Orb

The trees will house facial recognition cameras in them.

Looks like the inside of a narrowboat. What a con!

We both agree he's reactionary, whatever game he's up to, whatever force or pressure he's looking to appease for his own gain. Which is why come the end of September, I'll worry about nightclub covid passports if it actually happens. Which I don't think it will.

I think all this dissecting of the covid passport for nightclub policy is missing something more fundamental. Boris is a whimsical, u-turning, gas-lighting, manipulative, liar, despite the bit-of-a-lad persona that fools so many. So this policy is, in my opinion, nothing more than a fear-mongering, manipulative, blackmailing attempt at coercing youngsters to get vaccinated. Then come the end of September this policy won't be implemented, because lo and behold, vaccination rates amongst 18-30 year olds are miraculously over 90%. Earlier this year the idea of covid passports for pubs was bandied around. Then later the government said "there are no plans to introduce covid passports for pubs". I'll put money on the same happening for nightclubs. And if they do come in for nightclubs, it'll hit the night time economy so hard, Boris will u-turn on it. This is all noise. Nothing to see here. It's probably a distraction story to take a bit of attention off Dominic Cummings popping his head out again this past day or so claiming Boris was prepared to see the queen whilst positive with Covid.

Interesting... seems a fair bit of house for £60k. I wonder why it's cash buyers only though? It implies it's unmortgage-able for some reason. And for the owners to lose 25% over 8 years... Probably highly undesirable neighbours and foundational problems.

As someone who's never had a smartphone, I'm smugly watching the UK tie itself in bizarre knots over this 🙂

That's about as bad as flicking through Tinder, seeing a face you like, and clicking "marry".

LOL I'd love to know how much they paid for their noisy soulless crap hole dream.

LOL, the entire premise of competition is based on winning and losing. It unites people in as much as it brings polar opposites together under one roof, like the battle fields of the world wars did. English and Italian fans will be throwing bottles at each other after the match!

I was in the industry before 2004, the year many EE states were added to the EU. Instantly, at the company I worked for, 7 Hungarians turned up. I was politically unaware in those days, and couldn't understand why that happened. So I then became more interested in politics. I felt quite horrified, betrayed, and angered at what happened over the following 5 years, and watched wages slowly but surely hit almost minimum wage. Terms & conditions fared no better. Double time on Sundays vanished, Mon-Fri slowly became 'any 5 from 7' which is a terrible shift pattern (meaning you'd be off Wed and Fri one week, then Mon and Thur the next, and occasionally you'd get a weekend off). If you didn't like these conditions of employment, there was always somebody knocking on the door who would accept them. Then there was EU cabotage rules, which allowed an EU member state lorry to arrive in the UK with a load, do a certain number of internal jobs within 7 days, before exiting the UK with a backload for continental Europe. They'd do these internal UK domestic jobs using much cheaper diesel pumped into large diesel tanks far away, pay their driver local (say Romanian or Polish) wages, and undercut British hauliers by a significant amount, thus putting further downward pressure on UK driver's wages. One very large online retailer used these boys extensively. I see a bit of this still goes on, but it appears greatly reduced now. I felt further angered by official narratives claiming FoM had no effect on wages, because I'd seen intimately the very detrimental effect it had on wages. I felt even more angered at being labelled "racist" or "xenophobic" when voicing my concerns. I felt (and feel) no malice towards East Europeans, just anger at politicians and their cynical policies that ultimately benefited them and their donors (much like the housing market). So I stopped talking, and acted by marking my ballot paper "Leave the European Union". There was a high prevalence of leavers amongst HGV drivers for this reason alone. Things are now beginning to correct themselves in terms of natural market forces, and in my opinion the leave vote was the single best moment for ordinary working people I've ever seen, and likely to see. We were the ones who had the bathwater, not the baby. Funnily, a lot of my Romanian colleagues supported the leave vote, because many of them didn't want any more EE's coming, and they were upset at their wage suppression. Seriously, the transport industry was flooded with EE. And I don't use that word lightly. Every destination I went to would be 60% EE drivers. I'd often sign in to places, and from 30 names on a sign-in sheet, I'd see about 4 British names. My point is to highlight exactly how much superfluous labour the industry had on tap, at the drop of a hat, at a low cost, because of EU expansion. Some firms, especially in the east of England (Lincs, Norfolk, etc), employed only EEs, and paid £9p/h at best. They're struggling now, and that's why you're seeing occasional gaps on the shelves of fresh produce. The industry employs a lot of EE, but less so now. There's a noticeable absence, and that's what's causing the slight and temporary driver shortage. Many EE drivers are now choosing Germany, as it's closer to home, the wages are (for now) decent, and there's the FoM to do so. Expect indignation from there soon.

I'm not an footie fan by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm gagging for England to win because we left the stupid EU, then pee'd all over them in the vaccination race, un-lockdown, and the euros lol.

What really angers me (as a long serving HGV driver) is how certain groups (such as the Road Haulage Association) call for temporary visas for foreign labour as a strategy to mitigate the so called driver shortage. Wages have increased, that's undisputed from what I'm witnessing inside the industry right now, but they're only rising to where they should have been had cheap and plentiful EE labour not applied downward pressure on wages this past 17 years, and a true, un-manipulated job market been allowed to play out. HGV driving was historically a well paid job (£50k wasn't unheard of 20 years ago on petrol tankers), but since 2004 I saw it drop to an almost minimum wage affair in some cases. That's insane for a job with the level of licensing, training, responsibility, knowledge, bureaucracy, skill, and liability professional HGV driving demands, often for 12-15 hours per day. And now the tinpot hauliers who employed only EE drivers are panicking, as they can't get drivers. The Lincolnshire refrigerated hauliers who transport fresh produce for supermarkets are a good case in point. There's a difference between an HGV driver and an HGV licence holder. Many drivers moved into different industries because of the race to the bottom regarding terms, conditions, and wages. We don't need to grant temporary visas to cheap foreign workers, thus putting pressure once more on wages. Current rising wages will attract many HGV licence holders back into the industry to plug a part of the so called driver shortage. I say 'so called' driver shortage because until you literally cannot get petrol or food, there is no grave shortage (though I acknowledge there is currently a small temporary shortage). A firm such as Tesco destroying 2 lorry loads of food per week is negligible when you consider they deal with tens of thousands of trailer movements per week across all their depots. As a consumer, I'm yet to feel the disappointment of not being able to get every item on my recent shopping lists. I'm not on the level of a holocaust or Covid denier, but my personal opinion is that the driver shortage is a narrative that's been continually pedalled since I became aware of the trucking press (mid 80s). A lot of people don't realise, but the "50,000 drivers short" narrative was pedalled even throughout the pre-Brexit and great financial crash years where drivers were ten-a-penny, and wages were on the floor. It's always been 50,000. It's never stopped. It has a zombie-like momentum, much like "property prices only go up". This is because there are powerful vested interests in keeping wages low or getting more drivers in to the industry - large powerful haulage firms (with shareholders to please and CEO bonuses to pay), employment agencies, HGV training schools (the large nationwide ones who never stopped promising naive new passes "a job paying £45k on passing your test!") - it's all a big scam, and operates very similarly to the housing market it terms of perception management and its estate agent-esque vested interests.

Ar5ehole cancer would've been my intuitive guess. "U alright there m8? Ur limping whilst ur mincing lol" ... "Well I've got ar5ehole cancer FFS!"

c0ck cancer?

I love picture #7. It's probably the most depressing room you could rent, yet the EAs have still photoshopped a brilliant blue sky into the skylight. You really can't polish a turd, and rolling one in glitter doesn't fool anybody.