Re: "No one likes an asshole"
Personally I think the Americans elected an arsehole because they wanted him to go to town on the old-guard who have been lording it over them for so long :)
5770 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
"And apparently enough Brits and USians liked the lies from putin's puppets to vote to wreck their countries."
What?? You really think that highlighting a few contentious issues is enough to sway people's votes to a greater degree than the daily brainwashing from the local news?
"WELL DONE YOU."
That seems a bit harsh. I don't believe my one little vote can be conflated to me being responsible for the mess the politicians have made of the situation any more than your vote could be considered a failure to stop it.
You raise some valid points, but I certainly don't agree with all of them. At this point perhaps we should agree to disagree? I see no reason to sour the forum by continuing to dissect this particular beast, we're not going to change each others mind and it won't achieve anything substantial imo.
Putting aside differences and making the best of the situation seems to mean the other side should like it or lump it, and that's not going to happen. This is going to run and hamstring the UK for decades.
Unfortunately I'm going to have to agree with you there.
Just out of curiosity, if the Remain vote had won, do you think the Leave voters would have been expected to 'like it or lump it'?
So you and your pals thought you'd conduct a social experiment with the entire future of the UK's relationship with the rest of the world.
That's one way of looking at it, although I certainly took it a tad more seriously than you are implying - I'm not treating this as a game. From my point of view I was standing up for what I believe in.
Hoping for a revival of the "Dunkirque spirit" were you?
Guilty as charged.
How do you think that's worked out? 50% success rate? More? Less?
I will admit that I'm disappointed in the result. Whilst there was a slight majority vote in favour of leaving, it's hard to argue that there isn't an element of xenophobia there, rather than the positive viewpoint I had hoped would emerge. So I have to go with less than 50%.
I'll leave you to guess how well I think it's worked out.
I'm sure I have no need to guess, John. Any more than you need to guess that I was hopelessly idealistic in my faith that, when it comes to the crunch, people would pull together and show some solidarity.
I won't apologise for standing up for what I believe in, and I voted to leave because I genuinely believed that remaining in the EU would lead us down a path with fewer options later on, when an additional option or two could make all the difference.
It's just unfortunate that our political 'leaders' are so spineless and self-serving.
Lest we forget, the people of this country might have voted to join the EEC (an economic agreement) they didn't get a vote on handing over our national sovereignty. The very first time we had a chance to vote on that particular nugget was the Brexit referendum. Over 50% of the voters wanted to leave, and if you believe the pollsters the main differentiator appears to be age, i.e. the older people were more likely to vote to leave.
This has led to accusations of the older generation selling out the younger etc., yet you could also look at it as the older (more experienced) voters looking out for the younger generation (which are their children and future, remember).
Partisan lines have been drawn up along the most bizarre basis at times, but for me it's about the ability to stand up to the power brokers who see the little people as nothing more than cash cows to be milked and discarded, and I honestly believe we would have less power to do so within the EU.
"Not really seeing where your belief it'll achieve that result has sprung from."
Fair point, but it was only one of the reasons, and certainly not the main one.
If this country had been exposed to European culture (as opposed to almost entirely US culture) then Brits might *feel* European. As it is I don't feel connected with Europe, so the idea of decisions being made in Brussels outside of my ability to influence (by voting) doesn't sit well with me.
I was also rather hoping that this country would re-discover its collective backbone before it was too late and that once a decision was made that people would put aside their differences and make the best of the situation. Naive, I know, but without trying we would never know.
As it is, the remainers (who lost the vote by the way) have done everything they can to undermine the process and spread FUD across the land. Bloody annoying.
They succeeded above all expectations but in a completely unexpected way they didn't like: a majority voted for Brexit, largely because of the nasty habit of Whitehall to unjustly blame all impopular legislation on Brussels.
I think it's a bit presumptuous to assume that voting for Brexit = dumbed down.
I voted for Brexit, and oddly enough one of the reasons was so that our fawning politicians wouldn't have a skirt to hide behind anymore and we could actually stand a chance of holding them to account.
My first ever 'shit-yer-pants' moment was given to me by playing Doom in a dark room with the speakers up full. One of those 'ripper' monsters snuck up behind me and gave me a nasty surprise.
In fact, I think I jumped so hard I bashed my legs on the underside of the desk :) Happy Days.
Side note: I used to get accused of cheating in UT because I had such low ping times - benefits of working for an ISP and having a 100Mb connection direct to the locally hosted server ;)
"if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to fear”
I've just applied some basic logic circuits to this one (with all due precautions on overload/paradox etc.) and observed the following..
1. The only people who are afraid of this legislation are people who understand it technically and how it will affect the relationship between the people and government
2. The only people who understand this legislation in this sense are intelligent and have a moral conscience/sense of preservation for the whole of society and not just themselves
Therefore, for the original statement to be true, it can be considered 'wrong' to be both intelligent and have a moral conscience.
Now you know what the people who utter that phrase really believe.
I tried to track an item on the Royal Mail website yesterday, it took over 30 attempts for me to get the right combination.
I mean, is that dot in the distance, mostly obscured by a bush, a car, a lorry or a cyclist?
Is that a storefront? All I see are Chinese characters on a sign, it could be an old people's home for all I know.
FOAD indeed. Fucking parcel was here two minutes after I got through it.
At the conceptual level, security *is* binary.
It's only when you try to achieve that in reality that it falls short.
It's a bit like trust. Conceptually that is also binary, you can either trust someone or you can't.
In reality it's a bit more vague and it depends on what you are trusting someone for. Trusting a friend to return your car after borrowing it is one thing, trusting them to manage your bank accounts is another.
So here we have GCHQ, a known abuser of trust, asking us to trust it again. In response I would like to quote a well known security maxim back at them..
'Trust, but verify'. Until we have a cast-iron method of verification that their powers are not being abused then there simply cannot be any trust. At least not from those with a modicum of security training.
"Actually, I feel a letter to my MP coming on.... This could be fun."
I once sent a letter to my MP written on toilet paper. I recall mentioning that that's what I suspected all letters were used for anyway.
On that *one* occasion I got a response from the actual MP, handwritten, rather than the usual boilerplate stuff you usually get back.
Not sure it would work these days, someone would probably be offended and I'd be carted off to prison to learn to become an actual criminal and thereafter get an easier ride from the system.
First I've heard of this to be honest, although I am registered on the Flat Rate scheme (which I assume it doesn't affect*).
Perhaps the figures relating to #businesses meeting the turnover threshold that are not on the flat rate scheme is a bit lower than the headline figures here (unless that's already been taken in to account).
*I'm trying to break the habit of assuming anyone/anything makes sense anymore, but it's a struggle.
for all these bank cockups.
Almost all of these banks have built up a plethora of bespoke applications/scripts over the years to perform tasks that no off-the-shelf products could do.
These applications and scripts were developed and supported by in-house technical expertise.
Then the bean-counters came along and thought that off-shoring all those technical jobs would be so much cheaper and give the bank more profits.
So, now they are in the situation where aging scripts and apps are failing to meet the changes that inevitably happen and they no longer have the expertise to make changes without screwing things up.
You might ask me how I know this, but I couldn't possibly comment.