Westminstenders: The Tunnel or Bridge

[RedToothBrush]

Apparently negotiations are in the black hole of the EU tunnel or should that be on the back of the fantasy of the Boris Bridge?

Another week closer to complete meltdown.

I'm guessing that our world beating customs solution will be based on blackboard and chalk.

Outer Mongolia ... not that far from Nottingham

Clearly a Raabsian understanding of geography.

🐿 "Some internet firsts:

💻The first item sold on eBay (back then it was AuctionWeb) was a broken laser pointer for $14.83 in 1995. The man who bought it told founder Pierre Omidyar he collected broken laser pointers.
💻Mark Zuckerberg was the first person on Facebook with ID number 4 (the first three Facebook accounts were used for testing). The first non-founder to join Facebook was Arie Hasit, who is now in Israel studying to be a rabbi.
💻The first book purchased on Amazon was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought in 1995.

Therefore, pay attention to meeeeeee and be distracted by my enormous squirrel testicles, instead of unpatriotically noticing and discussing the cock-ups of ToryBrexitannianNationalPlague!" 🐿

I set up my first Ebay account in 2001
back when it was cute and fluffy and cuddly.
The Ebay boards on a Friday night were the stuff of legend.

LQ - re -exam cancellation - exactly my thoughts too.

Celebrate 2 brilliant women !

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 👏🏽👏🏽

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02765-9?

It’s CRISPR.
Two scientists who pioneered the revolutionary gene-editing technology are the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
......
The technology allows precise edits to the genome and has swept through laboratories worldwide since its inception in the 2010s. It has countless applications:

researchers hope to use it to alter human genes to eliminate diseases; create hardier plants; wipe out pathogens and more.

@TheElementsOfMedical the first documented use of bitcoin to pay for something was when a Florida developer/miner offered 10000btc to whoever could deliver a pizza to his house. A fellow developer called a Papa John's in Florida and persuaded them to take btc as payment (approx 7500 iirc) in exchange for two pizzas. Back then, that was peanuts, now it's a fortune.

Sorry about the squirrel...

The Daily Showw@TheDailyShow*

Trump’s return home from the hospital wasn’t a photo op, it was a biological attack on the White House.

Forgot to say, the chap who bought the pizzas was in London.

@ListeningQuietly

I set up my first Ebay account in 2001 back when it was cute and fluffy and cuddly. The Ebay boards on a Friday night were the stuff of legend.

I remember you from the EBay boards LQ - although I only caught a few of those Friday nights.

I didn't claim to know much about the Irish university application and admission system - it's not a test! You asked me what I knew and I replied; "I do know a little about the Irish Leaving Cert."
@Clavinova
More a case of something you walked straight into than a test...

You didn't admit to not knowing much, though. The statement "I do know a little about the Irish Leaving Cert" isn't an admission of little knowledge.

You - for reasons as yet unfathomable - believe the Leaving Cert 2020 is a relevant topic to bring to the Brexit thread. In order to shine a light on your reasoning here, many posters have asked for clues as to the relevance of the topic. For my part, hoping to elucidate hitherto unsuspected expertise, I suggested you knew next to nothing about the LC, and you insisted, "I do know a little about the Irish Leaving Cert." To the contrary, it turned out that you had heard a few details here and there but didn't know about the most important part of the process which the grading of the LC sets in motion, an element that sets the Irish system apart from the British - and this has a bearing on relevance to this thread. That is to say, it isn't relevant. It was an attempt at cheap point scoring at the expense of Ireland which has so far thwarted Brexit, and of course the usual "Squirrel!" tactic.

LQ & Peregrina - I would love GSCE and a levels to return to at least some internal assessment- DS has GSCE's this year. With the debacle this year I was saying the government needed to plan for disruption next year and plan standardised internal assessments for each subject, so we don't have the same shit show in the coming year.
However I have no faith that this will happen - so I am guessing we are heading for another clusterfuck.

@mrslaughan

LQ & Peregrina - I would love GSCE and a levels to return to at least some internal assessment- DS has GSCE's this year. With the debacle this year I was saying the government needed to plan for disruption next year and plan standardised internal assessments for each subject, so we don't have the same shit show in the coming year. However I have no faith that this will happen - so I am guessing we are heading for another clusterfuck.

Head of one the Academy chains just discussing this on R4 - his view is that all school exams should be scrapped for 2021, and it should all go to continuous assessment with some external moderation - a decision to do this sooner rather than later would give time for that moderation process to be put in place.

The Boy Gavin is due to make an announcement this month, apparently.

Oh - and did you see that Liam Fox has been knocked out of the race to be WTO chief ?..... so there goes that cunning plan to trade on WTO rules while contrite WTO...... so will they then cut the extra funding they promised?

Re exams - I have told DD2 to work her arse off on every piece of homework and every assessment to make it the best it can possibly be. Just in case.

@pointythings Same here.

Yep some here too.

Also worried because a lot of their gcse are actually i gcse and some countries are quite happy to do exams etc.... so he might end up in a situation where he will still have to sit some exams when no one else will.

BCF I'm actually really surprised that the Nobel committee chose only those two for the award. There's a massive patent litigation going on in the USA right now regarding CRISPR, and the male scientist at the Broad Institute whose team actually did a fair chunk of the work first has so far won almost every stage. I think it's unfortunate that the Nobel committee decided to go for a "first" instead of equally acknowledging a third person as they have done many times in the past. It cheapens the award.

Regardless, Outer Mongolia ... not that far from Nottingham is my favourite accidental juxtaposition on these threads in the last few months

mathanxiety
More a case of something you walked straight into than a test...

Oh, it was a trap! Thankfully, I was honest and posted; "I do know a little about the Irish Leaving Cert" (I do - you didn't challenge that section of my post) - instead of claiming I knew much about the Irish university application and admission system. Indeed, how could I compete with your forensically detailed account of its mechanisms.

You - for reasons as yet unfathomable - believe the Leaving Cert 2020 is a relevant topic to bring to the Brexit thread.

It was an interesting and useful comparison on a topic already discussed on this board (A-level results). I'm afraid that you (and OchonAgusOchonO) lost your argument last night when you entered into a discussion on the very topic that I had introduced. In fact, it was quite obvious to me that you took the trouble to research the pending court cases OchonAgusOchonO was referring to.

I took up the Leaving Cert schadenfreude comment just for the lols
It was fun while it lasted...

It hasn't ended - you keep posting! And I keep replying. I doubt you are having much fun at my expense - I think your 'trap' has backfired.

I see that the Brexit board have been discussing GCSEs this morning...

One of the quirks of the English language is when speakers declare " I know a little", they actually mean they are quite well informed. Or "that's not bad" means it's good.

However, the Irish Leaving cert was introduced because it's another EU country, which didn't get a Covid-19 response right. We could have had whole pages of cut n' paste about what a mess Trump has made, and if an EU country had the misfortune to have such an abominable leader, we would have done, but because it's the sainted US of A - not a peep.

because it's the sainted US of A

In fact I wouldn't vote for either candidate in the US elections - I would emigrate to Canada!

I see that the Brexit board have been discussing GCSEs this morning...

Because UK exams are directly under the control of the current woeful government, along with Covid response and Brexit, and is likely to be a significant issue in the next few months.

Irish leaving cert - not so much.

@Peregrina

One of the quirks of the English language is when speakers declare " I know a little", they actually mean they are quite well informed. Or "that's not bad" means it's good.

However, the Irish Leaving cert was introduced because it's another EU country, which didn't get a Covid-19 response right. We could have had whole pages of cut n' paste about what a mess Trump has made, and if an EU country had the misfortune to have such an abominable leader, we would have done, but because it's the sainted US of A - not a peep.

This - Clav's position in a nutshell.

Bad thing happens or is done in EU country: The EU is terrible! This is so bad! BrexitanniaNationalPlague is great!
Bad thing happens or is done in UK or in US: Complete silence, lame excuse or 'look! another country has bad things happening in it!

Why do we bother to respond to this stuff?

Because UK exams are directly under the control of the current woeful government,

If by "woeful government" you are of course meaning BJ and his cronies, then you're wrong as the Scottish exams are under the control of the Scottish government and there are no UK school exams

Pedant, moi? you wouldn't have expected me not to point that out

Yes, why ?
Gang mentality is always ugly ....

Good news about Liam Fox failing in his bid for the WTO !

Why do we bother to respond to this stuff?

I don't I don't even read it although I do get echoes of it via the responses to him/her

But you're right KonTikki - it is really good news that Liam Fox has been knocked out of the WTO race. If ever there was someone so totally unsuitable for the role, it was him.