Posts by Dave314159ggggdffsdds 1772 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Apr 2019
Absolutely cuckoo. It basically put an end to the fake-contractor scams. No-one in their right mind insists on going to court (or tribunal) over what they know to be a scam, so all the chancers and liars and tax evaders simply stopped, rather than fight. There were, as before IR35's introduction, a handful of borderline cases requiring adjudication.
I think you've misunderstood my comment - which is ironic, given the definition I presented of 'correct English' - if you think I said countable/uncountable nouns don't exist. I said that the distinction between fewer and less is not countable v uncountable. And that the distinction is language-elitist nonsense, which I'll stand by unless anyone can present an example of somewhere ambiguity would be introduced by using one instead of the other.
Incidentally, you aren't wrong about billions. When I was a kid there were still plenty of older books around which said it was 10^12. But it was already being superseded by the common-sense international standard version.
Countable/uncountable is definitely wrong. Plural/singular at least makes some sense.
But...
English only has one rule: your usage is correct if it leads the people you are attempting to communicate with to understand what you intended them to understand. Fewer/less is a difference manufactured by prescriptivists, which has become somewhat established over many, many years - mainly as a form of elitism. Can anyone suggest any example(s) where using one word or the other actually makes something ambiguous or otherwise hard to understand?
Cuckoo!
Any information like that will be worked out on the basis of the observations that can be made and what we know about physics. It'll have been written up and published so it can be checked by everyone else working in the field.
You could have just googled it to find out how they worked out the wind speed, but no, better pull that tinfoilhat on tight.
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/5400mph-winds-discovered-hurtling-around-planet-outside-solar-system/
"try taking an infrared measurement off of a speck of dust drifting in front of a raging fire, from a mile away."
Without an atmosphere in the way, that's a technical challenge, but not impossible at all. With, say, 10,000x magnification*, that's like taking a picture of something 10x the size of a dust particle (so, say, 0.1-1mm across), from 5 feet away. Obviously, with an infrared filter on the camera, a picture _is_ a temperature measurement, so all you need to do is then look how bright those pixels are on your image.
[*This is not actually how space telescopes work. But it's good enough for the purposes of debunking that nonsense.]
On the contrary, I have read the reports, and you won't find any respectable source saying anything else.
The simple fact is there were many MCAS incidents for every one that led to a crash. The linking factor between the crashes was that the pilots were inexperienced and overworked. Experienced pilots managed to deal with MCAS problems even without any specific training. Those are the actual facts here.
Boeing didn't 'game the regulatory system', though people clearly fucked up the implementation. The idea was sound: there should be (and were) fewer incidents with a plane that flies like an old one than there would be when pilots have to learn and qualify on a whole new plane.
It should be noted that the stuff Boeing is being fined for had no impact on the crashes. Those were down to inexperienced, overworked pilots at corner-cutting regional airlines in parts of the world with a non-Western approach to safety standards. None of the other MCAS incidents led to crashes. Unfortunately in all the Boeing-bashing, that is being overlooked, and it's by far the bigger safety issue here. There have been several more crashes (of all kinds of planes) since due to the same practices.
Yes, and still better than Le Pen is. I'll take the people who won't admit to themselves that they're Nazis over the people who lie about what they are to others, because at least the ones lying to themselves accept that it's vile - so if, maybe through some method reminiscent of Clockwork Orange, you could get them to understand what it is they actually believe, they might stop. But, like I said, it's 'choose your favourite from the Bristol Stool Scale' stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_stool_scale
And yet, 'austerity' is still just Tory propaganda; money was spent that wasn't allocated to those areas. If you're calling for a bigger increase, be honest about it.
I have no problem saying more money should have been spent on things. I have a problem with 'austerity' bullshit. It was Tory propaganda, and Labour decided it was more beneficial to them to go along with the narrative than to challenge it; this is a tactic that has been empirically proven not to work. It's much better to dispute the narrative and attack the Tories for profligacy and waste, and/or to state clearly that NHS funding requires increased borrowing, if that's what you mean.
Of course Jewish people are just as capable of believing antisemitic things as non-Jews. It's pretty normal that in any oppressed group some of the members come to believe that the oppression is justified by the group's alleged misbehaviour.
"things have become so politicised that any criticism of the Israeli government gets the dog-whistle of antisemitism"
The idea that Jewish people make false allegations of antisemitism for political ends is itself an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
The reality is that some people perceive racism where there is none, but that much more commonly the victims of racism are better placed to spot it than those who are not involved. Speaking specifically about 'criticism of the Israeli government', it's sometimes not antisemitic per se, but usually comes from people who are antisemitic and have said many other antisemitic things; mostly, though, it's just plain old antisemitic. It's notable that despite Israel having a fucked-up government at the moment, most of the criticism purporting to be of it is not based on reality, but on Iranian propaganda.
Yes. I provided a link earlier to the actual facts. Whatever Paul Krugman says - there are two types of Krugman articles, the ones where he speaks about economics, and the ones where he tackles social issues as an amateur - the facts are that the UK spent more every year, not less, and it was the deficit spending he approved of.
There is of course an argument to be made that the UK should have spent even more, but calling not doing so 'austerity' is falling into the Tory propaganda trap.
Vanishingly few of the people pretending to be pro-Palestine have ever said anything that is actually about helping Palestinians. They are anti-Israel (and mostly, let's be honest, overtly antisemitic). Ironically moderate Zionists - those who believe in Israel's right to exist, and even military action against Hamas, but don't support the current government - are pretty much the only people who ever express any actual concern for Palestinians, or do anything to support them.
"the value of the pound getting perhaps sufficiently close to that of the euro that would adopting it now actually make very much difference after all?"
The problem is not the value of the £ at joining. It's that the UK's economy is very differently structured to that of most Eurozone states. (Germany and a handful of other, smaller economies have had the same problem.) You can't set a single economic policy that suits all the different kinds of economies within such a large currency union, so, despite the rules, fiscal transfers from the richer economies are required to make it work. That would, quite rightly, be a killer to any plan to rejoin the EU.
As I've suggested elsewhere in this thread, there really ought to be two EU currencies (whether or not the UK rejoins). A slight loss of efficiency, but a big gain in economic growth without fiscal transfers.
Out of those 3 devolved bodies, two are run by extreme nationalist parties, and one is Wales, which no-one cares about enough to know what flavour of government they have. The DUP are vile, and the SNP makes a good pretence, but are ultra-nationalist and have presided over Scotland becoming the country with the most (recorded) hate crimes in Europe.
So, yes. We know what it looks like, and it's awful.
Reform would have lots of seats in Parliament, but you don't see that as a bad thing. Yup, yet another one who supports PR so the far right gains power.
We still haven't had a single PR advocate in this discussion who wasn't openly saying that the far right getting seats in Parliament is good. Because, that's what PR supporters want.
"There literally *is* a magic money tree"
!!!
Literally?
That's as daft as anything any magic money tree proponent has ever said, which is quite an achievement given the whole thing is a justification for the Holocaust. Apart from that misuse of 'literally' it sounds like you don't actually believe in the magic money tree at all, and you merely haven't quite understood it: the idea (such as it is) underpinning (such as it does) MMT is that money printing _does not_ cause inflation (and therefore the Weimar Republic's galloping inflation was the fault of the Jews, not of unfettered money printing to pay debts).
Your source does not support your claims about the Clintons. Repeating the same tired old nonsense about Joe Biden is also not proof of anything, except that you believe the things loony Trump nuts believe without a shred of evidence.
"That isn't what a lot of Democrats, and especially Democrat donors are saying."
Of course it is. The only argument is about whether there's someone more likely than Biden to beat Trump in the upcoming election, and/or who would make a better President. Anyone who isn't a loony Trump nut understands that even a dead body propped up in a chair would be better than a second term for Trump.
The level of hypocrisy involved in claiming Biden is incontinent, whilst Trump sits around in shit-filled nappies, is staggering. Maybe Biden did have to run to the toilet once. Trump doesn't even bother changing his nappies when he shits himself, it happens so frequently.
Now you're just repeating absurd conspiracy theories. And a few inanities. Trump isn't 'arguably less dreadful than Biden' except to Trump nuts who lie about what Trump is. Biden is hardly a good choice, but he's still clearly and obviously better than an incontinent populist liar/strongman-wannabe and convicted felon.
The Tories wouldn't have done better after another act of the clown show. Sunak was by far the best leader they had amongst the various choices. The previous election was unwinnable for any Tory leader, but Corbyn's idiocies and racism managed to over-ride the default Labour landslide and condemned the country to another Tory government. This time round, against grown-up opposition, there was no chance for the Tories whoever was in charge.
So... that's a bunch of countries that include many that are either run by extremists, or regularly have serious difficulties forming a government. Even the Netherlands currently has a government that incorporates a far-right party as the biggest group. It's obviously a system that is good for the far right, and bad for sane government.
I wrote that quite badly. I should have said 'rely on services', not 'exporting services' - though the same is broadly true in terms of what is being exported, but larger countries usually have large domestic economies.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.SRV.TOTL.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-services-in-total-exports?country=OWID_WRL~GBR~JPN~IND~DEU~Upper-middle-income+countries~Middle-income+countries~Lower-middle-income+countries~Low-income+countries~High-income+countries~SGP~USA
"There is no way to make Brexit a success for Britain."
No, but there are more and less harmful ways to do it. If it's going to be done at all, then it's simple common sense to maximise the upsides while minimising the downsides. That means unilateral free trade, liberal immigration policies, and so-on.
People advocating PR really are saying something quite incredible, when you think about it. How do you hold a vote for something or someone? Primary school children know the answer to this: averyone votes, and the person or thing which gets the most votes wins. But no, that way doesn't result in getting what PR-proponents want (because they're part of a small minority), so let's ignore common sense and come up with some absurdly complicated system vulnerable to manipulation, which lets extremists win.
I think the main reason Reform got so many votes is that in normal times people who support Reform-type parties would still vote Tory, because they know that's as close as they can get to what they want while still voting for a party that might actually achieve something, whereas this time round it was so obvious the Tories would lose heavily that it didn't apply. Also, a strong 'I'm not voting for those cocks again, whatever happens' swing against Tory. Give it five years and those things shouldn't apply, even without a swing even further to the right.
Corbyn's declaration of interests show that his main non-parliamentary income in the years before he became Labour leader was taking money from Iran to push their propaganda lines, including Holocaust denial. When he stopped being Labour leader, he went full Icke. There's no doubt about it, he's motivated by money.
"you think he's an anti-semite"
It's not just what I think. It's established fact.
"a label you've attached to half the commenters here too."
There are lots of antisemites here. I'm quite happy to call them what they make plain they are.
That doesn't sound like what I'd call 'small'! I've had a shock from mains wiring that was about like banging your funny bone, which seems more the kind of thing to lead idiots to think mains voltage can't really hurt you.
Then again, there are lots of idiots out there. I've seen someone trip a breaker - but fortunately not get hurt - working on a bathroom extractor fan, which, of course, has both switched and unswitched live, after turning off the light switch 'so there's no power to it'. I've also seen an electrician strip live wires with his teeth; he claimed that a good electrician can taste the difference between phases :)
Places like that _used_ to sell them. They are strongly discouraged in the UK by safety bodies, because UK sockets are safer without them. They're bendy enough to make it much easier to retract the shutters on L and N than any other way short of poking a screwdriver (or similar) into the earth.
"I genuinely think people fail to understand how dangerous mains electricity is because you cannot see or hear it unlike gas and water."
I think part of it is that lots of people - especially the kind of bodgers we're talking about here - have at some point experienced a small mains-voltage shock, and think that's as bad as it can get.
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