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I was once moved from my assigned seat to a seat further back, because the curtain separator thingy had got stuck, which would have meant the "business" class people wouldn't have been sufficiently screened off from us plebs. One of those Embraer 2+2 planes where business class is just a fancy doily on the headrest and better snacks. Totally pointless.
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Nov 1, 2021 22:18
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Yeah perfect pitch is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a good musician. I can see why it would be helpful though. I seem to have good pitch memory, in that if I think of a song I haven't heard for years (and/or hum it), then play it on iTunes/the piano, I was thinking it in the right key. I could probably use that to fake perfect pitch by deriving from that each time, but 
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Nov 8, 2021 08:34
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Jedit posted:Not an Attakelikopteryx? Was that the druid or the bard?
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Nov 8, 2021 16:00
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Comrade Fakename posted:lol Kathleen Stock has so quickly embraced the "cancelled" talking circuit that she's now part of a new "unwoke" university along with half of the entries in Epstein's little black book: Yeah I went on the FT yesterday - as often stated in the thread, they need to be non-delusional about how the economy actually works to some extent, but that doesn't stop them posting anti-trans "opinion" pieces  - this one defending Stock, won't link here, spoilered for transphobic paraphrasery:The usual bilge of "academic freedom" and "debate", combined with fake-balance of talking to students - notably the author couldn't find a single student who was pro-Stock, so went with "well these student seeeeeeeem to be sincere that they feel unsafe, buuuuuut..." Also a Cambridge professor dude saying "Speech is not a kind of violence; it’s a substitute for violence" which is so naive and simplistic it must be fake. Right...? And she brings up the fact that Stock is essentially the "I am being silenced!!" guy, but handwaves it away because Stock "didn't want that"... On the plus side, whenever I see the Indy pop up on Apple News, it seems to be quite pro-trans. Including reporting the Lorraine Kelly interview you mention in a celebratory way.
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Nov 8, 2021 17:33
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suck my woke dick posted:It's convenient that it's causing trouble for the Tories now, but the whole idea that government is spending a strictly limited amount of tax money is a problem. gently caress the whole idea of government spending having to be restricted because they're spending ~your tax poonds~. Government should spend at least as much as necessary to fulfil the demands we make of it, and IMO should err far on the side of spending too much when it comes to subsidising low income individuals and infrastructure. Corruption isn't bad because it's wasting ~your tax poonds~, it's bad because it causes officials to make decisions which will bite other people in the rear end. Getting people to invert the way they view tax and government spending is hard, but I think this might be the most significant hump to get over. Of course there are right-lolberts who believe that all taxation is theft, and there are socialists and such, but in between those extremes there's a huge mass of floppy centre-ish people who kind of think that earning/having lots of money is fine, but taxing those rich people to pay for a functioning country is a necessary "evil" (or at least a necessary "thing"). This is probably the majority of people in fact. But when you recast taxation of the rich as taking their money and putting in the money shredder, because that much money pooling in those places is bad for the country in general, that crowbar of necessity goes away. And then you have to convince them of a much more abstract necessity of making the money shredder go brrrr. Same as what you're saying, it's easier to phrase "government should spend responsibly because it's your precious money that you donated to the common cause" and have that land, rather than "government should spend responsibly because it's the right thing to do". And "responsibly" takes on different meanings in those two phrasings - "better do austerity" in the former, "not funneling it to their mates' companies, but otherwise keeping it flowing" in the latter. Sadly we're still at the stage where MMT states "money supply isn't constrained by tax revenue, only by inflation and real stuff" and is invariably met with "BUT INFLATION!!! ZIMBABWEIMAR VUVUZELA!!"
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Nov 13, 2021 12:05
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namesake posted:Maybe but we're both demanding to hold state power and the political will to rearrange society as we wish and your vision to inspire the masses to support of you and give you that authority is tweaking the tax code. It's dorky and incredibly limited given the tools you'd need to implement it. MMT has nothing to do with the tax code. It's a framework for understanding that currency-issuing governments aren't constrained by a lack of money, that government spending isn't funded by taxation, that money doesn't "come from" the private sector being all wealth-createy, and that government deficits aren't especially bad, but surpluses are because the government's surplus is the economy's lack of money (by definition). This applies to any political system, from neoliberalism through to mild jam socialism, so long as it uses government-issued money. For the last several decades, claiming the opposite of the above has been used by all governments to justify why we can't have nice things. So understanding how it actually works seems quite valuable in convincing people that better things are, in fact, possible. And on your point about the rich not deserving their wealth, the MMT framing of the purpose of tax is a lot closer to that than the current version, as I mentioned upthread: None of this liberal "well regrettably we must take a (not too big) portion of your wealth to barely fund some shoestring services" - you tax the rich to destroy their money, because it's damaging to society to leave it with them.
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Nov 14, 2021 09:54
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Lady Demelza posted:When the EU referendum was announced back in early 2016, the Irish government assembled committees to work out what it would mean for them if the UK left. When the result came in, they already had an understanding of the problems wih the border, trade, peace etc. The UK, on the other hand, had done no prep at all. Even if our government had put the effort in at that point, we would still have been months behind everyone else and rushing to play catch-up. It was started out weirdly by Pigman calling a referendum where he supported the status quo. Meaning that he didn't make any plans because he didn't want to Brexit, and anything the Leave campaign said didn't count because they weren't in government. He did this twice before of course, with AV and Scottish independence, and got away with it. And I guess instructing the civil service to prepare would have been an admission that leaving the EU was a possibility. And now 5 years later I just paid €7 to pick up an item from the UK worth £15
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Nov 18, 2021 17:33
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happyhippy posted:Just got a mail from Amazon titled 'Ordering on Amazon.co.uk for delivery to Republic of Ireland'. .de? But... I thought you brexited with us?  </Moggsay>
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Nov 18, 2021 19:56
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Spangly A posted:Having a single currency without coherent fiscal or economic policy is insanity, and it is this context that makes the euro bad for everyone else. It's not even a case where you no longer have access to fiscal and monetary tools to use during economic crises, but external powers with de facto seperate markets and different, even conflicting interests are now in charge of these things. Pretty much every necessary monetary tool liberalism has, and several that were planks of the 2017/19 labour manifesto, were simply not options available to Greece, Spain or Italy. See this is where my knowledge runs out - and the otherwise excellent MMT book was mainly about the US and the UK, and kind of casually mentioned the Eurozone as "here's an example of a place that's given up some monetary sovereignty to do a thing, so they can't do the printing thing so much". But given that Spangly A posted:Having a single currency without coherent fiscal or economic policy is insanity but also that having the Eurozone countries go back to having (checks wiki) 18 different currencies again* would be a right pain in the arse, what does this look like? Can it even be done, that level of integration? Does it make sense? Or considering that in the US, which is similarly giant and a currency issuer, even the states are currency users which have to use taxes (and federal money I guess) to pay for things, is my above assertion wrong and countries should have their own currencies for precisely that reason? Economics makes my head hurt. *I'm assuming Luxembourg and Belgium will revert to sharing a currency, even if the shops further away from the border in Belgium get funny about accepting coins with the Grand Duke's head on
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Nov 20, 2021 16:50
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A small amount of incumbency fatigue (which will be reported by the Guardian as "I'd like to see Boris/nu-Boris wriggle his way out of betraying the red wall") will be more than offset by the utter enthusiasm-sapping of Mr Stamper
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Nov 21, 2021 21:37
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E: nah, shoving that back down where it belongs
Bobstar fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Nov 22, 2021 |
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Nov 22, 2021 19:33
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https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/nov/24/harpers-law-will-not-be-retrospective-says-dominic-raab Laws named after people are bad, take 73. quote:A new law that will bring in mandatory life sentence for offenders who kill emergency services workers while committing crimes will not be retrospective, Dominic Raab has said. It's worrying that this needs to be stated quote:Lissie Harper said: “Emergency services workers require extra protection. I know all too well how they are put at risk and into the depths of danger on a regular basis on behalf of society. That protection is what Harper’s law will provide, and I am delighted that it will soon become a reality.” Harsher sentences, famous for stopping people doing things I wonder if she knows that "life sentence" doesn't mean that they would literally be locked up forever until they die. Even if she does, most people who like this law probably don't.
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Nov 24, 2021 19:14
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So what I'm hearing is that Insulate Britain shouldn't be allowed to exist without a counterpart group called Ventilate Britain?
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Nov 27, 2021 16:40
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Much as I love the APT, it's not fixing the same problem as HS2. Even if you could wave a magic wand and make us have trains capable of doing 300mph on the WCML, it still wouldn't much improve travel times because the line itself, despite being quad-track for almost all of the way, has no more capacity. Our magic trains would still be stuck behind stopping services and freight trains (a huge amount of freight is moved up that line, given it connects the capital (and Europe) to almost all of our manufacturing industries). Reminds me of the thing I saw ages ago, about how if everyone stood on both sides of the escalator on the tube, it would increase throughput so everyone's time from platform to street would be faster. But good luck convincing the walkers of that, since the time from escalator bottom to top would feel much slower.
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Nov 27, 2021 21:03
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Bobby Deluxe posted:But the comment sections of any article about the crisps girl are inevitably populated by either people calling her mum a bad parent and saying she should be taken into care, or bald nutcases raging about how she should be beaten. Ugh, as soon as I saw the crisp story I knew people would react like that Your wife sounds like me, and yes patience and absence of mockery are far more helpful than the median reaction (to either adults or children)
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Nov 27, 2021 22:34
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Guav beat me to the left-handed graph, so I'll mention instead something I saw on twitter as a response to the "millennials these days with their food "intolerances", never existed in my day urgle burgle" - have you ever read a book about posh people from the olden days? They're always going on about their "digestion" and how they feel "bilious" after eating. Bertie Wooster's uncle has a tempremental French chef whose cooking is the only thing that soothes his digestion (and the nouveau-riche Northern magazine magnate can't stomach it and spends the whole story in agony). Or old colonels having a touch of "bad liver". Or the trope of wives telling their husbands they don't like food X, it angers their spleen or whatever. There must have been loads of lactose intolerant people who drank milk all their lives, while complaining about their digestion, without ever putting 2 and 2 together (and also people who did figure it out because people weren't stupid just because it was the olden days). And I guess coeliacs just died of ruined intestine (recorded cause of death: vapour lock)
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Nov 28, 2021 10:52
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Ok I have chosen my news paragraph to send back in time 10 years to baffle the past-usses:
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Nov 30, 2021 10:46
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 02:41 |
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Barry Foster posted:that isn't how immune systems work Ugh, fine. Everyone's Euler system has had 18 months off. Guavanaut posted:Lib Dems to announce a skills wallet to train in interacting with two ping pong balls on a mop handle like CG movie actors.  Bobstar fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Nov 30, 2021 |
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Nov 30, 2021 16:10
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