dsr-burnley

If this game had been played five years ago, the goal would have been given and it would have been correctly given because the players were level. Linesmen were specifically told that they weren't looking for toes and kneecaps. We would have gone away thinking what a wonderful game and a great climax. But then someone came along with a plan to disallow that goal. They would introduce delays of perhaps two minutes or perhaps as long as 5, they would make it impossible for the linesman to give the decision so play had to go on regardless, they would make it impossible for the crowd to know whether you had scored or not so as to kill the excitement, but they would find a way to disallow that sort of goal - what would the reaction be? Would it be "yes, all you have said would be a wonderful thing for football", or would it be "what are you on?"? All they needed to do for VAR and offside is to show the VAR man a photo. If from that photo he can't tell that the linesman was wrong, then the linesman was right. It could be done in 10 seconds. 15 at a pinch.

Well, my point really (which I may nbot have expressed clearly) was that people who can afford fast food are not buying unhealthy because they can't afford healthy. I don't really want to get into discussion about how much less people have today compared with our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc.

Food poverty isn't caused by lack of money. Roast Chicken, roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, cabbage, carrots, for Friday tea. Chicken sandwiches on Saturday. Broth on Sunday. It didn't come to £10 for the lot, 9 meals, and there is still broth left over. People aren't buying fast food because they can't afford a tenner for roast chicken. If people don't have the time, or more likely don't have the inclination or the knowledge, to make "proper" meals, that's a different story. Certainly the healthy unemployed have little excuse, though one useful public service would be to introduce free cookery classes for the helpless and hopeless. (Basic cookery, not the complicated celebrity chef stuff.) On an even more controversial note, perhaps, not everyone wants to eat healthily. Nursing homes are full of thin people who ate healthily, and now can't remember their children. Some people are more than happy to eat, drink and be merry, and take their chances.

They can build a 4 bedroom house and sell it at a profit for £250k (in our area), and that includes land purchase and road building. A 2-story extension shouldn't be anywhere near.

If you don't have any savings at present, then don't bother with stocks and shares. Let your pension do that. (I presume you have a pension? If not, that might be a good place for it.) If it's cash that you know you will need before retirement age, then an ISA is a good place. The best rates are on fixed rate accounts for perhaps a year or 18 months, and you can sometimes get very good rates on regular savings accounts with building societies or banks. (I prefer branch banking to online banking. I want someone to talk to when something goes wrong.)

It is the main metric, but it's of very dubious value. After all, a vaccine can do literally nothing to prevent people contracting an airborne disease. It isn't designed to. So measuring its effectiveness by how many times it stops someone contracting the disease, is (as I said) of limited value. A person who dies and a person who coughs a little will both count as having covid, and it may be (I don't say it is, but it may be) that a person who would have died has instead had two days off work - but it makes no difference to the score. The covid virus, as I understand it, takes about 5 days to manifest symptoms, and it takes about 5 days before a vaccinated person's antibodies get to work, but about a fortnight before an unvaccinated person's antibodies get to work. So after 5 or 6 days, when the symptoms start to appear, there will be little or no difference in the results of the vaccinated or unvaccinated person, hence the small 10% difference in symptomatic numbers. But what about a week later? The vaccinated person's antibodies are in full swing, the unvaccinated person's are just starting up. That's where, in theory at least, the vaccinated person has the advantage; not in the early stages. If there are statistics that show just a 10% benefit of less serious illness or 10% reduction in likelihood of death, then that would be a stat worth listening to. Does that stat exist?

So 10% reduction in people with observed symptoms, if I read it right. Isn't that a bit irrelevant? What's more important is how serious the symptoms are. What is the vaccine's efficiency at preventing death in the elderly? That's it's main purpose.

10% of what? Is it that vaccinated people who get flu average 90% of the symptoms of unvaccinated people who get flu? Or that 10% fewer vaccinated people get flu than unvaccinated people?

I think there is a suggestion that both flu and covid mutated after the vaccine was prepared, so the strain people are catching is not the strain the vaccine is prepared against. It doesn't make the vaccin useless, just less effective. I think me and my mother both had covid (we had it at the same time, so it would surely have been the same thing). I was no tmuch affected, but my mother had a fortnight in hospital with pneumonia. (She got over it.)

It's something to consider, but by no means definitive. A house near me was on the market for over 6 months - 4 bedrooms, big playroom/gym in the basement, small garden and drive, relatively new - they only wanted £140k for it but (presumably because it's town centre) it didn't sell for 6 months. Similar houses on the edge of town go for £200k-£250k. The eventual purchaser can't believe his luck.

Your arithmetic is a bit out. 1% of 60m+ people is 600,000+, not 320,000. Otherwise fine. I believe "household wealth" includes all assets, not just household assets, so the very rich will seriously distort the figures. Whether the relatively low figure for the UK is because we're a more equal society, or whether it's because more of the rich have left, I wouldn't know. The article has a bit of a strange sentence at the start, saying the majority of UK households have lower than the mean income. This is true of every country in the world, and of every statisitcal distribution that starts high at zero and tails off gradually.. It's as useful as saying that the majority of people in the country have more than the mean number of feet. Why do the spoil articles like this with facile statements that make them look a bit dim?

I can perfectly well comprehend the various significances of the headline, and one of those significances is that people will use it to decry and deny global warming. I'm just saying it's poor tactics. I wasn't commenting at all about the issue, just the tactics. As for the glacier thing, I don't quite see the point. Are you saying that glaciers don't retreat in summer and advance in winter? Don't assume I know everything, and if I'm wrong you could educate rather than put down.

I'm not saying it isn't amusing. But the point of 1913 is that the record temperature for Death Valley (where that photo was taken) is 57 degrees, in 1913. And if you tell people who are inclined to disbelieve in global warning that the high temperatures now are lower than they were 100 years ago, it will be something that they will hang their hat on for years. Similar thing in the Chicago Science Museum, where they really ought to know better. They have a climate change film that starts out with a presumed expert saying that he went to look at a glacier in Spring and he went again 6 months later and was amazed by how much it had retreated and it convinced him how serious climate change was When you start a film with a sentence saying, in effect, that summer is warmer than winter, you can't expect people to take you seriously for the rest of the film.

This sort of sensationalism damages the cause. If you try and persuade people of the dangers of global warming by posting evidence that Death Valley is nearly as hot as in 1913, they won't think anything of it, and it will give them reason to disregard any more sensible climate based statistics.

If that's what it was doing 12 billion years ago, what's it doing now?

It's not a flight of fancy. You have said that you support a mob surrounding an MP's home and stopping his family from getting home. I just want to know if that extends to all families in the UK, or just to MPs who you disagree with.

So to be explicit, if a mob wants to surround your or anyone else's house and prevent your or anyone else's children from coming home from school, there's no problem?

Is there a line to be drawn beyond which intimidation of children is to be seen as immoral? If, for example, your own children (if you have any) were to be prevented from coming home because of a threatening mob outside the house who disagreed with some aspect of your politics, would that be fair game? Or is only MP's children who deserve this treatment?

The government is spending more, in both real terms of money and in terms of percentage of GDP, than any government since the war (apart from the covid and furlough year). By all means argue that they are spending it on the wrong things, but they are certainly spending it as if it wasn't their own (which it isn't) and as if they don't care whose children have to pay it back. https://www.statista.com/statistics/298465/government-spending-uk/

You're assuming that not more than 2% of them would leave the country, of course. Would that be true? Let's start with the very richest - the Hinduja brothers, tax exiles in the UK from India. If they were to be told they had to pay £700m per year for the right to stay in the UK, would they pay it? Or would they become tax exiles somewhere else? Or Jim Ratcliffe. He's already resident in Monaco, so getting 2% of his worldwide wealth would be impossible anyway. With £20m, you can set up a dodgy but hard-to-prevent foreign trust to hide the money, and it will cost less than £400k per year, and will have the added benefit of shielding the income and capital gains from UK tax as well. If only 500 of your 10,000 £20millionaires choose to do that, then there is a net loss to the Exchequer. Incidentally, £4bn sounds like a vast sum but in government terms, it isn't. It wouldn't run the NHS for a week, for example. It's £60 per person per year, spread out across the whole population. It would pay off 0.15% of the national debt, or it would pay the government's interest bill from now until next Wednesday. The government is unimaginably huge, far too big for tax-the-rich to have a significant impact. If tax-the-rich is to be a policy, let it be clear that it is a policy designed to appease envy and to make the rich take their money and investments and businesses elsewhere - it isn't a policy to raise money.

The problem is that both the Tories and Labour (and the Liberals and SNP, for that matter) all believe in high tax, high spend, sort of government that is incompatible with a low cost of living. Truss's theory that the economy needs to grow was bang on (even though her way of achieving it was miles off target). The current lot haven't got a plan for growing the economy, and as long as the economy doesn't grow but the population increases and the number of people paid to do nothing increases, then the cost of living will only go up.

Better leave an hour or two early in case the M62 / M6 are slow! Handy for the cricket, though. James Price is a good pro. But as Middleton got promoted to Lancashire League division 1 last year, I expect they'll lose more than they win.

It won't happen in every case, but at the very least an adult child living with parents should be contributing to the household expenses - enough that it isn't a net cost to the parents.

Surely even if there are grown-up kids living at home, the parents won't be supporting them? They'll either have a job or else enough benefits to live on. Mortgage payments are a valid point.

To say that a couple with gross income of £1,000 a week income and no mortgage is not "comfortable", is absurd. For example, you can have less than that and still afford two weeks' holiday in Europe (especially as they can go off-peak).