"we'll change the things that need changing and that's all we'll change": the paSUKification of post-brexit politics 2021

I don't really know what a yard is (roughly a metre?) ofc Ireland had its own insanities: for road signs it was miles if the sign was white and old, kilometres if the sign was green, but then it was also kilometres if the sign was white and new (they've probably replaced them all by now though)

bring back furlongs

furlongs is too horseracing

Greyhound racing is measured in metres but I'm sure I often heard the commentary in the bookies saying trap x is x yards ahead. I don't smoke weed but someone commented that it is bulk sold in ounces and also distributed in grams.

Fabric is measured in metres in the UK (or half metres if the shop is overpriced and they're trying to look less expensive at first)

Oh, I was talking about the US because there were posts saying we don’t use yards much.

Lol there's a metres and yards bit on the Simpsons ep I'm half watching right now

This made me chuckle yesterday, just the sheer insanity of it. And this is what they want to go back to lol

Tried to explain imperial measurements to the 5-year olds this morning. pic.twitter.com/fovYeItiUS

— Professor Pragya Agarwal (@DrPragyaAgarwal) September 17, 2021

took this opportunity to remind myself what an acre is = one (1) chain x one (1) furlong

then felt everyone else needed to enjoy this handy explanatory diagram (which introduces perches and rood but ignores chains and furlongs)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7f/Comparison_land_area_units.svg/440px-Comparison_land_area_units.svg.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z-dJ35fOiM

just realised it isn't "yards" greyhound racing commentary commonly uses to describe distances between the frontrunner and back, it's "lengths"

The twitter video was properly useful, knowing it's 11*10*16 feet in a mile will actually make it easier for me to remember that.

(also of course 12->10 is switching to something 'neater' from something more useful on a day to day basis pre-calculator-in-your-timepiece - you can cut 12 into every number from 1-6 except 5, and if you want five then you can go large to 60, which we still for time. 11 is still stupid, though)

yards! I meant yards.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E_lJoBQXoBAb0dN?format=jpg&name=large

I say if millions of people linked out their electric meters or just stopped paying in protest then they can't put us all in prison.

edf always email to say "meter reading by the 21st, please" and then text "we still haven't had a meter reading" on the 17th, which annoys me.

and the one time they credited my gas payment to the electricity account leaving the gas in arrears for 3 months before anybody noticed but nothing happened.

looking at that chart it's no wonder they (French) are keen on selling to England.

I have a combined gas/electric monthly dd and they used to inform me every april they were lowering it to account for the lower gas consumption of the summer months so the account didn't go too far into credit. At some point in the last few years they stopped doing that.

I’m on quarterly bills because I don’t want EDF having DD access to my account. They seem to try for five bills a year based on when they ask for a meter reading but I just ignore those letters and provide a reading once a quarter, based on being a month and a half away from my quarterly BT bill.

can't remember if i saw this here or just random Twitter but the panicky looks at 38s...

Sir Roger Gale (Tory MP) says one farming business in his constituency has had to trash £320,000 worth of produce due to no pickers and no drivers.

There are cries of “Brexit, Brexit” around the house… and the Govt front bench looks nervous.pic.twitter.com/uOE02uMe5w

— Dr Mike Galsworthy (@mikegalsworthy) September 15, 2021

maybe those farmers should attempt paying an attractive wage

probably would cost something south of £320,000

my friend who i helped move out of her london flat yesterday and today told me that when she filled up her car on sat morn for the big drive to norfok she had to go to three petrol stations before she found one actually currently selling petrol lol

also the combo firm she pays for her gas and electricity has gone bust and she currently has no one she actually can pay and her housing assocn doesn't know what's going to happen (and two similar firms have gone bust)

Would probably cost more than the profit margin on that £320k though. Which is crushed because the markets drove it right down to the level where farming is only possible with very low-paid labour.

Govt needs to somehow force UK workers to take the worst possible wages for jobs (during a worker shortage that is driving wages up), or watch prices soar on top of already Covid-inflated prices. What will they choose. (Lol both obviously) xp

maybe those farmers should attempt paying an attractive wage

How many of the Tory cunts voted for Brexit too I wonder.

we seem to be reaching a point that Boris and his big brain didn't allow for tho - that Brexit voters accept that this is a consequence of Brexit, don't care because they're still pro Brexit, but do blame this government for fucking up the post Brexit settlement. and they won't care whether that's logical or not

Farmers being farmers again is it. It's strange that in the Major years that harvesting was one of the only jobs with a national minimum wage even that was a massive £3.83 pH.

as mark says the govt appears to be quite relaxed about letting smaller energy firms fail. are farms who refuse to pay wages high enough to attract a workforce any more worthy of a bailout?

yes they’d need to raise prices. yes working people would then need bigger paychecks to pay for their weekly shop. don’t threaten me with a good time

going to end up with corn laws in a minute because if they raise prices above the level where imports are cheaper supermarkets will import and still not buy from them, then you really are into bullshit bailout territory just to keep British farms going.

Like NV says, Brexit promised the impossible (fewer immigrant workers, higher wages, same prices, no shortages) and now govt expected to deliver it somehow.

see also promise to level up but not to affect the south, promise to solve housing crisis but not to affect boomer property prices, promise to fund social care but not to make elderly pay etc etc

Know it's the Torygraph and it has Blair quotes in it but it's actually an ok piece that sketches out the scenarios.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/will-winter-lockdown-experts-set-three-scenarios-good-bad/

I baulked more at the Lolico quote, but at least it followed it up with a counter Lolico quote!

Those energy bailouts might be in the works https://on.ft.com/3CpCD9J

meanwhile the farmers are doing their own bailing. I got some serious country knowledge from a farm cattle herding lady the other day. She said dairy cows won't charge at you, herds of beef cows on the other hand need to be watched and might make a run for you. That makes perfect sense tbf.

It's maddening to read a story like that one in the Telegraph full of "It's reassuring that we haven't seen case numbers climb to higher levels" and "<in this situation> Cases start to rise again" when cases have been rising steadily for months (they've plummeted in the last week, but so has testing) and deaths have also been on the march - from an weekly average of 14.4 on the 20th of June to 144 last Thursday.

Some of the modelling did have case numbers at 100k but we've not been at half that.

Hospitalisations are around 6-8k for weeks and deaths have been around one to two hundred now since mid-July?

No signs right now that it will get as bad as last winter.

How it started How it’s going pic.twitter.com/QkkahKHCGt

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) September 20, 2021

yeah, i'm getting worried that i'll miss christmas for second year running.

there's another anti-lockdown sticker on the bus shelter this morning, i will paraphrase: "If this was a real pandemic the government would be working 24/7 to stop it, the fact that they aren't means the danger isn't real". er, no...

I saw some classic Marsan comedy this morning. He's quote-tweeting the archbishop of Canterbury in defence of the bigot Duffield with the hashtag #disagreewell. The Disagree Well should be a Kurasawa revenge movie about an avenging samurai who throws melts and knaves down a deep well.

xp Haha yeah, there is definitely another option that's not being considered there.

Hospitalisations are around 6-8k for weeks

Sure, in that it was 6k at the start of August and it's over 8k now. They stopped rising as fast as they had - they shot up from 2k at the start of July then plateaued a bit for a fortnight after hitting 6k, but it's been heading upwards since.

and deaths have been around one to two hundred now since mid-July?

40 on the 15th of July, 75 a fortnight later, then 90, then 113, then 138 - it's been pretty consistent?

No signs right now that it will get as bad as last winter.

No, and that's good, don't get me wrong, linear is definitely better than logarithmic! It's just weird seeing big brains talking about things are getting better when things just aren't getting wildly worse.

(and of course how bad things get is also a function of government action and indeed populace traction)

I'm getting this from https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

I don't disagree but I see that as a successful vaccination programme that has allowed lockdown to be rightly lifted.

Part of me does think that some restrictions could've been kept going until we had more of the younger population doubly vaccinated, and that there were more restrictions on numbers during the Euros but otherwise things have definitely gotten better. I know that 100 deaths a day isn't great but compared to winter.

That report covers how things could get worse. Certain communities could see a rise, plus influenza could come back and overwhelm hospitals.

Dunno whether to post this on here or in the UK Comedy thread, but I have recently discovered that Alistair Campbell's daughter has a stand-up act, and judging by the panel show she was on it's entirely anecdotes about her dad being a wild and crazy guy and angry tirades against Jeminy Crumbyn (v topical); the benefactors of nepotism used to be more circumspect about this kind of thing?

she was on As Yet Untitled the other week, kept talking about her dad without saying who he was.

Yeah that's where I encountered her, for most of it I thought she must be the daughter of some old school comedian but then she starts talking about having her dad take her to Question Time (making one comment for the "die hard Question Time fans", an alarming concept if there's ever been one) and her lecturing her dad and John McDonnel on labour divisiveness (and then everyone stood up and applauded). Slightly salvaged by Babatundé Aléshé looking just as miserable having to listen to her as I was.

This sounds appalling.

The @LibDems smashing the blue wall 👊🔶 pic.twitter.com/PZ7QipQGZl

— Dominic Buxton (@DominicBuxton) September 19, 2021

oh gosh I'm going to end up looking up a clip of Campbell's daughter now on the panel show now just to experience the horror first hand.

It was bad enough when they became politicians and journalists, but comedians? Come sweet death, take me now.

If only more of them became comedians

Ayesha Hazarika went the route of failed political advisor>failed stand-up comedian>presenter on right-wing talk radio. Maybe it's not family nepotism keeping her in jobs, but it sure helps to be from a posh background and be a vocal critic of the left.

Rachel Connolly had a good piece on the LRB blog a while back about the awful wave of comedy nepotists.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/april/funny-voice-videos