palordrolap
@palordrolap@kbin.social
- Comment on Voter ID | The Electoral Commission 5 months ago:
Not voting, if you're otherwise able, is a tacit acceptance for how things are.
Presumably you don't want to vote for the incumbents, so vote for someone who'll replace them, whether you like that option or not.
Voting out a bad lot is the only legal way we have to protest.
And then vote third party next time if they don't change things to your liking. Then fourth. Fifth. Etc.
Don't like the political parties? Start one.
Think the whole lot should be lined up and shot? (For legal reasons this is purely metaphorical.) Start organising.
But if that's too much for you, vote.
- Comment on Average British house price hits record high of £375,000 5 months ago:
This is mean sale price, right? Got to wonder what the current median property value (not sale price) is, and how close that is to this mean.
My point being that a lot of churn at prices near the mean would keep that mean away from a true median property value.
- Comment on UK police could get Ghostbusters-style backpack devices to halt ebike getaways 6 months ago:
In before this comes with a taser attachment.
- Comment on School leaders warn of ‘full-blown’ special needs crisis in England 6 months ago:
One wonders how a state with increasingly fascist tendencies would handle this crisis if it became impossible to ignore...
- Comment on Royal Mail waives £5 penalty charge for fake stamps 6 months ago:
That's how it works. If mail isn't paid for it's made unavailable to the recipient.
I don't know how long they hold onto unpaid mail, but I assume they eventually destroy it, or open it, remove anything valuable for auction and get rid of anything else. Maybe if they're lazy, you might get something non-valuable for nothing if you know what landfill their waste goes to, but I expect they'd at least shred it.
Chances are they don't get valuables all that often because if the contents are valuable, someone's probably going to want to pay the price of postage to get it... and whoever sent it probably put the right postage on it in the first place, dodgy stamps notwithstanding, as well as a return address.
And that last part is why the policy is for the charge to go to the recipient. The postal service often has no idea who sent a letter, only where it's going.
- Comment on Royal Mail waives £5 penalty charge for fake stamps 6 months ago:
Only if they want the letter. If they don't want it, the postal service will gladly destroy it at no charge.
Thus, this isn't necessarily a good way to exact punishment on an unsuspecting recipient. Someone who gets a lot of fan (and hate) mail will gladly forego the small handful that don't have postage.
- Comment on Royal Mail waives £5 penalty charge for fake stamps 6 months ago:
Charging the recipient for insufficient postage has always been the policy of the British postal service. These fraudulent stamps have thus been included in with that policy because as far as they're concerned a fraudulent stamp is as good as no stamp at all.
Anything with insufficient postage is held at the sorting office closest to the recipient and a note is posted (ironic, no?) to the recipient telling them to come and pay the postage if they want it.
The reasons they've backed down this time are 1) their newfangled bar code stamps have failed to stop the very forgery they were designed to prevent, and 2) public outcry causing them (the postal service, not the stamps) to reluctantly admit that this whole thing might, maybe, uh, perhaps just a little bit, be their fault.
- Comment on Disability benefit claims can’t be made on ‘unverifiable assertions’, argues Sunak 6 months ago:
Do you want deforestation because that's how you get deforestation.
- Comment on Why haven't I heard calls for sanctions on this abominable regime yet? 6 months ago:
An older person I talk with (older than Boomer generation if you can believe that) keeps trying to moot that it's an "invasion" and then goes on about how these invaders have paid thousands to some people trafficker to be able to get over here.
I point out that invaders generally don't pay more than their life savings to invade, they get paid to do so. And they usually turn up with weapons.
Bless 'em, I keep having to reset their compassion because the newspapers must be what's putting these "invasion" ideas in their head.
There's a vague chance they might not vote right in the upcoming elections.
In other news, and riffing on the "skulls" comment elsewhere, I'd quite like for someone to stand up in the Commons and ask what the government's jackboot budget is these days, and whether teaching armed troops to goose-step is coming back into fashion.
- Comment on UK inflation falls as meat and crumpet prices drop 7 months ago:
Mean and crumpet? Haven't we learned not to use these terms for each other? "Desirable partners" is the preferred termino...
whisper whisper whisper
I am told that I have misunderstood the headline. Please carry on about your business.
- Comment on Royal Mint to stop making overseas coins after 700 years 7 months ago:
Prediction: Royal Mint will cease to exist within the decade. King William coinage will be minted in the European Union.
- Comment on Fake stamps circulating in the UK are originating from China, lawmaker says 7 months ago:
Yeah, that looks like what Google Translate gave me. The old horse-bell yam.
- Comment on Fake stamps circulating in the UK are originating from China, lawmaker says 7 months ago:
Because people would lose attention if they tried to use a phrase longer than "China", and most people on this side of the world wouldn't know or retain a specific placename in China unless they had specific interest in the country.
The news could throw something like "Malingshu province" and most people wouldn't bat an eye.
... despite the fact that that province name is fake and is in fact a mangled transliteration of one of the Mandarin words for "potato".
- Comment on ‘Romeo & Juliet’ Play Starring Tom Holland and Francesca Amewaduh-Rivers Faces ‘Barrage of Racial Abuse,’ Producer Says ‘This Must Stop’ 7 months ago:
A fellow of milkable wealth.
- Comment on Public satisfaction with NHS falls to lowest level on record 7 months ago:
NI is just another tax that goes into the total pot
It's not supposed to be that way though. It has only become that way through many tiny changes so that now it's indistinguishable from "yet another income tax".
The entire point of its existence was to fund the welfare state, including the NHS, and the government we've had most of in the last 50 years absolutely despises welfare. Unless it's for people who already have too much money and businesses "too big to fail" anyway.
- Comment on Public satisfaction with NHS falls to lowest level on record 7 months ago:
Our blue powers-that-be are talking about getting rid of National Insurance as swing-voter catcher for the next election (whenever that might be). NI underpins many things, including the NHS.
Now there's something about only a small percentage of NI going to the NHS, but who's behind that exactly? Oh. Blue people again.
And then they say "See! See how rubbish the NHS is! It cannot work! Go private! What's that? You don't have money? Get a better job! Go private! It's easy! This has nothing to do with ideology and we certainly haven't been actively making the NHS worse! Go private! We have shares in private! Oops shouldn't have said that! Vote for us!"
- Comment on What’s the point of Starmer’s Labour if it won’t stand up for poor, sick or disabled people? | Frances Ryan 8 months ago:
The point of Starmer's Labour is that it's a step towards shifting the Overton window back towards the left, for which there's no hope under the Tories who are sliding further and further to the right without any sort of regulation.
Short of revolution - and good luck with that, even Starmer's a kettler - it's the only way there's any hope of it. We got into this mess gradually, and we're going to have to get out of it the same way.
The real problem is that there's no party to the left of Labour, so what the next step is after that is a more difficult one. Still, might as well take the obvious step while there's a chance.
Perhaps we can convince Labour to slide left once they're in.
They can't do that now because they need the votes of Overton-affected floating voters and need to be "in touch" with what those voters want. Or at least appear to be.
- Comment on Prince William calls Israel-Hamas fighting to end 'as soon as possible' 8 months ago:
Define "possible". Now get several thousand Israelis and a few hundred Palestinians to agree on what's possible. Even within those groups, never mind between them.
- Comment on Ten Million Voters Still Don’t Know They Need Voter ID: Rishi Sunak’s Government accused of trying to “gerrymander” the next general election by making it harder for certain groups to vote 9 months ago:
Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of the Toriest of Tories, actually admitted that they'd shot themselves in the foot (he may even have used those exact words) by introducing voter ID at the last elections; a larger contingent of the Conservative-voting public than for other parties was unable to vote due to not having the requisite ID.
Many Conservative voters are scared shut-in curtain-twitchers who think the world's gone mad (I mean they're not wrong on that count, I speak as a shut-in myself), but that fear, for various reasons, makes them keep voting Conservative. Kind of hard to get ID if all you do is stay at home and your only way of staying informed is to read the Mail and Express every day, it would seem.
Thus, I would have thought the Cons would have found some excuse to get rid of it before the next lot of elections.
But then, that might mean getting the whole party to agree that it was a mistake rather than the occasional stopped clock.
- Comment on Eight million UK households to get £299 cost of living payments from Tuesday 9 months ago:
Prediction: They'll leave it as long as possible before calling the election.
Secondary prediction: If they think people are predicting they're holding off as long as possible, they'll call it earlier than they have to in order to prove the prediction wrong.
Tertiary prediction: "Earlier" will be no more than a month.
- Comment on Dud’s army: How on earth will Gen Z cope with conscription? | Ryan Coogan 9 months ago:
Without some absolutely top-tier propaganda, you'll end up with a whole load of conscientious objectors who'll have to be cajoled or outright threatened to fight.
And you don't want to give a gun to someone who's been forced into a miserable situation they don't want to be in with no way out.
On the other hand, maybe there are enough zoomers who'd take to conscription like their (great-)great-grandparents did in the 1940s. Gung-ho, fight the enemy, come back with PTSD if you come back at all and all that.
Maybe they'll leave that last part out of the propaganda. Or maybe this time they'll promise (pretty promise with sugar and a cherry on top) that since we have PTSD treatments now, those will definitely be implemented for those who make it back. Absolutely. No question.
Yay war!
- Comment on Gordon Brown calls for overhaul of benefits system as study reveals ‘crisis’ 9 months ago:
"Damn right! Good thinking, Brown. Those lazy good for nothing oiks and whackos should get far less. In fact, is there a way to get them to give us money?" - John Q. Tory.
- Comment on 'I told police who my burglar was - but they did nothing' 10 months ago:
unless the victim is a business
Not true! If you're a member of the police, a close relative of the same, or anyone who can take legal retribution against the police farce or manage to make them look exceptionally bad in some way, then you'll be cared about too!
- Comment on Jeffrey Epstein: Prince Andrew named in newly released court files 10 months ago:
Nah. He's too honourable.
- Comment on Comment any opinion and I will disagree with it, no matter what. 11 months ago:
Your opinions are valid.
- Comment on UK responds to Argentina new president’s pledge to ‘get back’ Falkland Islands 11 months ago:
The Falklands are 300 miles "off the coast" of Argentina.
By that logic, France, let's say, has much greater rights to Britain's resources which is only 25 miles away, and Canada will no doubt be laying claim to Greenland very soon on account of it being only 10 miles off their coast.
- Comment on NHS waiting list could hit 9 million in two years after Hunt offers no new money 11 months ago:
Hunt literally co-wrote a book on how to turn the NHS into a US-style system, and members of his family are prominent in private healthcare.
Understand now?
- Comment on Disabled people must work from home to do ‘their duty’, says UK minister 11 months ago:
May could have been a good Thatcher but for the lack of balls. Truss could have been a good Thatcher but for the lack of a brain.
The former, a school administrator elevated well beyond her abilities, the latter, a child with a head full of Tory rhetoric but no means to innovate or extrapolate.
In a way, we should be glad we got them and not Maggies mark 2.
- Comment on Truss-supporting economists call for minimum wage to be frozen, then cut 11 months ago:
That site really needs a newer stock photo of cash. I felt compelled to look it up: The paper tenner was withdrawn in 2018 and the round pound coins were withdrawn in 2017.
Feels like last week. Where the hell has the time gone? (Pandemic probably hasn't helped.)
Back on topic, those economists are letting their cold, blue little hearts rule their heads. Ghouls.
- Comment on ‘Flip-flopping’ has cost UK billions in investment cash since 2010, says report 1 year ago:
"Listen, you. The correct course of action is always and I mean always whatever makes the most money for me and my mutual back-scratching cronies in the short term, possibly medium term if I dare plan that far ahead. Sod the long term and anyone else because I'm going to make damn sure I've got mine until the moment I kick the bucket. What are you going to do about it?" -- Sir Stereotypical Tory