phweakazoid retweeted
🇰🇵 North Korean LEGO be like : Military aircraft and missile launchers, space rocket sets, tanks, armored vehicles, and military trucks
Locally made building block sets that closely resemble products from the famous Danish company
phweakazoid retweeted
You just admitted it's "illustrative modelling based on a premise" — i.e. you made the premise up.
No country funds welfare from income tax + NI alone. That's not economics, that's ideology.
And your ONS point proves the opposite of what you think.
ONS regional balances include ALL spending — defence, debt interest, Whitehall, infrastructure — not just welfare.
Of course only London + SE are in surplus. That's what redistribution is for. That's the whole point of a unitary state.
Birmingham isn't "insolvent". It's been deindustrialised while London hoovers up HQ's, finance, and corporation tax registered to a London postcode — even when the work is done elsewhere.
Your map doesn't show welfare is unsustainable. It shows the UK is London-centric and unequal. Fix that.
phweakazoid retweeted
Very much enjoyed reading this piece by @for_birmingham questioning why the @TransportForWM Transport for West Midlands network needs to spend thousands on a rebrand. betterstreetsforbirmingham.o…
phweakazoid retweeted
Things To Come (1976). Sci-fi Seventies sexploitation with a side order of radical politics. It's Logan's Run meets Westworld, having read The Machine Stops on the way. But the budget is good, though the acting, erm, isn't.
America is a state controlled dystopia of tediousness, with the population of drone workers hooked on TV sex and violence. But Uncle Sam has a way out: if you play the lottery you may win a weekend at The Pleasure Dome, a hedonistic paradise of sex robots in St. Louis.
Bored housewife Julie wins a ticket, but she's been recruited by a group of radical libertarians who want to destroy the state's control of the population. However all is not what it seems in the Dome, and Julie must confront the sinister truth: what if Computer Utopia is all a big fat lie...
phweakazoid retweeted
Remember when Wendy James went on Going Live! with Sarah Greene and admitted she wasn’t wearing knickers?
Sarah asked if they matched her outfit. Wendy just said she didn’t wear any. Live on kids’ Saturday morning TV. Jonathan Ross later grilled her about the parental complaints.
Would never make it to air now. Kids’ TV is far more tightly controlled, any underwear chat would get cut, and the clip would spark instant online outrage plus Ofcom complaints before the credits rolled. The old cheeky, unfiltered banter just doesn’t survive today’s standards, Not that the BBC seem to have any.
phweakazoid retweeted
Jonathan Meades: Remember The Future (1997).
The first documentary from his series Even Further Abroad, Meades asks about Britain and technological modernism and our national dread of awe. Big Tech was never going to fit into Little England he concludes, despite the postwar lurch towards the white heat of technology and a brief flirtation with architectural determinism. Instead "The shape of things to come is the shape of what's already been. We're invited to advance timorously into the past."
What's old is new again and Meades's arguments about Nineties Britain are back in play: data centres and high speed rail, wind farms and modular nuclear reactors - is it really us? Is our suspicion of technological utopia a hangup, or a well honed defence against the petty tyrannies of planned progress? Or is it just an argument over taste? One person's national heritage is another person's Victorian monstrosity etc. We're headed into the future regardless, why argue about the brickwork there.
Meades is acerbic as well as informed and thoughtful, and his documentaries should be Grade 2 listed: preserved for future generations to gawp at on school visits to the world of analogue television, where we thought 30 minutes of architecture on BBC2 before the snooker started was good for us.
phweakazoid retweeted
Like so much public infrastructure, it's built around the behaviour of 1% of the population who don't know how to behave in a civilised society.
phweakazoid retweeted
The lowest point of land in Britain is a cast-iron post in a Cambridgeshire wood, and when it went in the ground it was level with the ground.
Stand next to it now and it is four metres over your head.
It is at Holme Fen, south of Peterborough, and in 1851 this was the edge of Whittlesey Mere, the largest lake in southern England. A syndicate of landowners drained the lake that year for farmland, and the engineer, who knew what happens to peat when you take the water out of it, drove an oak pile through 22 feet of it down to the clay and cut the top flush with the turf. A column from the Crystal Palace replaced it. Then they stood back and watched the land go down.
Nine inches in the first year. Eight feet by the 1890s. Today the ground around that post is 2.75 metres below sea level, and the post is a ruler nobody asked for, sticking out of a birch wood with guy ropes holding it up because the soil that used to hold it up has gone into the sky.
That is what drained peat does. It dries, it shrinks, and it oxidises, which means it turns into carbon dioxide and leaves. Peat takes a thousand years to lay down a metre. Under the plough it loses a centimetre or two of that every year, and the Fens have been under the plough since the Dutch engineers arrived in the 1600s. Peat soils farmed for crops are among the largest sources of carbon dioxide in Britain's whole land sector, and the fields doing it are growing lettuce.
Because that is what the Fens are for. A third of England's vegetables come out of this one flat black square: half the lettuce grown in Britain, three quarters of the celery, the carrots, the onions, the potatoes, the leeks, the beetroot. The bag of salad, the celery sticks, the chips. Every field of it is a few millimetres lower than it was last January, the pumps run day and night to keep the sea out of a landscape that is now beneath it, and the water the crops need is forecast to run short within ten years.
Before the drain this was eels, wildfowl, reeds, summer grazing, and a fen that had been quietly stacking carbon since the ice left. The cattle came and went on it for 5,000 years and the ground stayed where it was.
The salad has been on it for 170 years and the ground is four metres down. The post is still measuring.
phweakazoid retweeted
Marston's threat shows the damage cost is doing to hospitality.
The threatened closure of Marston's Brewery in Burton upon Trent should be ringing alarm bells in Westminster. I lead Staffordshire County Council and I've worked in hospitality since the early 80s, and I've never seen our sector in a worse state. Since COVID, it has been battered, and the biggest reason is cost.
Burton upon Trent, here in Staffordshire, is Britain's capital of brewing. If brewing is in trouble here, it's in trouble everywhere.
My heart goes out to every worker at Marston's and their families. For some, this brewery has been a way of life for generations, passed down from grandparents to parents to children. They are worried sick right now, and they deserve every effort we can make to keep it open.
Carlsberg Britvic points to falling cask ale sales. Sales of all alcohol are down. But that's only part of the picture. There has been a huge drop in people going out and socialising, and a large number of pubs, bars and clubs have closed their doors. 161 pubs shut in the first three months of this year alone, nearly two a day. A third of our nightclubs have gone since 2020.
This is far more than a change in society. One of the biggest reasons is cost.
I owned and ran what I believe is the UK's longest-running nightclub under the same owner. Trust me, at today's costs, much of our sector is simply not economically viable.
Our hospitality sector is one of the most heavily taxed in Europe. Take VAT. We charge 20%. France, Spain and Italy charge 10%. Germany has cut VAT on restaurant food to 7%. The European average is 12.8%.
Then there's beer and alcohol duty, again among the highest in Europe. Our brewers pay twelve times more duty than brewers in Germany or Spain. After all that, a pub makes around 12p on a pint.
Add the red tape and the never-ending legislation, and you can see why so many good operators are handing back the keys.
I've written to the Minister to discuss how we save this brewery, and I've asked Carlsberg Britvic for a meeting to find out where the pressures are, and how we can help.
VAT is the problem. But so is beer duty, and most certainly business rates and energy costs. Together they are killing off the Great British pub.
This matters far beyond the balance sheet. Humans are social creatures. We need to get out, see each other, talk and laugh together. When that stops happening, people suffer. You can see it in the rise in mental health problems, especially among our younger generation.
A pint of beer is as British as a cup of tea. The Great British pub is as English as the village green. And brewing in Burton is as historic as it gets. Monks at Burton Abbey were brewing beer here more than a thousand years ago.
We must save our traditions and our heritage sites. Marston's has brewed in Burton since 1834, its Shobnall Road brewery has been making beer since 1875, and it still brews Bass, a name that goes back to 1777.
This brewery should definitely be treated as a heritage site. Not as some museum piece, but as a viable business with a future.
Martin Murray
Leader, Staffordshire County Council
#SaveNightlife #SaveHospitality #SaveMarstons
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@UKHofficial @morningad @CAMRA_Official @ntiaofficial @Ben_Bradley_32 @CarlsbergUK @UKHospKate – at Cannock, England
phweakazoid retweeted
Someone’s cut the new trees down on Digbeth High Street. – at Birmingham, England
phweakazoid retweeted
I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron.
Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence.
Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons.
Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist.
After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence.
New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today?
worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…
