leicsmac

1 hour ago, Jon the Hat said:

Possibly worse I think, as Iran now know the US is a paper tiger that is not willing to invade, and that they can fight on almost indefinitely against air attack, while causing Billions of dollars of damage to US bases and allied countries which they don't like very much.  Oh and they know what they only hoped before, that their power to block the Straight of Hormuz is a massive trump card.  SO maybe they go back to where they were on nuclear weapons, but they feel emboldened in every other way, and will come out with fewer sanctions and more wealth

Right - so a fine use of resources all round then, yes.

23 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

think we need to wait for the wording of the MOU to be released by both parties (or pakistan)

 

Does seem that Iranian govt may well be better placed now than in mid Feb 

netenyahu is definitely not 

if he manages to cobble together a govt post the upcoming elections (has to be end Oct latest) it would be remarkable.  He gambled big time on this, dragging in the USA and its failed miserably. 

I guess we'll find out. 

It does look like in any case it looks like a truly needless waste of money and lives for pretty much all concerned, though. 

So correct me if I'm wrong, but the current agreement in the Middle East will pretty much status quo ante bellum... only with hundreds of billions of dollars spent quite a few lives needlessly taken, and economic uncertainty redoubled. 

That seems like a fine use of taxpayer resources, right? 

Just now, nnfox said:

Yes, people of all ages struggle with it but eventually you have to let adults stand on their own two feet.  We're talking here about protecting children, and actually, the adults who struggle with it are quite possibly of a generation of young adults who have grown up with unfiltered access to all of this stuff.

 

Personally, I don't think it goes far enough, this is a bit of a halfway house, but it's a step in the right direction.

I'm going to be honest, the comments that I see from a fair few older people (shall we say) on social media beg to differ there. 

Do again agree with the magnitude of the problem, though.

2 minutes ago, nnfox said:

But they're not banning 16 year olds.  It's kids under 16.  Very impressionable, sometimes very young brains that:

 

- Are susceptible to the harms that bad people do to them online (you were probably told not to talk to strangers, but it's very different now)

 

- Become over reliant on online relationships and lose key interpersonal skills and they are growing up to be young adults who, in times of difficulty, reach for the virtual world instead of real world relationships.

 

- Can't handle the effects of dopamine that flood their system.  It's the same chemical that drug addicts and alcoholics get from their vices and their are plenty of controls in place to protect children from them.

 

 

I get where you're coming from here, but such arguments (well, the first and third ones anyway) could easily be leveled against people of any age, given what I've seen in terms of social media activity.

Don't get me wrong, something has to be done, but this is just one piece of the puzzle and addressing how social media negatively affects everyone, not just kids, is a critical thing to address. 

2 hours ago, fox_favourite said:

Fart mans reflection pool has turned green already from the algae returning. That was millions dollar worth spending for a few days . I think that reflection pool is so badly designed you can't fix it. 

"Leftists sabotaged it", apparently. 

Just now, Innovindil said:

I mean that's not exactly what's happened is it? 

 

And nothing stopping the UK government outsourcing it to them in any event. 

No, it was overstatement borne out of exasperation towards entirely unnecessary nationalist idiocy,  I'll happily admit that. 

FWIW I think you're right about the ethical concerns and I also think it simply won't be enforceable anyway, as per above, a lot of these kids are smart, and a lot of them communicate with others who are smarter.

13 minutes ago, Innovindil said:

All I know is it will undoubtedly come with a bunch of privacy invading horseshit via some garbage 3rd party like anthropic in the name of "saving the kids". 

Would have to be a different company now that Agent Orange#47 has made all Anthropic products verboten to "foreigners", I reckon. 

14 minutes ago, Super_horns said:

Is this actually going to work and be effective/controlled ?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c77yx1jpg1nt

13 minutes ago, Blarmy said:

No. Cats out the bag unfortunately.

6 minutes ago, Super_horns said:

I mean they all have phones and will just make up ages which probably happens now .

Yeah, can't stop the signal, and almost all of these kids are either smarter than the restrictions or will know someone who is. 

50 minutes ago, Lionator said:

I know everything is miserable and he’s a massive leftie but I really like Mayor Mamdani. 

He's certainly a far cry from a high ranking government official claiming that every single person of colour in the US is "illegal", as one Greg Bovino did recently. 

On the topic of how the natural works comes at you fast, a fun fact:

Mosquito-borne disease has killed around half of the humans ever to inhabit this earth, from the beginning of recorded history to today. 

Once they had momentum, Littler and Humphries looked like they meant business and when that's the case, there's not a lot that can stop them. 

Clearly wanted it after the disappointment last year. Congratulations to them. 

14 minutes ago, Alf Bentley said:

 

Fair comment, though I plead guilty to any charge of pretence. My post was just addressing the charts in the article, not seeking to look at Brexit pros (?) and cons generally.

 

I also probably think less about freedom of movement as, through my Irish Dad, I was able to get Irish passports for myself and my daughter, so as to keep freedom of movement. Though I've not used my Irish passport yet - still used the British one, so far.

 

Come to think of it, there's a massive irony there: British people whose families have immigrated from other EU nations still keep freedom of movement, while "purer" Brits descended from the Normans and Anglo-Saxons don't. Though, to be fair, us Celts were here before them, anyway - our ancestors were mainly pushed across the Irish Sea by the Romans, I think? 

 

Perhaps the only fair solution to all the national identity/immigration issues is for all of humanity to return to its roots - and go back to living up trees in the Congo, from where I believe we first descended and started walking, thereby arguably becoming the human race. 

Unfortunately, there are far too many nationalists (and others, come to that) who can't agree on that being the fact that it is. 

It's like our species wants to invent reasons to pick problems because for some reason we think the natural world isn't giving us enough.

9 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

the theory of MAD works for all countries that currently have nuclear weapons. 
are there countries around the world for whom that wouldn’t work ?

Good question. 

I think some folks might have such a dim and tribal and dehumanising view of other human demographics that they disagree with this, but I think probably not - no human group is, imo, actually willing to die and let its entire group also die for the sake of an ideology, no matter what words they might utter about it. 

Of course, there are quite a few groups who would be quite willing (and able) to make sure everyone else dies, so long as their group survives. But that's a different matter, and (thankfully) for the moment, not possible with the principle of MAD standing. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8jde20v83o

Four days of extreme rain and landslides in the Indonesian island of Sumatra have pushed the world's most endangered great apes even closer to extinction, says a study.

Research suggests that 58 of less than 800 critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans, or around 7% of the total species, were killed as a result of the extreme weather event last November.

Those are conservative figures, and do not take into account rain-induced canopy damage or reduced food availability, said the authors of the study, external published on Wednesday.

Well, that's grim. 

4 minutes ago, Salisbury Fox said:

1. Russia’s intent is to force Ukraine into its sphere of influence rather than destroying it. Dropping nukes  would make them even more of a Pariah around the world and jeopardise the relationships with countries that have remained neutral or continued trading with them. 
 

2. NATO clearly benefits from reducing Russia's war machine, but I’m sure that many countries in the alliance would rather spend their money elsewhere like we see playing out in the UK currently. 

And to add to this, the Russians, while nasty, aren't insane and have their own protocol regarding nuclear weapons release, viz. only when attacked with nuclear weapons themselves, or when under conventional attack and the survival of the state is threatened. 

They could be lying about those conditions, but right now the situation satisfies neither of them, thankfully. 

6 minutes ago, Salisbury Fox said:

Many of those responsibilities exist because they directly affect our security and prosperity. I think it’s fair to question how much we spend on defence and look for ways where we can reduce commitments perhaps through a greater reliance on allies, but that’s a different argument to these threats don’t matter or aren’t our responsibility. 

Of course, I was looking for a bit more meat on the bone (as it were) because it seems that so often arguments about "defending the realm" veer into sentimental arguments rather than logical ones. 

10 minutes ago, Officer Doofy said:

Quarterly financial updates will be utterly hilarious at that valuation.

 

The world is one big ****ing meme 

On 10/06/2026 at 15:19, leicsmac said:

It's almost as if the whole thing is a well engineered racket where the ones on the inside are the only winners.

Yep. 

11 hours ago, Trav Le Bleu said:

I guess it depends on whether you want a defensive force to defend the UK, or do you also want to defend the Falklands, St Helena, Bermuda, Gibraltar, etc.

 

Because if it's the former, then UK armed forces as they stand should be adequate. Our island nation is geographically very defencible, it would take an enormous effort to create any meaningful beachhead.

 

If it's the later then that involves a much higher level of logistics, maintaining a significant presence around the globe in order to react swiftly to any threat, which the UK forces are probably not able to do as effectively as would be liked.

It's a difficult conundrum because such things always have to follow the geopolitical landscape which is constantly shifting.

But it terms of actually defending the existence of the UK as a state, as an island nation existing nuclear weaponry for deterrent, naval options for addressing threats to "lifelines" and a modest ground contingent for overseas territories should be all that's needed in terms of overall manpower. Looking into digital options and UAV's appears to be important now, looking from the way the current conflicts are playing out.

6 minutes ago, Salisbury Fox said:

I think you’re over simplifying things. The threats we face are much broader than defending the country and overseas territories from invasion. Defence must cover deterrence, protecting trade routes, securing air and sea space, meeting our NATO commitments, protecting undersea infrastructure, cyber threats, long range missile strikes, and far more. 

And I think it's also over-simplifying to say that at least some of those things are the UK's responsibility without explaining why beyond some sentiment based on "it's what we've always done and what we should do".

51 minutes ago, The_77 said:

Not sure anyone needed that to be explained. The majority of Americans are not happy at all with what has been conducted in our name.

 

The whining on this thread is still hilarious, we’re talking about our football team, not Trump’s cabinet. And this is all while the England supporters who made the trip over are having a great time in the host cities and will have plenty of fun with the locals.

I know what you mean, man. It's not great how it's bled over into everything, football included, but that sadly is where we are. 

I do hope as many fans of all nations have a good a time as possible over there. 

... and what was it that Nikola Tesla said about "man made horrors beyond your comprehension"?

4 hours ago, The_77 said:

This thread is hilarious.

An unfortunate, if predictable, consequence of the events of the last couple of years. 

Lack of decorum tends to be answered with like lack of decorum. 

So it looks like a large part of Texas is struggling with a parasitic worm called screw worm affecting their livestock. 

This is after government cuts to scientific agencies researching how best to keep it away, and total ignorance towards the warming natural world which allows this parasite to flourish in more places. 

Sometimes the Earth and its consequences comes at you fast. 

USA in ridiculous future inhibiting nationalism shocker.

29 minutes ago, nnfox said:

I suspect that there are more than a few variables that need sorting out before any kind of accurate prediction as to what a plausible outcome would be and I'm certainly not qualified to venture into such an area.

 

What I would say though, is this:  I sleep OK at night knowing that there are people who are qualified to deal with such scenarios and they care passionately about it so that it allows me to sleep OK at night.  I also strongly suspect that the better funded they are, the better they can perform at their job and that on a macro scale, more funding for defence = less chance of a war breaking out in the first place, less funding = greater chance of war breaking out, and a much harder fight to come out the other end without pressing the master switch.

There's certainly a point to be made about the value of intel and how it lends itself to accurately gauging the amount of deterrent required. 

It is a necessary debate as to how much deterrent is required and therefore how much in terms of resources need to be allocated, though, particularly when other areas that are more mundane but equally threatening to human life and health exist that also require said resources.