Be Excellent To Each Other

The Economist: "America’s housing system was at the centre of the last crisis. It has still not been properly reformed". How foolish. We all know it was Labour, of course.

Is the film any good? Looked at a trailer today and it looks worth a watch. RT give it 73% so guess things have calmed down?

sensing opportunity, i signed a 38degrees petition to call for the resignation the fat cunt

At about 7.15 this morning, Corbyn's Batman was on R4 talking about "giving power back to the people via more referendums" and things like that. It seems that the big issues are worthy of such public opinion, but when pressed, it seems things like the reintroduction of capital punishment wouldn't be as that "isn't a council issue", so scaling it back to council issues like "banning a burqa like some councils inFrance" would also be excluded as it would be discriminatory. So, the will of the people is fine if it is in line then.

He also struggled when asked why all experienced labour figures want Corbyn out with the exception of MaccyD, and he said Diane Abbott doesn't and then he listed the shadow cabinet and tried to unsuccessfully gloss over the lack of experience.

Once again showing the lack of substance in Corbyn's thinking.

All in all, terrible once again. I'd take Nicky Fucking Morgan as leader of Labour right now.

Come back cavey!

I think DocG made one spiteful, pointless dig too many for that.

It was a painful one to listen to. He fell into most of the traps that Robinson laid for him, all of which were easily avoidable with preparation.

I'm all for constitutional overhaul, but it's a very hard sell to a voting public worried about jobs, health, and schools.

If this was a catalyst, then I'm sorry. Not aimed at Cavey, but rather despair at how people treat each other in this and other political threads.

It wasn't DocG. More someone who likes to remain anonymous.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p043bkyg

From about 1 hour 45mins.

From an email i received:

I saw that post and yes, it was very unpleasant, however Cavey's final post on BEEX to date is a response to Doc.

Have you ever considered a career as a spy, Myp?

'I have planted the 'mossive bamb' on the bridge that is near Westminster'.

It'll be like the Enigma code. They'll still be trying to crack it years after they've made several movies about you.

I liked the Remain bit especially

Last night, whilst watching Robot Wars, I applied for a few jobs. I had a couple of call backs today and it all seemed pretty positive. Pay was 25% up plus bonus, advancement and so on. Feeling chipper, I booted up rightmove and realised Uxbridge isn't near Stafford.

It is not very near Stafford, no. It's quite near the music quiz, mind.

I texted MrsA to suggest I live in London in the week and return at weekends....

And she responded with a suggestion to make it all 7 days?

It went down as well as you might imagine.

https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/ ... 4911625216

Jeremy Corbyn traingate is a scandal fit for our times. https://t.co/ZtcPkMIWMP

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) August 23, 2016

Oh. My.

At least he didn't get caught in first class without a ticket.

Let's be generous. Perhaps Mr Corbyn wanted to let someone else have the space.

Busted.

Pretty naive to do a stunt like that and not expect someone to out it as a stunt - surprised it was cctv and not just a fellow traveller saying "the train wasn't full".

Heinz or United Biscuits?

Nothing good ever came of Stafford.

Ain't that the truth.

Yes. Former

I know someone who works there, BTW.

I bought Castlevania - Symphony of the Night for 50p at the Stafford car boot sale.

If it helps, for a long time I thought Kardashia was a former Soviet republic.

I spent many years thinking Yemen was made up.

I thought Timbuktu was a pretend place made up by my grandad to tell me funny stories.

That's a great game.

Thinking about Virgingate (oh, how I've longed to write that), other than Mr Corbyn's rather embarrassing failure to find a crammed train, I'm not sure it's the most effective way to argue for renationalisation. A new BR might still have deal with over-demand and under-supply at peak times, and it's not clear to me how just changing ownership would resolve this. I'd be happier if they would say what shape a re-nationalised railway would take, especially given that the infrastructure is already state-owned and there's large amounts of public money and public direction already in the system. Just recreating BR and letting the system rust won't be a step in the right direction.

That said, letting a national operator bid for franchises would be a good step because it doesn't make sense that SNCF or DB (who run the wonderful Chiltern line) can operate trains and cream off the 3% but the government can't and it would introduce some more competition at franchise time.

Renationalisation would presumably make the tickets (far) cheaper, which would make crowding worse.

In the same way that making the tickets more expensive has made it better?

Seen on Twitter re virgingate. Never before has such a fuss been made about a virgin berth.

Indeed, it's a poor argument. "this train is overcrowded* for a small part of the journey, let's nationalise"

* - if your definition of overcrowding is "no seats'

Are you suggesting that supply and demand doesn't exist?

I think the amount of journeys made out of necessity means supply and demand and cost constraints are a lot less relevant to train journeys than many other things. Especially when the competition is nonexistent.

Depends if the competition is "transport" or "rail transport"

True, but even then the competition may not exist in feasible form. Train commuting into London being the obvious case.

Bus, natch. :l

Yes. First isn't crowded

Sure, in the short term, there is some inelastic demand.

But (a) I think that's a rather London-centric view of things that isn't true across most of the country. Going without a car and just using public transit is a luxury Londoners can enjoy that few areas can, but once you have a car the train is typically an option but not a requirement. And (b) in the long term, rail service quality will drive house purchase decisons which will drive rail service demand, even in London; so it looks less inelastic if you use longer timescales. Citation: house prices are already increasing near HS2 and Crossrail stations.

No I'm suggesting that nationalisation isn't going to lead to massively slashed ticket prices to the extent that demand rockets in the same way that the steadily growing ticket prices don't really seem to have reduced demand.

Quite. There have been several thousand homes built right next to the train station I use. The relative pricing of the train ticket is almost irrelevant; train use on my line is going to go up (unless they, like, put prices up by 1000%, and even then it'd still probably be busy).

Because there's more demand than supply (trains are overcrowded). Losing x potential customers through price matters not if you can only supply x-y.

You're still thinking like a Londoner. Commuters aren't the only people on the train.

No, but we're talking about overcrowding, and it's pretty reasonable to suggest that commuter trains have a massive overcrowding problem.