Youtube hearted comments of (@EbenBransome).

  1. This is the kind of video that makes YouTube worthwhile.
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  2. A university friend got a job oop North when he graduated and needed transport. He saw one of these advertised for £90 - he wasn't a car person but he was poor, it was low mileage and he went to take a look. It really was owned by an old lady whose husband had died and she only took it to the shops etc., always garaged. No signs of rust. He bought it and, as you do, decided to go to Scotland on holiday. Where it started to overheat. A farmer stopped to investigate and suggested it might be blocked radiator. He was lent a bucket, and started to drain and flush the system. Vast quantities of sludge came out. When it ran clear he filled it with burn water, and it then ran perfectly. He eventually sold it for a lot more than he paid for it, because the insurance was expensive and he needed to raise the deposit for a house.
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  3. Farage's brilliance or the determination of the media to push someone who creates loads of clickbait?
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  4. Mrs. Tice just shows how far the Times has deteriorated.
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  5. Bevel gear drives were very common before and during WW2 but by the end of the war, pushrods had been made light enough to be competitive even for light racing use. As you rightly say, the eccentric drive does depend on consistent centre distance, however it can be improved by moving the driving gear off to one side and allowing for a little up and down movement in the bottom anchorage for the distance piece. Bentley used an eccentric drive with three eccentrics at 120 degrees which is just about the ideal but expensive. However, the bearings of the rods do wear and are much more expensive than replacing a chain or belt. Steam engine eccentric drives had means to adjust the centres of the straps on larger engines, quite impracticable for the enclosed straps and bearings on a car or bike engine.
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  6. There's a lady named Esther McVey Who has nothing important to say. She has nothing to lose By upsetting some Jews But offend Big Tobacco - no way!
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  7. Actual marine architects have already analysed this, and put forward credible explanations based on the design of the yacht and conditions in the Med as to why the boat sunk and why the crew almost all survived. There's no need for conspiracy theories. So far, the only credible criticism levelled at the captain is that perhaps he should have got the passengers on deck as soon as he was aware of the storm severity - but under those conditions there may not have been time. As one sailor said, most of the time things happen on boats quite slowly but when they go wrong they can go wrong extremely fast. One of the saddest things about this for me is all the people complaining about excessive publicity being given to the sinking. They probably just have no idea how important Lynch was in the computing world. We always seem to know the names of American equivalents but not British ones. They also probably have no idea that when a San Francisco academic disappeared on his small boat in the Bay, the search and rescue attempts were also very large and were funded by the computing industry in the area. It was all over the computing and IT press - but the mass media weren't interested because there was no "exciting" background story.
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  8. The latest claim about Teslas (they are being sued) is that the odometer exaggerates as the mileage approaches the warranty limit. Someone is claiming that theirs went from 27000 to 40000 miles while he drove only 6000. Add the faked range estimates on early models, bits falling off Cybertrucks, and the horrible lack of ergonomics, and the temptation is to say that anybody silly enough to buy one is in the Range Rover/Porsche Cayenne world of unrealism. However, in fairness, quite a lot of US "trucks" now have plastic sumps and are only one rock on the road away from total inability to sustain usual performance. There are YouTube videos...
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  9. This is just anecdote but: 18 houses in our road. 5 EVs. All 2022 or newer 1 Mokka (Opel) 1 Honda 1 MG4 1 Hyundai 1 BMW i40 (new last December, replaced Audi EV) No Teslas. One other guy has 2 Porsches (petrol). Saw our first BYD in town today. For our next EV in a year or so, we have a lot of choice - Renault, variety of Stellantis, Honda. I think we've seen Peak Tesla, and the Cybertruck was actually the first nail in the coffin.
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  10. This is a very good demonstration of how to lie with statistics. I mean, I learnt all this for A level statistics but you did it much more amusingly than our teacher did. Incidentally with things like sales, house prices etc., average is a crap way of doing it. (e.g. if one house in the street sells for a million and the other for £100000, the average is £550k but there are no houses at that price.) The correct statistic is the median, the middle value, the time at which half the cars had sold by. Using averages is already a sign of bogusity.
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  11. Vance's military career reminds me of a story I was told by an RAF officer about a NATO meeting in the mid-90s when a couple of Slovenians had come as observers. At the last night party they were asked "What do you think? Could the Soviet Union have defeated NATO?" "Oh yes," said one of them, "They'd have been in Frankfurt before you'd finished showing one another PowerPoints." And then there was the guy who remarked that the reason the US lost in Vietnam was that they couldn't work out how to air condition the jungle.
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  12. Soon to be twinned with Waterlooville and Clacton?
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  13. Jolly clever as there aren't any stars 32 million miles away or we'd be in real trouble.
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  14. So long as Farage also reveals the sources of all his funding over the years, I see no problem. (So long as Hansard has a few people who can write Cyrillic script, anyway.)
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  15. At the moment speculation, especially by non-experts who are not in possession of the facts, is just idle conspiracy theory of the worst kind.
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  16. The back end reminds me of one of those rear engined air cooled V8 Tatras, in a good way. (If Porsche had stolen even more of Tatra in WW2, that might have been how the 911 went.) By the way who needs a boot? Your valet is following with the luggage.
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  17. The term "crashed the economy" is not a technical one and so cannot be technically incorrect. I hope Starmer will respond by simply requiring all Labour politicians including himself not to refer to her again on the basis that she is a private citizen with no role, under the GDPR. She'd love that.
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  18. I am white middle class. I've heard so many horror stories about the Met, including from police officers in Hertfordshire and Somerset, that I really wouldn't want to live in their area. It used to be that the big gangs would ensure some of the families stayed out of trouble so their sons could join the Met, and they didn't do it out of a desire to make the streets safer. The Stephen Lawrence case is a good example. The problem for the police is that the many good and honourable officers have to stay quiet because the dishonest ones know how to fit them up if they rock the boat.
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  19. Fines by OFCOM should reflect the assets of the owners of media. When the EU goes for e.g. monopolists they don't just waggle their fingers. If Marshall can afford £100 million to buy The Spectator, an appropriate fine for ignoring broadcasting rules should be £millions. Because £100 000 is probably what he spends on a private jet flight to his mates in Dubai.
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  20. I suspect a lot of it depends on where you live. If there are plenty of charging points, you have a driveway, and solar panels, it's a no-brainer. If you live in a terrace with on street parking only, street chargers that deliver about 1.4kW and you have to visit a fast charge station frequently, not a good idea. Most people are not electrical engineers and didn't understand that. Back in the 2000s boom, a lot of people bought narrowboats. They seemed to imagine they were a kind of water caravan. A lot of them lost a lot of money then, too, along with the people who bought RVs. We had an office near a place that sold them, and they were sitting in the yard in some cases for years with the asking price slowly dropping. The yard wasn't run by idiots; they didn't buy them in, they hired out a yard space to the owners. Falling prices didn't worry them. There's lots of status obsessed mugs.
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  21. Remind me which government was in power when Widdecombe was an MP? Which government walked away from our international treaties (read Boris Johnson's housemaster's letter about him - it says it all)? Which government preferred to spend £700 million on Rwanda rather than have effective border controls? It is too late to have an enquiry - what we need is a properly funded effective Home Office and the operations it controls, after fourteen years of neglect. As for the national identity of villains, read up the case of the man who killed his wife for the insurance, how the criminal trial folded, and how it took a civil suit to get some sort of justice. Read what the judge said about the man involved. Psychopaths are not confined to non-Europeans.
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  22. I suspect the focus on Islam is to deflect from the brutalising effect of belonging to the American armed forces (or indeed the Israeli ones). A lot of the violent crime in the US is committed by people who have been in the US Army, you know, the one that refuses to accept the jurisidiction of the ICC, won't sign up to the UDHR, and which trains its recruits using collective punishment to turn them into near-zombies. The US is a state which maintains its power through widespread violence, and which encourages gun ownership so it has a ready supply of recuits already programmed to believe that guns are the answer to various problems. Then they are surprised when mentally ill people follow the same logic. Blaming Islam when the main cause of Islamic terrorism is US power projection in the Arab world and Iran is pretty silly.
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  23. Says what all? It's irrelevant. He was an academic who built up a medium sized IT company, but seems to have acquired a dodgy accountant. Not the first time. Not his fault.
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  24. Badenoch almost exactly resembles one of those megachurch "pastors" that rant on US television, except that being a woman she would not be allowed to speak in one of their churches.
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  25. Or to put it another way, he opposes taking social housing off the market, which many consider a good thing.
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  26. It hasn't.
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  27. Braverman, Badenoch and Patel think they are the Eumenides, but they are just the Graeae for today.
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  28. Definitely sounds like a member of the criminal classes. Should have refunded the money less the DVLA costs and said see you in small claims if you don't like it.
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  29. Following his logic we need to defend against the USA.
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  30. I live in a "leafy suburb" and we have 5 EVs in a street of 18 houses. Your anecdote is as good as my anecdote. The most recent addition is a 74 reg BMW i40.
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  31. All Johnson's peerages were trouser department - either filling pockets or satisfying what goes between them. Cherchez la femme ou cherchez l'argent, il s'agit de la même chose.
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  32. In this situation: Do the work at home on your own equipment. (Very important). Find a friend who sounds like he knows about computers. (He doesn't need to really, the management won't have a clue.) Set up a limited company with the pair of you as equal shareholders. Get friend to approach Head Office and tell them he has a product that will greatly improve productivity, can he explain it to the Finance Director (NOT the Sales Director, the person who can actually spend money.) Find a way to be chosen to "evaluate" it. Share the proceeds. This is legal. I knew someone who did something very similar though it was a hardware box he designed, it made him a lot of money.
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  33. Is this partly because people are going off excessively large cars if they aren't company funded? Polestars, Teslas and the like are pretty big, and "small" EVs like the MG4 are the size of the tall Golfs. What's the depreciation like on the bigger petrol Fords, Peugeots etc.? (I'm not arguing that big EVs are a good idea.) Now look at the price of secondhand automatic Smarts and blink, because new young drivers want automatics with low insurance that are easy to park.
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  34. I disagree. We had this nonsense with the 2005 SI that made it illegal for actual electrical engineers to rewire their houses, but apprentices were allowed to do it! Electrical fires in this country are actually rather rare, whereas gas explosions destroy houses from time to time and a faulty Range Rover caused millions in damage at Luton Airport. Batteries and chargers should be regulated at the point of import. Trading Standards needs to be returned to pre-Cameron levels to do it. Battery packs need proper over-temperature and over-charge provision. Several years ago I did an e-Bike conversion. One of the first things I did was to dismantle the battery pack to verify its condition. The arrangements for stopping the cells shaking around and for getting rid of heat were totally inadequate, so I rebuilt it right down to fitting adequate ventilation and a heatsink for the battery management. Your typical bike shop is never going to get assessed ISO 9000 certification.
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  35. I am sure Mary Archer will find a new post commensurate with her abilities. Given her judicially approved fragrance, perhaps she could be the new spokesperson for Paco Rabanne. God knows the Conservatives could use something to conceal their stink.
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  36. He isn't in America, we use English here. If he was he'd probably be Trump's VP pick.
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  37. People keep referring to lithium battery "explosions". They have no idea what an explosion is like! They catch fire, which is different. Our house backup batteries are in the garage (where we don't keep a car) with a simple but effective sprinkler system - if they catch fire water will be pouring on them before the Fire Brigade arrives, and there is nothing flammable near them. But then I have had safety responsibility for actual factories with compressed air, 400V electricity and hazardous chemicals. Most people have not. How many people have fire extinguishers in their cars, or even fire blankets their kitchens? A boat of any size requires at least 3 extinguishers, yet many houses have none. I would say the problem isn't so much lithium batteries as general ignorance and carelessness around fire safety.
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  38. Every champagne and cigar type with billionaire friends and a £3 million farm is a down to earth hardworking man, I'm sure.
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  39. The simple fact is that brain function is so complex that developing medicines is enormously difficult. One of my supervisors would remark that antidepressants do not treat depression, they mask some of the symptoms. I believe in the last year or so biochemists are finally starting to get to the biological cause of depression, which means a "scientific" as distinct from symptomatic relief treatment is still probably decades off. A lot of "mental health treatment" is in essence fraudulent - Freud invented what was in essence an untestable money making scam which is still treated seriously in the USA, whereas CBT does have some degree of success.
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  40. To be fair, if there are Americans about the safest place to be is somewhere else. Just ask the British Army. It was probably just a typical friendly exchange of views by a couple of drug dealers half a mile away.
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  41. The Cadbury family, like the Clarks, sold out long ago. Oddly enough I once had an interesting conversation with Matthew Clark in which he more or less said that the company made a huge mistake in going corporate; too many of the family chased the short term money rather than the long term.
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  42. It was much more likely a water spout (as described by Dante in The Inferno , they have long existed in the Med.) They can move fast, arise quickly and do immense damage due to the extremely concentrated energy at sea level.
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  43. In Warminster one of the banks closed. They got protests, and the protesters were told that under 40 people used the branch regularly so, if they didn't all mind paying £4000 a year each to keep it open...
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  44. Small but powerful waterspouts have been known in the area for a long time. Dante actually describes one in The Inferno which "struck the forepart of the ship and the prow went down", showing how small it was at sea level.
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  45. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from one MD I worked for who said "Never let management accountants run the company." Truss is a management accountant and it showed. It's the financial director's job to deal with borrowing, and she never reached that level.
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  46. "Je ne regrette rien" - Edith Piaf. "The only thing I regret is when I was unable to avoid doing the right thing" - A B de P Johnson.
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  47. Since Farage's only occupation was an unsuccessful small LME trader, how would he know? His input in fisheries was nonexistent.
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  48. What was it, 17% Reform voters? Even 5 million people signing an online petition doesn't exhaust the number of people silly enough to support Farmer Farage.
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  49. Not fit to be spoken of in the same sentence as Cromwell.
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  50. Sauron? Wormtongue more like.
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  51. Oxford is famously the Home of Lost Causes and the University for the Seventeenth Century, so I fail to see the problem. It's just living up to its reputation.
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  52. As a matter of fact home chargers do record energy supplied to vehicles already. My charger talks to my solar system and can tell you how much solar energy went into the car, as well. Given the enormous levels of pollution produced by oil central heating, which doesn't have emission control, you should be paying more for your heating oil, though. A really fair system would charge for fuel based on the vehicle emission class, with Euro 6 paying the least tax, and pre-Euro Diesels and oil fired CH paying the most.
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  53. No intellectual ever thought joining the USA in Afghanistan was a good idea.
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  54. Which from the video it did not. Stuff sprayed out through the back and rear windows.
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  55. A local council election with a tiny turnout, and he got 546 votes. About 8% of the electorate bothered to vote for him, which hardly shows much interest.
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  56. Tousi has yet to do anything brilliant.
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  57. For those who may not remember him, before WW2 the British politician Edward Heath spent a lot of time warning about Nazi Germany and asking the government to support the Republicans in Spain. Later as PM, he would sack Enoch Powell for stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment. As I was told it, and by a Liberal politician no less, the argument between Heath and Wilson really was that Heath thought Wilson compromised too many moral principles in his negotiations. Heath was awkward in front of the media but when he came and spoke to the Cambridge Union I remember someone saying afterwards "Was that really Heath?" because he made an impassioned and articulate argument for joining the Common Market. He also expressed the view that Margaret Thatcher was "raving bonkers" because of her Randian right wing ideas and meanness (like stopping school milk, intended to protect poor children from rickets without singling them out.) Heath was a Left Conservative, and he was sabotaged by the unions and the right of his own party.
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  58. That was actually included. It's lower now in many countries because of increased electricity generation from renewables.
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  59. ICEVs are much more economical than horses, steam trains or foot power, though less so than a bicycle, whether or not electric. It has been claimed that Ford decided to go into cars because horse dung was already making cities almost uninhabitable. But joggers don't emit NOx and carbon particles, so in towns EVs are good for people's lungs.
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  60. Because it is actually weak, Jewish population not much bigger than Scotland. Israel has advanced weapons but a limited number of people who can operate them, who cannot easily be replaced. This is why the worst soldiers are invading Gaza; they cannot afford to use the good ones. Terrorism actually involves the least risk to Israeli forces.
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  61. Like the Buddhist monks who used to self immolate to protest against the Vietnam war.
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  62. I remember a farmer who had two tractors - HOR120N and HOR150N. Now those were worth the bother.
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  63. Why does Andrew need security? What threats does he face exactly?
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  64. Trump surrounds himself with people rich enough to do bad things and mostly escape consequences. Stanley Baldwin would call them harlots - power without responsibility - along with Murdoch. Giuliani is there as a horrible example, and might give some of Trump's less sociopathic joculators a little cause for reflection. The ladies who must not be named have certainly caught up with him.
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  65. She thought it was C4, not ITV. Whoever made her Culture Secretary was thinking Petri dishes.
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  66. No. Karma is the Buddhist concept of the accretion of the world-illusion (maya) preventing liberation from the Wheel of being. There is no good or bad karma, there is just karma. It's a concept totally misunderstood by most Westerners. Your comment is actually pretty disgusting.
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  67. Just remember that Rolls-Royce dodged a bullet by not launching a Silver Mist in Germany (mist=dung, as in BMW, Bayerische Mist Wagen, Bavarian dung cart), and then Audi launched the etron - which means dung in French. Oh, and ChatGPT said in French sounds like "Cat, I have farted."
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  68. Sad story though. My father was 2ic on a minesweeper for part of WW2 then got transferred to Combined Ops. First, he told me from an early age that the NCOs are the backbone of the Navy and secondly, he died at over 100 just starting with dementia, and in his last months he reverted to WW2 mode. 62 is too young to go for that generation.
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  69. No, it's because the Catholic Church is the union of Pauline sects and Roman paganism, and gets hugely tangled up with things like Cybele-worship. The Eastern church avoided that and its regular priests can marry but bishops can't.
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  70. I wasn't aware that Reagan was black.
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  71. I imagine it would be the same if you bought a petrol car from a company circling the drain.
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  72. Can actually, though I imagine there's someone on the staff with marketing knowledge who makes the suggestions. The butcher in Sandringham used to have a big Royal Warrant sign, and QE2 sometimes went there in her Morris Traveller to deliver the shopping list.
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  73. People like Johnson, Farage, Yaxley-Lennon, Peterson, Tousi and Tate are enemies of civilised discourse and of objective truth. They seek to wind up the gullible and easily led, and try to create division. Dante had a special section of Hell for them, the sowers of discord. I annot agree with you. If someone has a strong case that they can reinforce with facts rather than anecdotes, hyperbole and distortion, there should be no need for confrontation - except against the people like them who are determined for it to happen. Two things worry me these days: first, that my grandchildren will find themselves in a war against authoritarian nationalism once again. And second and worse: that a future government led by those forces of disruption will conscipt them - on the wrong side.
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  74. As I understand it the Chinese government etched a permanent QR code on certain sharp objects and keyed them to the person buying them. It's actually not a bad idea, no different from recording gun serial numbers against owners or car VINs against registered keepers. Incidentally YouTube is getting very twitchy. I wrote a post explaining to someone what a particular term for a particular white ethnic minority meant - just in plain English, no judgement or insults - and was threatened with a ban leading me to suspect that members of the said group had complained in numbers. I've deleted my account and created a new one, but this is a warning to people - the Right is on the defensive at the moment and it seems if you have a record of dissing them enough for them to notice, they may try to shut you up. High on my list of suspects is the subject of this video. Possibly best to ignore, ban without comment, and pass on.
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  75. The Civil Service is not and should not be Special Branch or part of the Armed Forces. That is not what it is for. The word "Civil" is a clue. What is the Head of the Civil Service supposed to do on a Sunday? It isn't like a company that operates oil rigs or 24/7 process plant.
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  76. Rabelais as well as being a satirist was a medical doctor, and you could say it was his stock in trade since in those days the main internal diagnostics available to the medical profession were pee and poo. I have the two volume Motteux translation (I was only able to find the original in a large library). The simple fact is that Rabelais is totally unembarrassed about any bodily functions. It's a reminder of What the Victorians Did for Us, along with the Americans for whom even a boob is a step too far in mass media.
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  77. Something tells me that but for the General Election result this would never have come to light.
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  78. It doesn't matter, though, does it? You will still be able to drive a petrol car till at least 2045 if you want, ssuming sales stop in 2030. And in 20 years time who knows what things will look like? In 1900 people had to buy petrol from pharmacies and frequently it wasn't the right stuff. With the technology of the day this meant a practical range of around 50 miles. In 1919 the first pumped petrol station opened. Four years later there were 7000 pumps in Great Britain.
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  79.  @stewie7338  Relevance? Labour-supporting academics were largely opposed to both Afghanistan and Iraq. Nobody supposes the Labour leadership consists of intellectuals. Do you know what the term means?
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  80. To misquote Tennyson, "Better fifty years of Europe than a Trump for USA".
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  81. He said it would take 50 years to know whether it was good or bad. This from a politician tied to a 5 year election cycle.
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  82.  @DropdudeJohn  Oh, just go to Dover and look at the traffic.
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  83.  @nicholasbethell2921  Yes but it isn't 2066 yet, he might still be right by then.
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  84. Answer to the question "what's brown and sounds like a bell?"
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  85. Farage will never democratise. He threw a complete wobbly when UKIP actually came up with a manifesto. Nobody must have different ideas from whatever The Leader has been told by Trump to think during his last US visit.
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  86. In the escalating runup to WW3 it is important to get the steps right. An ICBM has a range over 5000km and usually has multiple warheads. The ATACMS supplied by the US is a short range missile which releases cluster bombs, effectively a minelayer. The Russian IRBM is intermediate range, fast and ballistic (from Gk. ballein, to throw) i.e. unguided till it slows and aims close to the target. The Iranians have similar weapons and so too, we assume, does Israel. The US tends to depend on overwhelming firepower and reducing the target to a big hole, which has been their tactical approach since about 1917. So you can read it like this: ATACMS attack - see, we can cause destruction and deny areas inside Russia and our mobile platform means you can't stop us. And we have bigger, longer range drones than the ones we've been using to disrupt you. Russian response - well, we have a precision missile beyond the range of your ATACMS, so if you don't want holes in Kiev, think again. And by the way we laugh at your crappy Watchkeepers. In the arithmetic of death and destruction it's perfectly rational, a kind of chess game.
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  87. Oh, they are a solution all right. A solution to the problem of US world domination.
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  88. His US counterpart is part of a government that is trying to "destroy industry, increase insecurity and impoverish the country." I'm not sure nowadays is the right time to listen to the US on anything. Chairman Xi on the other hand reassured the rest of the world that China will continue to push hard towards net zero. I make no comment on whether Miliband is right or not, just that I would not trust an American these days as far as I could throw a Cybertruck.
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  89.  @jon-kp2rq  Your local library may point you in the direction of remedial English classes. Has it occurred to you that people of limited literacy being anti-EV may not project the image you want?
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  90. Your vocabulary is far above Gullis's pay grade and I doubt he has such clearly articulated views. He just saw a bandwagon that got a job much better paid than teaching, and now he's fallen off it. What Head is going to offer a job to someone who basically says "I'm going to argue with my colleagues about matters irrelevant to their subjects?"
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  91. The male Ukrainian refugees I know will probably never be able to go back because they would be arrested. You need to be well off to afford the bribes to get on the boat to Turkey, several thousand dollars or Euros. And then the air fare to this country. The mid 1990s were after independence and in the middle of the misgovernment of Yeltsin; it isn't surprising people were not having children. And Zelensky is still the face of an oligarch, just a different one from the ones before.
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  92. Once upon a time I was working late in the office when I was phoned up by an irate Irish customer. Their account had been put on hold as they had returned an item which proved to be in perfect condition, so their next order hadn't been shipped, nor had they been charged. I was subjected to quite unpleasant abuse by a woman, a complete stranger. She then demanded to speak to the manager (!) at which point I left the phone, came back and said "Hello, commercial director here, can I help?" More abuse followed till I said "Would you say that to an Irish supplier?" "What do you mean?" "Are you having a go at me because I'm English?" She couldn't process it, blew her top some more and put the phone down. I realise as an inhabitant of a country with a terrible colonial record (though not a fraction as bad as the US, Belgium or perhaps even France) that this sort of thing is going to happen. Get over it, move on. Just (in this case) cancel the order. We didn't need customers like that.
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  93. Farage has copied a trick from the USA. Representatives and Senators will make speeches in an empty house aimed at their constituents, then it gets turned into a video with cut shots of a full house. Farage will do the same but omitting the bits where he gets laughed at. My own suggestion is that a media honesty law needs to be passed that any reporting or recordings from Parliament that include questions must also include the full answers, in one cut with no omissions or additions, and OFCOM will have powers to regulate anyone breaking the rule, as being contempt of Parliament. This would shut up Farage, Tice and Anderson for starters.
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  94. The stories going around in 2007/8 about management excess in banking shows you to be wrong.
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  95. Well of course. You're either miserable because of Brexit, or you're miserable because St. Nigel isn't PM.
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  96. Well, Putin has a daughter so Johnson was half right. As for being an id10t, the ISW and other independent bodies show Putin still holding onto Donbas, Crimea and all those lovely mineral deposits. If I had a £ for every article I've seen that says Russia is on the verge of collapse, in the last couple of years, it would make up for the Winter Fuel Allowance several times over. And Trump's demand that the rest of NATO spend lots and lots of money on buying US weapons (which is what it's really about) does suggest that supporting Ukraine is not a priority for him. Whereas Johnson is a washed up ex-PM. Who is the id10t here? The fact that Alexander Johnson has a complicated relationship with the truth is neither here nor there. His assessment is no such thing, it's just headline grabbing. And it works. Clickbait, that's all the Conservative Party is good for these days. Seniors in Clacton are using this one weird trick to get an appointment with their absent MP. Ian Duncan Smith reveals this secret way to destabilise the economy. You won't believe what Boris said about Putin. Fifty politicians we're glad are out of Parliament.
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  97. The traffic became ridiculous while my daughter was there, visits went from parking near college to the multistorey to the park and ride. It isn't "change for the sake of change", it's the inevitable effect of economic success. From the days when Boris Johnson's subject was prestigious to the modern day when it's a joke and medicine, science and engineering are the status subjects, Oxford has become much richer (as has Cambridge). Cameron, Johnson and Truss wrecked the British economy - so much for PPE and Classics - while the Jenner Institute developed a very cheap vaccine that saved millions of lives around the world in countries that couldn't afford mRNA. Change for the sake of change? To reverse your argument, only if you are Telegraph-reading would be upper class.
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  98. He went to Yale. Look up "Skull and Bones".
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  99.  @catherinehall4862  Shortage of competent English speakers in St. Petersburg or just another victim of the US education system?
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  100. You need to do something about the spam, 20 posts plus already.
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  101. Nadine Dorries was briefly the Minister for Kulchur, Meedja and Sport till the proofreader intervened. Writing a book doesn't qualify you to manage anything or become an expert on subjects outside your scope (does it, Rowling?), but it seems they don't teach that at Eton.
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  102. W B Yeats: "My brother Mavroun is all worn out/ with [helping] his big brawling lout/and I am running to Paradise/A poor life, do what he can/and though he keep a dog and a gun/a serving maid and a serving man."
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  103.  @Georgie-G58  Just helping Tousi spread his lies.
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  104. A bit like Colonel Custer being supported by Wile E. Coyote.
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  105. Trump is simply waiting to see which side will bribe him with the most lithium at the lowest prices. His advisers may argue they should favour Russia, because that way they can get their supplies of tungsten back.
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  106. The "erosion in free speech" is because of Trump and Musk using vile language to attack innocent people, thus enabling other sociopaths. They are responsible and now they do not like the fact that we in Europe remember the past and do not want it back. Don't like it, Vance? Get your party and President to behave like decent human beings so restrictions are not needed.
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  107. It looks like the Leapmotor TC03 is indeed coming to the UK - it was reviewed last week, I believe. It's imported by Stellantis so it will have a decent dealer network. It looks like a perfect commuter/shopping trolley that can cope with short motorway journeys, and it's about £16000. The size of a Smart Forfour or a Fiat 500 but much cheaper and bigger inside. This is the EV second car we should have had instead of having Teslas pushed as main cars.
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  108.  @FredFox-m9v  Those batteries are heavy though, and you're likely limited to 2kW charging. That or half an hour at the supermarket once a week while you do your shopping?
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  109. When speaking of Johnson's magnum opus (i.e. big book) we should be reminded of the Greek tag mega biblion, mega kakon - a big book is a great evil.
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  110. Harold Macmillan: "Events, dear boy, events." Harold Wilson: "Three weeks is a long time in politics." The UK in 1914: "The war will be over by Christmas". The hysterical claims that a government 6 months old with over 4 years to go if it wants to, is somehow on the verge of collapse, would be silly if it wasn't so silly.
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  111. Il Duce Farage will make the trains run on time! (Only Mussolini didn't, and someone whose sole business experience was trying to run a small brokerage on the LME is equally unlikely.)
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  112.  @lynnlovattjones4171  He has to last another 4 years.
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  113.  @DoggleBird  I guess you think the EPA is a commie plot, like your orange hero?
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  114. Billionaire non-dom property developer Nick Candy is on the left of the Conservative Party? Göbbels to Satan: "I told you we would win in the end."
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  115. Forget Der Spiegel, it's reported that at least two banks are trying to divest $11 billion worth of Twitter debt that Musk took on. They are talking it up to the rubes because that's what they do to make the sale, but it is clear they doubt Musk's ability to service the interest on the debt.
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  116. We'd better say what we think of Trump while we still can, as he seems to be trying to block all criticism on US media. Trump - suka Putina!
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  117. As I understand it she never got a brief of her own, yet she was made a KC. It's been around a long time. Hilaire Belloc wrote about this kind of corruption, but unfortunately it hasn't made its way to the Internet.
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  118. To a degree Shakespeare is who he is because of the industry that grew up around him, just as Jesus is a construction of the Jesus industries. Every scrap of possible meaning has been extracted from the plays creating bodies of work like the Mishnah or the works of Aquinas. But a couple of middle class people marching on stage at a performance of one of the better plays with a "Just stop oil" message, seemingly an attempt to discredit the people who believe we need to take urgent action to mitigate climate change by presenting them as self-important and arrogant, really isn't anything to do with Shakespeare. It's just "choose somewhere where people are looking, it's a cultural icon and importantly there won't be any armed police". If they are being paid by oil industry PR, it's venial, and if they are not, it's narcissistic.
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  119. I suggest a look at the ISW map, as they are pretty independent. The incursion is currently about 80km from Kursk, with an area around 1000sq km. Some of the posts here are celebrating very prematurely. It may be that Ukraine has done significant damage to Russian bombing capability, but holding this territory seems unlikely - just as Russia some time ago retreated over quite a large area in the north of the Donbas which was of no strategic value.
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  120. To be brutal, EVs are like Porsches or Bentleys: if you cannot afford to buy three, don't buy one. Any new or advanced technology has a big price premium above what the average person thinks it's worth, and when you sell, you're looking at selling to someone poorer than you are. Of course there's huge depreciation. I remember when the 3.5 litre Rover V8 depreciated 50% in its first year for the same reason, people were nervous of reliability (with good reason) and who buys a moneypit second hand? Why did we buy an EV? Lots of solar electricity, very easy to drive for people in their 70s, and they don't suffer from lots of very short journeys like petrol engines do. Was price an issue? No. Might replace it in a year or so if the top of the range Renault 5 looks good. Would we spend the asking price on a Tata Jaguar? Never. Son in law has a long range MG4 in London, completely worth it to them - nobody wants to steal it and it does vast numbers of very short journeys which would never get a petrol engine warm. Worth as much as a Jaguar in convenience, under half the price.
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  121. McVey has now posted that she completely rejects all criticism of her post and that the BoD is twisting her words. She seems to have confused the Conservative BoD with the Labour Party. This is quite funny because it was Thatcher who overtly recognised the BoD by giving Jonathan Sacks a peerage. The BoD fiercely attacked Corbyn. So McVey is now attacking supporters of her own party. Her posts are really quite extreme rants. I do wonder if the loss of power has caused severe mental problems for many Conservative MPs - the ones who are not self medicating with Colombian marching powder or horse tranquilliser, that is.
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  122.  @Paul-je7bo  Who has benefited from Brexit? Not the British public. Not even the US. Not the EU. But the disruption did cause governments to take their eyes off Russia.
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  123. Unlikely to happen since Cambridge at least is the economy driver of East Anglia. Its massive traffic problems are due to its success not its failure.
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  124. The government is reported to be having a campaign to get those entitled to pension credit to claim it. If they do, this will cost more than savings from winter fuel allowance. The right wing media re focussing on WFA because so many of their readers are well off pensioners.
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  125. How much publicity do the media give Farage compared to the Lib Dems? Many times more than the relative vote share. The media have decided - or Murdoch has decided - that Farage will be PM.
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  126. Musk is basically trying to turn the USA into Apartheid South Africa, denying the good jobs to non-white people and women. And Trump is happy with it because it suits his passed-down Mitteleuropaischer prejudices. Well, it worked in South Africa for a long time - till it didn't. The issue becomes, what happens to the US Armed Forces as recruits start to dry up (except for white supremacists from backward States)? For many intelligent black Americans the military is the only way to a reasonably well paid job and a university education. Perhaps that's what Musk wants - push down the non-white Americans so the only options are the jobs undocumented immigrants have been doing, while relying on all the armed MAGA nuts to prevent servile wars. The wet dream of the South, introduced by someone from the South - of Africa.
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  127. It won't, you won't.
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  128. By then GCHQ will have the evidence and be rounding people up, I suspect.
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  129. Slippery slope argument. Divorce has released a lot of people from loveless marriages, on the whole it has been a public benefit. I'm not sure where you are going with this.
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  130. The US at the moment reminds me of Kipling's poem at the time of the Russian collapse in 1917-18, when pacifists in England were saying it was time to negotiate peace with Germany. It is still popular in Russia. "God rest you, peaceful gentlemen, but give us leave to pass. We go to dig a nation's grave as great as England was. For this Kingdom and this Glory and this Power and this Pride Three hundred years it flourished - in three hundred days it died." Musk may seem an unlikely Lenin but he has many of the personality traits.
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  131. It isn't difficult really. The Lib Dems are a regional party with a few areas where they are the alternative to the Cons rather than Labour. So, they get seats. When they have a leader like Charles Kennedy who unites rather than divides, they get more seats. When they have an apparently delusional one like Swinson, they get fewer. Reform is a right wing pressure group which has persuaded a few very left behind areas to support them. But they don't have enough support in the rest of the country to persuade enough people that they could represent them. Most of the country is totally unworried about immigration. Farage keeps on about it constantly. Most of the country detests Trump. Farage worships him. He doesn't represent 85% of the population as a whole. In a representative democracy, an MP is supposed to represent their constituents, not the country as a whole. Only about 15% of voters are, to put it bluntly, antisocial and xenophobic. Only a few percent believe in a Marxist revolution. The election result was to be expected, therefore, since the majority in most constituencies have no time for extremes.
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  132. I think there is a causal relationship, though not as stated. The fact remains that the Biden family had at least one business interest in Ukraine, and if you are a professionally suspicious Russian you might well conclude that with Biden in the WH, the US might be plotting against you. Remembering the economic, and possibly physical, sabotage of Nordstream 2, Putin and his group might have concluded that the only way out of the straitjacket was to take over Ukraine, and as a fait accompli negotiate from a position of some strength. Europe doesn't like the way it has been blackmailed into buying expensive US gas while the US gives itself permits to buy certain strategic materials from Russia. Cheap Russian gas and better relations with China, weighed against the loss of the US export market? A difficult one and not necessarily to the advantage of the US. Remember - when the US tells you something isn't about the oil and gas -> it is about the oil and gas.
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  133. Ah Johnson, just as it's reported that his autohubristicbiography was something of a flop and massively outsold by Rory Stewart, he has to say something to get media attention. Just like when he was lacking media attention and put out a rude verse about Erdogan. Trump with a Home Counties accent.
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  134. Unfortunately the Wills family became enormous drug dealers based in Bristol, and a lot of older Quakers really struggled to believe that smoking caused serious diseases.
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  135. The members did the calculation. She'll last just long enough to get Johnson back at a by-election before she melts down and he takes over again. Jenrick might last long enough to lose the next election.
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  136. Confession: I taught briefly at a private school which had a strict no beating, no bullying code. It wasn't until I talked to people from certain very well known schools that I discovered this was highly unusual, because it was just like the grammar school I went to myself. I was a crap teacher and got out, but I was extremely fortunate in where I taught.
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  137.  @StephenPalmer-w3y  No, it was persuaded to abandon democracy by people like Alcibiades after the franchise was extended to people who had no real stake in the success of Athens.
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  138. Trump is a failure in one respect: there were lots of assassination attempts on Hitler to the extent that he always went everywhere with three cars, three aircraft and chose which one actually to travel in at the last minute so nobody could pass on information. He also employed doubles, though Trump might find it hard to recruit anybody prepared to look like an overweight Essex geezer covered in fake tan with a ferret on his head. Trump so far has only managed two amateurish ones in a country with more guns than people. I can't see the Dems wanting to remove him, he is perhaps their biggest electoral asset.
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  139. Nothing that Powell predicted came true. His prejudices led him to complete and utter failure. There's a lesson there.
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  140. I suspect Johnson as been watching Trump's approval ratings with the utmost attention.
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  141. Because professors and GPs are so working class, aren't they? I don't think I'll be saying that to our Nigerian GP though.
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  142. Both the Taycan and the Fiat were ridiculously overpriced. I looked at the Fiat - the boot is useless and Fiat cannot up the price based on reputation. The Taycan is based on Porsche's idea that they too could sell on reputation, but the sort of people who buy Porsche sports cars want IC engineering. It's like Rolex trying to sell a quartz watch with an LCD display. 2025 is going to be the year of the MG4, Renault 5 and the Hyundai Inster. Sensible size, range and even price for use in cities and larger towns. Against them the Fiats even look under-spec and over-price.
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  143. Read the article in Aljazeera by an Ukrainian journalist and an academic from Germany. Ukrainians have been voting with their feet since long before the war, and fewer and fewer want to fight for the oligarchs in Kyiv. I don't disbelieve it since I've spoken to Ukrainian refugees and heard stories of escaping over the Black Sea to Turkey, and know that Russian speaking Ukrainians are often very critical of Zelensky. Both Putin and Zelensky and their entourages need to go as soon as possible. Zelelnsky sleepwalked into the war, Putin started it, both of them are political failures.
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  144. I do get the impression, and I am not joking, that Trump's dementia has advanced to the stage that he is living in the past, and quickly gets confused by new people. I'm not really sure that he knows who Farage or Starmer are, but he remembers Putin. My mother had dementia, I'm pretty sure I recognise the symptoms. My father was pretty lucid till shortly before he died, but the brain research people said he had started to show the signs of Alzheimers. We really do need to think seriously about how we test if old people really should be allowed to do these jobs. I am years younger than Trump but I wouldn't trust myself running anything despite my last IQ test still being on 140.
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  145. Much of what you say about Russia could equally be said about Imperial Britain and today's US. You are just watching Trump behave with a cynicism even Putin must find amazing, but the main difference between him and previous US presidents is that with a very few exceptions - like Carter and Bush 1 - one suspects they behave the same in private but don't say it in public. And both Carter and Bush were one term presidents, because Americans don't like diplomatic negotiators. They want authoritarian strong men who follow the "who compels us to keep our agreements?" school. The Cold War was between two dysfunctional powers using Europe and the ME as a chessboard, and now Trump wants Europe to pay for the destruction of trust the US caused.
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  146. They do. Whenever the K goes anywhere, there's someone handing out press releases saying who made his clothes, shoes etc., and Mrs. Wales has only to wear a dress from a small British firm and they become a much bigger one. I'm no monarchist but they do a good job as the marketing arm of UK SMEs.
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  147. The alternative story is that HP lost its way, took on Fiorina who took it further down the tubes, and then the hapless Apotheker who wanted to turn HP into a software company, abandoned the mobile phone market and seems to have become obsessed with the Autonomy acquisition; neither he nor the CFO really seem to have done proper due diligence on the acqusition, and then when HP got into financial trouble the shareholders wanted to sue everybody in sight. But who spends $11 billion carelessly? US corporations and Wall Street, that's who. Look at the acquisition of Twitter and the valuations of Tesla and Trump Media for more recent examples. HP had gone from a company that was a world leader in the handheld market to one which had a failed launch of two mobile phones and then just got out, even as Nokia, Samsung and Apple created a vast new market between them. It was that which really did for them; trying to change horses in midstream while failing to look the new horse in the mouth. Blaming Autonomy for HP's failure is just...well, typical of some ex-HP execs I've talked to.
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  148. Trump had been told England isn't a swing state.
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  149. Oh, don't be silly. Bandying around what are no more than ignorant memes is not political discussion.
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  150. The ones who were not there; Musk and Thiel. The monkeys are not the problem, it's the organ grinders.
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  151. Johnson knows enough about history to be a weasel. The root cause of Pearl Harbor was the attempts of the United States to defeat Japan economically in order to prevent its empire growing t the expense of US control of the Pacific. The root cause of the invasion of Ukraine was the attempt of the USA to destroy Russia, after it succeeded in defeating the USSR. Putin is a bad man, but in terms of overall harm done he's just a footnote compared to the efforts of the American rich.
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  152. You're mostly water so I expect you'd be better off living under the sea.
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  153. Putin's a bit busy right now, doesn't want to have to spend time on yet another British agent.
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  154. No, that's just civilisation 101 default mode. Why yes I am a birthright Tottenham supporter, why do you ask? (The anti semitic abuse Tottenham supporters had directed at them was a source of pride.)
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  155. I have noticed increased support for Farage from some UK Zionists, presumably because they see him as anti-Islam. Farage is truly the Nexus of the Nasty.
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  156. And your solution is?
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  157. They are over 5 years old, so even with a replacement battery might not realise the replacement cost.
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  158. You think Badenoch is clever enough to work that out? She seems to understand very little about (a) this country (b) political economy and (c) how to avoid putting your foot in it.
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  159. That was Volvo, and when the amount of renewables generation was a lot lower. (Actually they will never be carbon neutral, 70k was the point at which they undertook ICE Volvos.)
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  160.  @MC-nb6jx  The point I was making is that out of 5 recent EVs not one is a Tesla, and it isn't because people can't afford them. Nothing to do with EV versus ICE.
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  161. In Purgatorio, Canto 16, Dante discusses good and bad government. His character says: "Onde convenne legge per fren porre; convenne rege aver, che discernesse de la vera cittade almen la torre." Therefore the laws were needed as a brake (i.e. curb on bad men) And there is need of a king who can at least make out the tower of the True City." Trump, Vance and Musk reject and ignore the laws, and have no higher goal in mind than their own power and wealth. If Vance is correct in saying that Europe has not invested enough in its security, he is saying it for the wrong reason: because we are in this situation due to the US attempt to take over the world, starting in 1990, and using Europe as a tool. Without NATO in the post-1990 era, without the US bases, Europe could have Europeanised Russia, to the benefit of everybody but with a great relative reduction in US power.
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  162. I thought her income was already jug-based?
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  163. Mein Kampf is a tedious book full of lies and nonsense but it is written in a style that aligned with German culture of the era. Yaxley-Lennon doesn't have the ability, he's a "misleading video" kind of white-winger, not a book. And who reads books any more?
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  164. To be fair, in the tables of horror, the Allies as well as the Germans developed nerve agents of which "novichok" is simply a more potent derivative. Whether it takes a whole drop or a tenth of a drop to kill someone is mainly of academic interest. The fact is that Russians deployed a WMD in this country and technically NATO should have jointly responded, but did not. If that bottle had smashed in a shopping centre or a school, there could have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of deaths. Putin intended a test and a warning. He may even have chosen Skripal and Salisbury to see how Porton Down would respond. The warning was "I could kill thousands of people in a city." The test was how NATO would respond. NATO failed to respond militarily and the rest followed.
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  165. Any military organisation that doesn't check bulk hardware purchases for supply chain and booby traps is a bit incompetent. It looks like they have got very careless. You don't need a lot of C4 in a pager to do localised damage but, even so, it wouldn't be hard to detect. When you are dealing with perhaps the most uncrupulous and paranoid militaries in the world, this is the sort of thing you expect - especially as the Mossad has used phone bombs in the past, and there will be KGB-trained people at high levels.
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  166.  @RoboticRaindrops  Did you pay for your copy of Roget? Speaking of fiction, Le Carré, who really was in SIS for a while, would have given you gamma minus for that bit of trying to write on stilts. Too many overblown adjectives, too much supposed ad hominem, no content.
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  167.  @RoboticRaindrops  I am not trying to be clever. You are. That's the difference. And enough pandering to your narcissism right now.
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  168. Do you think she's a deep penetration Reform mole? Destroy her own party banging on about the immigration they failed to manage, then jump ship to Reform in time for the next election and still bang on about immigration (if Labour have also been unable to control it.) At this point everybody in the Conservative Party and the Reform Company Limited can see that being lazy, intellectually vacuous and unwilling to learn has brought big dividends for Johnson, Truss and Farage. Why wouldn't they copy a winning formula?
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  169.  @stevec700  I think it's a long word insult bot generator. That or a 13 year old at Eton.
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  170. None of these are EVs I would ever consider buying, they all have some major downside that keeps them off the list. Air cooled batteries (obsolete tech), high price for a brand that your fellow bankers won't recognise, or one just not associated with expensive cars. And then there are things like the Taycan or the Q8, bought by people who usually obsess over noise, or capacity of the engine, or position on a model pecking order. In my experience there are three basic types of Porsche buyer: the German who does high Autobahn mileage (one guy I encountered was commuting 50 000 miles a year), the engineer, and the status freak. The first group won't buy a Taycan because it doesn't do what they need, the second group won't because they can't maintain it themselves, and the third group live in a world in which all their friends sneer at EVs anyway. That leaves the people with lots of money who buy one for the experience and then discover that once you've played with all the bits it just becomes normal. And those people don't buy second hand. I did see a 2015 Leaf on the road this morning but most of it was Hyundais, MGs, BMWs and the odd Mokka, with one Model 3 from 2019. All practical company cars.
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  171. Are you seriously saying we will be paying Mauritius £891 billion up front for the Chagos Islands?
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  172. Surely the point is that neither Badenoch nor Farage have ever achieved anything remotely positive in their pointless, narcissistic existences? And that really is the key metric of the far right: all negativity. When did the Conservative Party last have a leader who had done more than move money for people, write columns or make speeches? Heath had perhaps the most distinguished record of any postwar PM other than Churchill - an early anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist, artillery officer in WW2, musician and sailor with friends in other parties, who stood up to Farage's predecessor Powell, but was sabotaged by the unions. Thatcher reportedly helped put the air in Mr. Whippy, and sensibly married an oil multi-millionaire to further her career. Major was decent enough and did his best over Europe and the economy, only to be sabotaged by the likes of Deadwood and Bonehead. The party preferred - just - PR man Cameron over David Davis who actually was successful in business before going into politics. They then had the nonentity May, the featherweight Johnson, the disastrous Truss and the unreal-economy Sunak. And without having remotely learned the lesson, they chose Badenoch who had risen without trace like Truss. Is it deathwish? In this case electing a puppet so the corruption can proceed unchanged doesn't apply as she isn't PM.
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  173. It would probably turn out that most of them are too small to be viable or have inadequate premises. It is hard to get it across to people, a number of whom may well be relatively recent immigrants, that just because you pay for it up front doesn't mean it is better than state provision.
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  174. Exactly. I didn't notice Johnson offering profound thoughts on what is going on in the Russian government, or even the Duma. Just name calling.
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  175. I doubt either of them regret anything. They both give the impression of having zero empathy and zero insight. That may be what makes them successful.
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  176. Narcissism, we've all heard of it. But why is it the right wing parties here and in the US that seem to have so much of it? Do Twitter and Facebook preferentially rot right wing minds?
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  177. Small tornados (waterspouts) can be very destructive and also very small at water level, as well as being fast moving. They happen on land too. A couple of years ago we had a very small one, you could track it by the roof tiles that it removed from a succession of houses. It was no more that 4 tiles wide, missed us completely, clipped our neighbour, and removed the caps from the roofs of a couple of other houses.
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  178. No, "populist" means politicians who advocate doing what they think will get the votes of the uneducated, even when the results are harmful to the country. Doing what "the public" wants is likely to be disastrous, which is why we have representative democracy - as do just about all developed countries. Athens discovered this - initally the franchise was limited to the upper middle classes, people who could afford to take time off to attend debates. The test was being a freeman who could afford a hoplite panoply - equivalent today to being able to buy your own armoured car and lend it to the government. As the franchise extended down the social scale, to keep people supportive of the government, decision making got worse and worse, they were more likely to listen to Farage types and make really bad decisions, and as a result eventually lost the wars with Sparta and Athenian democracy was over. It lasted about 50 years.
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  179. Meanwhile the French retain a pointless verb conjugation system. Je regarde, tu regardes, il regarde, nous regardons, vous regardez, ils regardent. Are you suggesting we would all be better off if we reverted to Old English? Proper declensions and conjugations? Because retaining one special conjugation for the third person singular makes no sense at all.
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  180.  @Pooter-it4yg  Знаю. See what I did there? English has evolved towards prefixes rather than suffixes. It's basically a commercial language evolved to be a lingua franca, if you see what I mean. Meanwhile the Germans keep having arguments about simplification and the French tinker around the edges so that these days I can't remember which words no longer have circonflexes and çedillas, let alone where ß isn't used any more. Our sentence structure is different from Slavic* languages because we rely on positional order. This presents a problem for Bulgarian which doesn't have Russian word order flexibility, for instance. You may find these things fun but if you need to get a job done they can be rather annoying. *As for the flavours of Slavonic, I'm not Othodox and thank Bog I don't need to know about them.
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  181. If Truss did not have her unearned huge pension to fall back on, I think she'd be delivering for a pizza shop.
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  182. Kensington and Chelsea? You are surely peddling disinformation.
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  183. I think the Inuit merely need to ask their neighbours to the West how they got on with the white invaders before offering a middle finger to Trump.
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  184. I like many others followed the whole story in Computer Weekly and The Register with growing disbelief at HP's apparent incompetence. It seems a jury agreed. I've done another post which provides some background, but most people I've discussed it with think the problems lay with Leo the Chemist (Leo Apotheker, CEO of HP) and his CFO. They wanted Autonomy, come hell or high water.
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  185. The best thing about this is that Farage won't even realise what is going on. The Marriage of Faragio where he doesn't realise what the Count is planning for him.
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  186. How about academics who have a brilliant idea, build up a large company, employ lots of people on high salaries? I object to people walking in (e.g. to top job at HP or IBM) to existing companies and being paid telephone numbers. But when someone builds up a company from scratch, that's a very different matter. The fact that HP screwed the pooch is neither here nor there. Lynch's work was important and it added value to society. It is childish to confuse someone like him with a leech like Musk who got rich off other people's work.
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  187. Наижел Фараж любит Ванц и Трамп - Pravda exclusive.
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  188. The Conservative problem is the same as the Republican problem - the headbangers drove out all the sensible people and now they have nobody who understands how to unite rather than divide. They preferred David Davis over Cameron not realising Cameron would run the government with a very small Etonian clique (and a couple of oiks like Osborne). They eliminated Stewart and Tugendhat, both of whom would have been "safe pairs of hands." In the past they have chosen Hague, IDS, May, Johnson, Truss ffs, and then a banking apparatchik. In about 1970 I was asked if I wanted to join the Young Conservatives. I said that I really didn't want to get into student politics. "Oh", they said, "we don't do politics. No ideologies here." And that is the lesson the new Cons, with their two right wings, have forgotten.
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  189. The country that refused to sign the treaty against landmines is now sending them to Ukraine which means there will be minefields in Europe, as in WW2. It also means civilians will die in American minefields, again. Now the significance is obvious. If Ukraine intends to mine the edge of the Donbas, they have accepted they cannot retake it. You don't crap in your own garden. It was the same in the Falklands; when the British Army realised that Argentina was spreading landmines, they knew that the junta had no intention of occupying the Falklands, it was purely a vanity project to try to get public support. The de facto border will end up like the old East German one whatever Zelensky says about retaking land.
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  190. I suspect even the members realised that Jenrick had things in his past that might ome back to bite him. In Badenoch's case her problems will be the things in her future.
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