuous new information out of it. Although they'd be quick to blame the readers for driving the demand, it's 100% on the editors here.
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Jun 6, 2021 17:56
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Gort posted:I always thought medals and titles for the highest taxpayers each year would be a good way to incentivise paying taxes among the richest given that taxes are basically voluntary for them It would probably be a less broken way of selecting people to get into the House of Lords than the current one. For political balance though half of the intake are selected from the people with the lowest incomes in the country.
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Jun 7, 2021 09:13
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The Question IRL posted:While it won't harm her career, there is a certain satisfaction to be gained from watching people be aquited because she couldn't keep her mouth shut. It's paywalled and as it's the Indy it's not even worth the effort of working round that - what do they claim the problem is? The Home Secretary is responsible for policing - as long as they don't have her on record giving ordering them to do illegal things then there's not any actual legal problem, surely?
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Jun 7, 2021 23:55
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Guavanaut posted:It'd be interesting if cultivated banana trees were able to grow properly locally, I was always told that way back when you could get them much bigger if you don't have to pull them early to ship them around everywhere (back to Nigel Farage banana havers in Kent), but the modern bananas are all Cavendish strains, neither the extremely sweet Gros Michel colonial cultivars nor the extremely starchy Indonesian plantains. Also of course edible bananas are never going to grow wild because they've been bred to be completely seedless - theoretically every banana in the world is a clone of one that was in Kew Gardens during the war. This is also why we don't have Gros Michel any more - the extremely low level of genetic diversity means that when a disease came along that killed them, they just all died. (Apparently that generic banana artificial flavour that tastes basically nothing like bananas *does* taste a lot like Gros Michel - maybe sprinkle some of it on your normal banana if you want that hit?)
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Jun 8, 2021 08:09
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OwlFancier posted:If you think there is something about society that causes unfathomable collapse of children's brains if they don't go to school then perhaps that is an indictment of that society rather than an argument for school. It sort of is. Kids don't socialise anywhere near as much as they used to, for a multitude of reasons - communities are more atomised of course, lack of public space and activities, wariness (justified or not) of the outside world generally - that all pretty much come back to the fact we've spent four decades reshaping society into something that serves only Number. For many kids school is about the only place where they get proper socialisation (and physical activity). For a better part of a year they've been reduced to purely online interaction and basically no exercise - we've bred The Goon Generation.
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Jun 8, 2021 11:04
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