They can clearly enforce that more

Or, you know, at all…

I see far more Lime bikes sitting in the middle of the pavement than I do parked appropriately. Lime clearly has no incentive to punish bad parkers as all it does is lose them business for zero benefit.

The way to make the cost-benefit analysis work - and therefore to make Lime enforce against bad parkers - is for Lime to face a cost when their riders park badly. Local councils should just drive a van round and impound any Lime bikes thrown in the middle of the pavement and charge Lime £200 a pop to recover them - that would quickly get them to stop renting bikes out to hooligans.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun

Imagine the queue to see Larry lying in state.

Yes - that was the next sentence I wrote?

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s. It felt at the time that this line risked dating the episode but I don’t think anyone could have expected just how much he would go on trash his own reputation.

The only thing that saves this line is that we found out a few episodes later that the character who spoke it secretly came from the Mirror Universe - where he grew up Musk’s embrace of Nazism was probably seen as a virtue.

Sky invented football in 1992.

Never heard of him. Do you mean Stephen Yaxley-Lennon?

I was disagreeing with you perpetuating the lump of labour fallacy that one can be anti-immigrant for pro-worker reasons.

When nativists use this argument, it’s usually shit-stirrers deliberately trying to pit people against each other. They rely on the fact that the average person probably hasn’t taken the time to conduct a literature review of the economic studies of immigration, but might be able to be seduced by a superficially easy argument that all their ills can be blamed on some minority and drawing on some cherry-picked anecdotes.

The reality of immigration bears little relation to the skewed narrative the nativists are trying to sell. Irregular migration represents only a tiny fraction of UK immigration. Immigrants are no more likely to commit crime than natives. Immigration grows the economy and has little or no effect on jobs and wages. Immigrants are net contributors to the NHS and public services. Once you knock away all the far-right’s factual lies, it’s hard to find the nugget of a ‘legitimate’ reason why people might consider immigration to be one of the major ‘problems’ facing this country that doesn’t start and end with xenophobia.

The idea that the unions would legitimately oppose immigration is nonsense. Economic analysis of the actual impact of immigration has consistently shown that immigration has little-to-no negative impact on the incomes of native workers - immigrants don’t undercut the wages of native workers so the unions shouldn’t be worried about them.

A large part of that is because of the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy. Unthoughtful people assume there’s a fixed number of jobs to be filled, but the reality is that immigrants don’t just fill jobs but also create jobs through their own demand for goods and services. But there are other factors too like entrepreneurialism and business start ups - immigrants, as evidenced by them being part of the small subset of people who are prepared to pack up their lives and move to another country, tend to be more entrepreneurial than the general population in either their home or host countries. Some of our biggest high street names like Tesco and M&S have immigrant origins.

The small caveat to this is that immigration in recent decades has been shown to have a tiny negative impact on the incomes of the lowest paid 20% of the population (of about -0.5%) but this is dwarfed by the positive impact it has on those further up the income spectrum (e.g. +1.7% for the richest 10%). Obviously +1.7% of a very rich person’s income is a lot more than -0.5% of a poor person’s income. So if the unions are rational and actually want to improve the lot of the poorest in society then they should be campaigning for a lot more immigration and a very small increase in taxes on the richest to fund redistribution of this income, which will more than compensate the poorest for the fraction of a percentage point of lost income from over two decades worth of immigration.

He didn’t ‘appear’ to justify the rioting.

He literally said ‘of course it’s politically justified!’ There’s no ambiguity here.

No, Russian bots lack physical form and hence aren’t able to turn up in person to in-person events. So there was probably one genuine radicalised thug in attendance.

That’s their worst feature.

I’m so supportive of this. Lime bikes are an absolute menace.

Round my neighborhood, I constantly find them just lying on the floor blocking the whole pavement. Especially at this time of year, I find them literally every time I walk to the shops and back, every time I go for a run, every time I walk to the Tube station, etc. I regularly find myself picking them and moving them off the pavement because we have lots of families with push chairs in the area, my elderly neighbour uses a mobility scooter, etc.

It really pisses me off that the people using these bikes are so selfish. The designated parking pay solution seems like a fair compromise to support use of these bikes but only when used in a responsible way - you just don’t see this problem with the Santander bikes.

That is obviously untrue. I’m a second-gen immigrant and hard-Remain/Rejoin, Schengen-supporting-as-an-eventual-bridge-to-global-free-movement, neoliberal shill, who disagrees hugely with Labour’s cautious official stance on immigration (although I doubt it’s what Starmer and his senior team - Remain-voting, 2nd referendum supporters to a person - actually believe).

Even I can see that Starmer is a million times better than Farage - the guy who campaigned for a freeze on all non-NHS immigration, a ban on immigrants bringing their partners and children to the UK, supported the Rwanda scheme, and more generally has made a whole career out of demonising immigrants and refugees.

Imagine being so far off to the left than you can no longer tell the difference between Keir Starmer and Nigel fucking Farage 😂

You can’t just say ‘austerity’ every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money…

Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown’s decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today’s size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.

By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we’re not living in austere times.

The 1906-22 Liberal-led governments gave the UK progressive taxation, unemployment benefits, the state pension, the first tax-funded healthcare, the end of the primacy of the House of Lords. This was one of the most transformational progressive governments in our country’s history and this is partly why they were winning by-elections in working-class seats right up to the start of the First World War.

I think you’re overestimating the existence of underlying ‘political’ causes of the rise of Labour and underestimating the pure ‘electoral’ factors around the Asquith/Lloyd George split.

Good. It’s bonkers we were handing out non-means-tested fuel benefits to pensioners living in million pound homes, while young people and families in genuine need were struggling.

Pure Tory pork-barrel politics to bribe the one generation that most reliably voted for them. Now let’s get rid of the pension triple lock next please.

Parliament could reduce annual illegal immigration to zero with a one-line piece of legislation: ‘All immigration is legalised’…

I’m not suggesting we quite go that far. But any attempt to address the problem of illegal immigration needs to start off with a recognition of how 14 years of Tory home secretaries and 13 years of authoritarian New Labour home secretaries before home (the choice of home secretaries were always the worst thing about the Blair and Brown governments) have conspired to ramp up the barriers and hurdles to a regular hardworking immigrant - someone who wants to work and pay taxes and obey the law - actually being able to legally enter the UK and work.

It depends which way the Tories go. If a) the Tories elect another extremist and if b) the Tory-Reform split nonetheless persists into a second election, FPTP makes all sorts of crazy outcomes possible.

This is essentially what happened in the 1920s that allowed Labour to displant the Liberals in the first place over the course of two elections. Looking from the position of the 1906 Liberal landslide or even coming out of the First World War when the Liberals were still the largest party, the idea of Labour replacing them as a major party would have seemed fanciful. But the Asquith/Lloyd George split led to two Liberal Parties standing against each other in the 1918 and 1922 general elections, and by the time the Liberals reunited in 1923 the damage was done - Labour had snuck through in Liberal seats to become the 2nd party and, given how relentlessly majoritarian our system is, the reunited Liberal Party was unable to reassert themselves.