Westministenders: No Australia Don't Have A Deal

[RedToothBrush]

Since Friday, far from letting things calm down, Johnson has doubled down stating that if we can't have a Canada Deal (which the EU says wouldn't be equal because we are much closer than Canada geographically) we will go for an Australia Deal.

This is the latest rehash of a managed no deal package up as something else which the EU have already repeatedly said no to.

So we are on track for no deal.

At the same time Johnson has got very excited about American food and how its great. Almost as if he wants no deal wit the EU to force a shitty bad deal with the us through.

Johnson and his chronies have also been trying to undermine journalistic transparency by blocking access to the lobby to some media outlets in a move that makes us look like a tinpot dictatorship. Fortunately there was a mass walk out of journalists but it remains to be seen how long that can be maintained.

Far from being a clean slate to move forward from its already proving that nothing has changed and old divisions are as deep as ever, if not worse...

clavinova It's not about about a few thousand banking jobs - these will increasingly be reduced anyway because of new tech.

it's about the 900 billion / trillion of assets moved

That could well be an overestimate - or an underestimate - but it will be in the hundreds of billions lost, massive.

All reputable sources agree that large amounts of assets have been transferred out
and that investment has been hit;

• yes before you cut & paste about some new investments, there has been some, just significantly less than before the referendum: e.g. FT:

https://www.ft.com/content/bdc9f940-bb92-11e9-b350-db00d509634e

The UK’s strong track record in securing overseas investment is being put at risk by Brexit,
with the number of jobs created and foreign capital deployed in Britain falling sharply since the EU referendum,
according to Financial Times analysis.
.....
in the three years to June, the number of jobs created in the UK as a result of foreign investment
in new production facilities or extensions of existing ones - so-called greenfield investment -

dropped by 19 per cent to about 183,000 compared with the same period before the Brexit referendum,
according to FT calculations.
These are based on figures from fDi Markets, an FT-owned database that tracks cross-border greenfield investment.

During the same period, the foreign capital deployed in greenfield investment fell by nearly 30 per cent to $83.4bn.

I suspect even if the economy crashes down the toilet,
with most of the Uk population only surviving via soup kitchens and foreign charity
(it won't ever get this bad !)

some Tories / Leavers would never accept that Brexit was a massive mistake

some Tories / Leavers would never accept that Brexit was a massive mistake

The other side of the looking glass is that had we remained, every bad news story would have been because we remained.

This is like those wonderful trade deals that we will do with the USA. If they were new deals on top of existing EU ones we would all say 'Fine', as an incomplete substitute for existing deals, Not Fine.

some Tories / Leavers would never accept that Brexit was a massive mistake

Which is, incidentally, classic NPD behaviour (as I have learned, thanks to MN).

I wonder if there is any correlation between political behaviour, and emotional behaviour ?

I was chatting to a friend from the Netherlands this week who has decided to sell her house there as the market is extremely buoyant, she thought it was a Brexit effect.
She said on the downside the international schools are extremely full.
She was of the view that Brexit has given her country a significant boost.

Vinyl is very popular with the young people I believe 🧐

Vinyl is very popular with the young people I believe

When the CD fad started, quite a few audiophiles gave very convincing reasons why for sound quality alone vinyl pissed all over digital. But it would need to be a state-of-the-art turntable, needle, cartridge and amplifier before you'd pick up the difference with even a cheap CD player.

And ultimately, it wasn't sound quality (and you can read that how you like ) that drove CD sales, but convenience and relative ruggedness. Notice that sales of tape continued well into (and beyond) the CD-era.

Personally, I loved the old 12" LP format for the cover art and package feel of a classic album. It's telling that was never really carried across into the CD era. Proof (if it were needed) that record company executives really have no soul.

CDs were big fat liars!

They were marketed as being able to eat a full English breakfast off and afterwards dunk in your tea! Drive over it in a fully loaded articulated lorry? No problem! Whereas in reality, you breathed on them in the wrong direction and they were fit only to hang in the garden to scare the birds!

CDs were big fat liars! [] They were marketed as being able to eat a full English breakfast off and afterwards dunk in your tea! Drive over it in a fully loaded articulated lorry? No problem! Whereas in reality, you breathed on them in the wrong direction and they were fit only to hang in the garden to scare the birds!

Is this a Mandela moment ? I don't recall them ever being marketed as indestructible. More rugged than vinyl, yes. But so was an omelette.

I do recall a Tomorrows World clip where they smeared jam on one, but even then, I would never have expected much from popular reporting. if i had I would have been waiting at home for my hover boots to be charged up by nuclear fusion.

This must be the most ludicrous settled status story so far:

A 101-year-old Italian man who has been in London since 1966 was asked to get his parents to confirm his identity by the Home Office after he applied to stay in the country post-Brexit.

He was then asked for evidence that he had been in the U.K. for over five years despite the fact that he came to the U.K. in 1966 and worked until he was 92! How can HMRC not have evidence of NI payments for someone who has an employment record spanning 44 years?!

meanwhile ...

A 101-year-old Italian man who has been in London since 1966 was asked to get his parents to confirm his identity by the Home Office after he applied to stay in the country post-Brexit.

I wonder if DF has bumped into him ...

Vinyl was scratchy, rumbly crap. I was converted to CD in 1987 by Deacon Blue's Raintown. You could hear the fingers on the piano keys, the sound of the guitar strings vibrating and the saliva on the singer's lips.

The only loss was the artwork, and those terrible cases with the flimsy hinges that break and the teeth on the spindle that break. At least now we have largely moved to mini-lp sleeves like we should have had all along.

Vinyl was scratchy, rumbly crap.

For us little people, yes. But if you had a concrete floor a £4,000 turntable, speakers made of fairy farts and cables made of compressed diamond, the quality (particularly dynamic range) was meant to be far superior to CDs. There is a thing about sampling frequencies and the way inaudible harmonics can affect the overall sound. Generally the CD spec pretty much nailed it and gave us "OK" reproduction for a marketable costing system.

Ultimately it's analogue v. digital and the mathematics involved in not losing information when quantising. Nyquist formula and all that.

I was converted to CD in 1987 by Deacon Blue's Raintown. You could hear the fingers on the piano keys, the sound of the guitar strings vibrating and the saliva on the singer's lips.

Have you seen "Content Provider" where Stewart Lee riffs about ordering a copy of that very CD from music magpie and getting an email saying it had failed it's quality inspection. He replies saying he's not too fussed about the case and gets a reply:

“No, not its physical quality inspection. Deacon Blue’s mix of soulful singer-songwriter sensibilities and plastic mid-’80s production values has not aged well."

(scrapsfromtheloft.com/2020/02/10/stewart-lee-content-provider-transcript/)

Hmm! Maybe I was exaggerating about CDs for "comic" effect?

It's a period piece now, rather like the man who looks like Spencer Tracey Now, but no less worthwhile for that.

The problem today is what they can do with the magic software. My most recent CD is the New Who, and Roger's voice which in live performance has clearly gone west is magically restored by what means I know not, and truthfully care little. Still The Greatest Rock & Roll Band In The World.

Maybe I was exaggerating about CDs for "comic" effect?

Is there such a thing in 2020 ?

But it's a fair point. Even in the early 90s, I knew people who claimed CDs had never once been marketed as more robust than vinyl. As you may guess, my wariness of the critical faculties of my fellow humans has been a long time in the baking. It didn't just happen 4 years ago.

"so what if vinyl has surface noise, I like surface noise, life has got surface noise."
J Peel

Still The Greatest Rock & Roll Band In The World.

Well there goes this thread ...

Surface noise is like film grain or brush strokes. It is art.

What it is not is faithful reproduction.

Mockers I feel like you may be of a certain age?!

There's a philosophical debate to be had about the nature of recorded sound, it's reproduction, what it's supposed to capture (and what not) and what it ultimately all means.

20 year ds and his chums, and my younger nephews behave about all the bits and pieces of record players and vinyl like seasoned old pipe smokers with their favourite tobacco lovingly kept in an old leather pouch and all the other smoking paraphernalia. Meanwhile, I'm still delighted by the likes of Spotify and Tidal!

I do remember CDs being promoted in the 80s as "the future" because they were practically indestructible . No more scratches and skipping, no more worried about pieces of fluff getting caught on the stylus. No more worrying about it wearing out or the stylus damaging the vinyl.