Sampson

“Kin-Noah” yeah. Glad I’ve never ordered it at a restaurant and made myself look an idiot.

Does anyone remember that joke I told about the chiropractor? It was about a week back.

The glue is indeed where everyone gets stuck.

Huh? Why not?

What's the difference between a piano, a tuna, and a pot of glue? You can tuna piano but you can't piano a tuna!

After the above discussions I googled commonly mispronounced words. Quinoa is actually pronounced Keen-Waa?! What the ****?!

never mind

I’m walking on egg shells and trying not to get banned so I’ll just say… Isn’t the stopping displaying certain political symbols and setting up rules about what flags you can fly in 21st century Britain more than a bit snowflakey and cancel culturey? And basically everything they say they hate?

This is a good video on the matter

Exactly. All these leaders just look at what happened to Ghaddaffi after he took back his nuclear programme and was shortly after deposed and killed. Compare that to Kim Jon Un who Trump kept threatening but who called Trump’s bluff and is now untouchable. All the West have shown to dictators in recent years is getting nukes helps you to survive.

I’m not really sure we’re there yet. I think many European leaders are probably hoping the US returns to normalcy again after the next election but the way the institutions and checks and balances are creeking I can’t see it. The midterms will be a big thing too. But even so 3.5 years is a hell of a long time to wait these days with the breakneck speed the world jerks from one crisis to another right now. Personally I think the old world order is gone and the US no longer cares about the UK and EU as allies anymore and in fact is probably more likely to side with Russia behind the scenes, but I’m not 100% convinced on it yet. I’m also obviously a bit worried the UK wants to follow the same path after the next election.

Yeah especially as most locations get you going from Gatwick or Heathrow which involves faffing around on the Underground with suitcases as well which isn’t fun. It feels like it takes longer to get to from Gatwick to St Pancras on London’s public transport to get the train homethan it does to get actual train home from St Pancras to Leicester as well. Then there’s still the taxi from the train station too. Not only longer but often getting to and from the airport is more expensive than the flights themselves too. Much prefer to just get the Eurostar from St Pancras into France.

I also hate the faff of flying as I’ve gotten older. Getting to the airport early, security, checking bags in etc. Much prefer the boat/train/buses for going away nowadays.

Fecking hell. He’ll probably be having nightmares of those scenes for the rest of his life. Must be impossible to get your head round, the surrealness of surviving with the horrific things you’ve seen.

From bbc Leicester residents believed to have been on crashed plane - British MPpublished at 17:02 17:02 The MP for Leicester East has said she understands "a handful of Leicester residents" were onboard the crashed plane. Shivani Raja tells the BBC's Rajini Vaidyanathan that her community, which has a high population of British-Gujaratis, is "really horrified and devastated waking up to such tragic news". "So far my understanding is that there are a handful of Leicester residents who were on board that flight - but I am still awaiting for official reports on that," the Conservative MP says.

Even survivors in these cases there’s a high chance they’ll still be completely brain damaged or in a lifelong coma sadly.

That’s awful. Hard to see many surviving that sadly.

It’s on YouTube if you want to watch it.

Ok I think you’ve won this thread.

Interesting debate. I often wonder whether we really have better lives than cavemen. Like of course we have better medicine, technology, live longer, live in more comfort etc. But does is actually feel better in the pit of your stomach on a day to day basis? I’m not sure. I’ve definitely pivoted from thinking the internet being a fantastic thing for society to it doing more harm than good in the past few years and AI scares me if I’m honest. I’ve definitely started to appreciate as I’ve got older that the Luddite protesters of Loughborough had a point.

I think AI can probably make better decisions in running a country’s economy than humans, but it can also take out the humanity of the decision making process and it allows humans to remove responsibility from the decision making process, which is why the concept scares me. An AI cant really take into account human life and suffering and I can easily see a future where it’s given a decision making process but that process has no thought on the consequences of how it will affect people’s livelihoods or it will brutally say, not care about thousands of people dying if this saves some money in the budget. It also has a scary amount of legal creep potentially associated with it. I can’t remember which user said it but someone here said a few months ago - they can easily see some Grenfall style disaster in which the legal defence it was the algorithm who told us to do this, not a human at fault and then adjusts the algorithm through some public outcry. That’s how we’ve ended up with loads of crappy laws - because extreme emotional examples were used to create laws or reinterpret or enforce old laws no one had cared about in decades. With AI there are much scarier consequences to all that process to me.

In the summer I agree. But it’s nice to get out of the winter and go somewhere warm. I don’t like the faff of the airport as I’ve got older

I think it’s more about when you start explicitly saying things are right/centre/left they ban people rather than the hotness of takes. You can say absolutely anything political (everything is political after all) but as soon as you start saying certain opinions are of a certain place on the political spectrum, you get banned, regardless of how fiery the post was or wasn’t It’s a strange system. All it does is cause the political chat to spill out into other threads anyway.

Careful. I got banned from the General News thread for a much less accusatory and more milquetoast post of a similar vibe saying the right constantly saying the left and centre call them stupid all the time is a trap so they create a collective enemy to go after. See it all the time that “owning the libs” is more important for many of them than improving their lives or the deaths of people in overseas conflict.

I don’t think that’s unpopular. The way the current government is going after the institutions, checks, balances and the separations of powers mirrors exactly what the likes of Bolsanaro, Putin and Orban did. I just hope they can hold like the judges managed to in Poland when they were being replaced with government plants. (The difference of course was Poland was under the ECJ and they stepped in and threatened Poland with sanctions, the US doesn’t really have so many supra-national institutions above it to protect against democratic erosion.