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Brexit

Westminstenders: War and Weirdos

999 replies

RedToothBrush · 03/01/2020 21:34

With weirdos set to run No10 and Trump seemingly having started a new war in the Middle East, 2020 already looks set to be a cracking year.

To start off your year, it turns out that chinese curse about interesting times is actually a fallacy...

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times

Happy New Year.

May we make 2030...

OP posts:
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RedToothBrush · 04/01/2020 23:58

Agile isn't scalable...

OP posts:
BoreOfWhabylon · 04/01/2020 23:59

PMK

Thanks as always, Red, and to all the other regular posters who so generously help me make sense of this unparallelled freak show we've been sucked into

Ditto

HesterThrale · 04/01/2020 23:59

Really interesting articles about Portugal written last year.
Then in the October election, Costa’s party did increase its seats.

Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.

Portugal has found an antidote to right wing populism

www.nytimes.com/2018/07/22/business/portugal-economy-austerity.html

kontrast.at/portugal-economy-right-wing/

Motheroffourdragons · 05/01/2020 08:42

This reply has been withdrawn

This has been withdrawn by MNHQ on behalf of the poster.

TheElementsSong · 05/01/2020 09:07

PMK - I don’t really drink, which is just as well because I’d be walking around with a helmet like Mysterio filled with gin to get me through the coming months.

squid4 · 05/01/2020 09:09

Australia is on fire and likely to continue for months - the 51st story on the daily mail. Under a story about how women with bigger breasts have more colds. Most of the comments deny climate change is responsible, and the outright lies about green policies being responsible are currently being pushed hard with targeted facebook attacks. While towns are actually burning.

In Australia papers, murdoch press aren't even putting the fire on the front page.

Not a fan of Nick Cohen, but this article is absolutely spot on.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/04/australias-pathetic-pm-reveals-much-about-the-rights-efforts-to-deny-reality

squid4 · 05/01/2020 09:11

I think Johnson's absence & silence (& outofthisworld expensive holiday 5 minutes after winning an election) is pathetic but entirely predictable, we know exactly what he's like.

Mockers2020Vision · 05/01/2020 09:15

Among the little Murdochs, only Elisabeth is capable of standing up to Daddy. She is also the only one with any talent. James and Lachlan are pampered little princes who have never had to earn anything in their lives. It says volumes that neither of them is thinking of the future of their children and taking a stand on climate change.

Grinchly · 05/01/2020 09:23

Raab has just backed Trump.SadSadSad

TheElementsSong · 05/01/2020 09:30

I just don’t understand how anyone can look at how 2020 is going so far without wanting to drown themselves in oblivion.

Having said that, in the absence of alcoholic anaesthesia, I’ve been aiming for other forms of escapism. We had a pretty full-on Christmas/New Year, draped the house in festive decorations, saw loads of friends and family, went crazy with cheesy Christmas music and food... And now I’m about to do the same for Chinese New Year, I have a decoration and food plan of an extent I haven’t bothered with for years 🏮🧧🧨 The neighbours are going to be Crown Shock

Peregrina · 05/01/2020 09:58

Raab has just backed Trump

How long before the Brexiteers come running into this thread to tell us of course they voted for war with Iran er where is it?

However this, could be one of the unanticipated events - with a hung Parliament a vote would almost certainly go against another war. With Johnson and his apparatchiks with a majority, a vote for war will be a formality - and probably somewhere in his tiny brain, Trump knew this, so it emboldened his attitude.

malylis · 05/01/2020 10:04

Shhh don't mention the brexiters, they get all upset when you talk about them. If you are too mean they will hit the report button million times and accuse you of being smallfox.

Laniakea · 05/01/2020 11:00

“'agile' is a religion - if it fails you mustn't have employed true believers.“

Grin ... bit like communism!

Dh is a DevOpps engineer, he’s been ‘doing agile’ for 10+ years and is generally pretty cynical - too much one true path stuff for him. Last year ago he moved to a company who use it as a tool rather than credo & is now much happier & productive.

thecatfromjapan · 05/01/2020 11:03

Cummings' plans for the Civil Service are almost certainly only going to result in chaos and poor governance.

And a lot of people know that.

They're not interested in his weird, megalomaniac ideas/delusions about reforming governance into an anti-elite, agile force of maverick geniuses.

The chances of success there are near zero.

We know that - and we're just internet ransoms.

But the chances of pulling apart a significant force in good governance and stability are very high.

And the lovers of disaster opportunism and deregulation know that.

Cummings is, I think, a useful idiot (& as someone else said, Johnson is a vain, amoral, lazy toad - with a whiff of corruption about him). I'm quite sure Cummings believes his own hype. But that just makes him more useable.

It's where interests cohere.

It's a bit like some of the economic theories Thatcherites endorsed.

For some, they saw loss of manufacturing as an acceptable short-term loss to rebuild the economy and generate wealth.

For others (& these proved to be more prescient) they saw the economic argument as tinsel to cover the job losses & attacks on workers' rights - which were the goal in toto.

I'm pretty depressed about the way 2020 is shaping up.

And I am currently very angry about the populist forces (right and left) that dragged us here.

Oh, and of course we're not getting action on climate change. The resistance to getting action on climate change is huge. I suspect it's a massive factor in the donation of money to right-wing projects such as Trump and Brexit.

lonelyplanetmum · 05/01/2020 11:15

The good thing is part of me sort of doesn't believe what's going on. Like I'm in a Truman show type dream and will wake up soon.

•The best person in the whole country we could find to put in charge of foreign affairs is now supporting a mentally ill loon. The same someone who once had an epiphany leading him to fully appreciate the importance of the Dover-Calais crossing for UK trade.

•Our govt frequently use Australia as a role model and brought in an Aussie/NZ team to help them win an election. Yet over there the population tolerate and fund a press that isn't even putting the fires on the front page.

• Meanwhile the brains behind our govt is running a job ad asking for anyone new with ideas for the economy now they've torn up the previous script to heal a party rift crashed the pound etc.

DGRossetti · 05/01/2020 11:34

agile, (well done Laniakea Grin) DevOps ...

Scrum anyone ?

ContinuityError · 05/01/2020 12:10

DH does digital stuff and has been involved with “agile” for a while. His view is that trying to get innovative stuff done fast leads to high failure rates (a 50% failure rate was expected in one big company). Plus getting the customer buy in and readiness to change isn’t as easy as people like McKinsey want you to believe.

DGRossetti · 05/01/2020 12:25

trying to get innovative stuff done fast leads to high failure rates (a 50% failure rate was expected in one big company).

Google have a long list of failed obsolete projects. "Fail fast" is one of their mantras.

Plus getting the customer buy in and readiness to change isn’t as easy as people like McKinsey want you to believe.

by the same token, Google, Apple, Microsoft (to name a few) don't really give a shit what the customer wants. They just pump out what they want, and the customer adapts. (The car crash that is Windows 10 being an example). Are you unhappy about the last iOS release ? Then go fuck yourself. Did the last iteration of Android break the app you paid for (or were getting paid for) ? Why don't you jog on ? And so on.

Of course when you look at political matters, definitions become elusive and vague. Has Universal Credit "failed" ? Depends what it was intended to do in the first place. Did the Bedroom Tax achieve it's aim ? Depends whether aim was to save money, or implement a social policy. The former ? Clearly failed. The latter ? Runaway success and in no need of change, (Looks at what is happening, and reverses the logic to calculate the original aim ....)

ContinuityError · 05/01/2020 12:34

For DH’s work, the customer is within another part of the business. Some projects fail despite being a good process because the customer doesn’t want to change the way they work (for a variety of reasons).

Mockers2020Vision · 05/01/2020 12:48

Govt. Is not a business and not a suitable place to impliment business-based models. Govt. has liabilities no business would sustain. It can print money. And the shareholders aren't half fickle.

prettybird · 05/01/2020 12:50

I remember a former colleague of mine (talking about a potential sales customer database for recording prospects and tracking progress) saying that for it to work properly it needed to be useable , useful and used (and without the first two, the third becomes difficult).

That maximum could apply to most projects. Smile

As it happens, the company then moved from a "useable" system, which, for all its flaws, was useful and therefor used and "upgraded" Hmm to a system which management saw as useful to beat up its sales reps Hmm but was no longer actually useful for the sales reps/account managers themselves. So of course we no longer used it for its original purpose (to understand our customers and to help develop and then track plans to build business) and instead manipulated the information in it to keep senior management off our backs and only put in enough to keep "management" happy Hmm

NoCountry · 05/01/2020 13:53

Raab has just backed Trump

Was anyone seriously expecting him to do otherwise? This Government will always be 'on the same page' as the US, probably the same sentence. Pompeo only had to say he was disappointed and Raab came to heel.

The Torieshave to get a deal with US they can brandish to justify Brexshit.

BigChocFrenzy · 05/01/2020 14:11

Come to heel, poodle

Alsohuman · 05/01/2020 14:37

Pmk

Grinchly · 05/01/2020 14:57

Wasn't expecting otherwise, no.
It's still utterly shocking. Each of these developments feels like a punch in the gut.

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