Funky_Gibbon

This one for starters https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/contents/enacted Slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour (1)A person commits an offence if— (a)the person holds another person in slavery or servitude and the circumstances are such that the person knows or ought to know that the other person is held in slavery or servitude, or (b)the person requires another person to perform forced or compulsory labour and the circumstances are such that the person knows or ought to know that the other person is being required to perform forced or compulsory labour.

The right to withdraw labour is a human right because a person who has no right to do so is a slave.

They won't. It's empty bluster from politicians who've got themselves into a mess they can't get out of without admitting their errors. It's not like anyone would pay a blind bit of notice to a ban if they tried it. They can't arrest millions of people if those people decide they've had enough of how their employer (the Government) treats them and refuse to work. Nor can they can't sack them and replace them either because unlike the 70s/80s the employment market is as near to full employment as is technically possible so there's isn't a pool of labour available to replace those who get sacked, most of the jobs are highly skilled and can't be filled except by people with the same skill (which we already don't have enough of because of how the Government treat them) and the country would fall into chaos if they tried anyway. An economist described the Government's rhetoric today as "delusional".

Tokyo Vice (season 1) On iPlayer in full or starting tonight (22/11/2022) on BBC1 at 9:10pm. The (loosely) true story of a young American who moves to Japan and succeeds in becoming the first foreign-born person to be hired to work as a journalist by a major Japanese newspaper and who, chafing against the restrictions placed upon him by his bosses, starts to privately investigate the influence and crimes of the Yakuza in Japanese society and in doing so attracts the attention of both gangsters and detectives as he gets deeper into the unspoken and unacknowledged underworld of Tokyo. Slow burn, gritty neo-noir. The lead actor does an ok job as the somewhat naive stranger in a strange land but can also be a bit annoying. Other than that the cast is excellent.

I've seen some tenuous threads started on here... 🙄

Andor Disney+ (10 episodes so far, two more to go) Really enjoying this. By far the best Star Wars TV show they've done so far and the first one that feels like it wasn't made to sell toys for Disney. A slow burn, political spy thriller set in a totalitarian regime under which you can feel the oppressive atmosphere in every scene.

How easily manipulated some people are into thinking of human beings as if they weren't. Of thinking about them as personal threats to themselves. All it takes is a few days of newspaper headlines and all the same ugliness reappears... Nobody learns from history.

Because that water comes from reservoirs that are all recording extremely low levels of water and need a lot more than a few hours of heavy rain over the next few months to reach a normal level where we won't be facing be facing water shortages next summer.

He'd been suffering from health problems for a long while apparently. He'll be remembered for playing Hagrid in the Potter films but for me he'll always be Dr Samuel Johnson and the Ghost of Christmas in Blackadder, Charles Bronson playing Ken Livingston in that GLC Comic Strip and of course Cracker. RIP

The reason the council (and every public service in the UK) are having to think about doing stuff like this is because the Government have provided almost no additional funding to cover some quite large new expenses. One of those is the 5% pay increase (which still amounts to a large pay cut thanks to inflation) the Government announced they were giving to public sector workers in the summer. The Government only provided about 40% of the money required to cover this new mandatory spending and said that public services would have to find the rest of the money out of their existing budgets. In addition to that, the Government have also announced that they're not going to uplift their previously announced annual budgets, where they estimated inflation would be something like 4%, to take account of the actual rate of inflation of around 10% so all public services are now having to find ways delivering services on a substantially reduced budget. There's also the increased cost of gas and electricity and there's no cap on the cost for business or public services so the bills for those will have risen by a lot. The Government have announced some kind of relief scheme here but everyone is still paying more than they were even after that. Oh and the cost of paying for the rebate that was part of the Government's help on household energy costs and which local authories were made to fund. After 12 years of shrinking budgets and increased statutory spending requirements and all of these unfunded extra spending costs, it's not at all surprising that we're seeing things like this being contemplated because despite what people on here may think there's nothing a great deal that can be cut that doesn't hurt us all anymore. Oh and that's before we even get to the massive (at least as large as after 2010) reduction in public spending the Government are now planning in order to pay for every tax cut in their 'Mini' Budget, the vast majority of which they're still going ahead with, plus the £20bn per year they added to our debt repayments by spooking the markets and forcing interest rates to rise. Get used to the idea of not receiving the services you think you're entitled to because none of us are going to for a very long time.

Just two weeks ago... https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/politics/liz-truss-pledges-to-protect-doncaster-sheffield-airport-amid-ticking-clock-over-closure-3835381 Well that didn't take long did it?

The Oxford Murders - 5/10 Quite silly murder mystery played absolutely straight by Elijah Wood and John Hurt about an Oxford mathematics professor and a student who try to stop a mathematically predicted series of murders.

A city that was built up rapidly in the 19th century around the industrialisation of steel manufacturing and was famously described in the late 1930s as one of the ugliest places he'd seen by George Orwell, a place of slum housing and a "...landscape of monstrous chimneys pouring forth smoke which is sometimes black and sometimes of a rosy tint said to be due to sulphur", where buildings were blackened by soot within a year of being built... a description that which only really stopped being true about 30 years ago... and which also famously had a large proportion of the older original city centre buildings bombed into rubble or burned down by the Luftwaffe and then replaced in the 1950s/1960s with brutalist architecture has the "one of the lowest proportion of listed buildings and monuments"? and isn't aesthetically pleasing to look at? Well I'm shocked.

Because most people slow down when heavy rain is reducing visibility and the road surfaces are flash flooding and that causes congestion?

'Kleo' on Netflix A German series set soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall about a former Stasi assassin who was thrown in prison by her own side for 3 years for no reason and wants to find out why it happened and take revenge on anyone involved. Very similar to the first series of Killing Eve in tone. Quite fun.

Carter (Netflix) - 5/10 Quite possibly the most OTT and ridiculously stupid action movie I've ever watched. Seemingly filmed almost entirely with a drone and with a vomit-inducing shaky cam, it has a every kind of action scene you can think of and a body count to make the silliest 80s action movie blush... It's really a 3/10 movie but I gave it a higher score for the sheer chutzpah of the filmmakers for some of the camera work.

Samaritan - 4.5/10 A kid obsessed with an old superhero who died decades earlier becomes convinced that an old garbage man in his housing block is the same man. Stallone's superhero movie on Amazon Prime. Light on plot and character development and what little it has is easy to guess well in advance. Action was ok.

Already worked out that if I use the exact same amount of gas and electricity between Nov and Feb this year as I did last year I'll be paying about £170 more a month. And then in the quarter after that it'll be a few hundred more on top of that per month!

The main reason I stopped going to Cineworld is that they didn't improve their standard seating. Where most other cinemas installed larger luxury seating with leg room as standard, they only installed it in their more expensive VIP screens. If anything their normal seats seemed to get smaller thanks to some new cup holder design they added. It's harsh but if I'm going to watch a film and the ticket prices are largely similar then I'm going to pick the cinema that's more comfortable. I'm getting older and my knees just can't take being pressed against the seat in front for 2-3 hours anymore, they need a bit of room to stretch...

I'm pretty sure Diamonds Are Forever felt dated in the year it was released....

The Holcroft Covenant - 5/10 Michael Caine stars in the adaptation of a Robert Ludlum novel about the son of a Nazi general who is told decades later that his father, along with two other Nazi generals, stole a fortune from the Third Reich towards the end of the war and hid it in a Swiss bank account that has to be accessed jointly by the sons of those generals. As he tries to track down the other two men, mysterious third parties appear to intervene. Far from a classic and Caine seems somewhat miscast but an ok mystery conspiracy thriller for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

I'm sure you're trying to make some kind of clever point but I can't see what it is.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three - 8/10 Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau are both excellent in this crime drama about a group of criminals who take the passengers of a subway train car hostage. I love these older films that show glimpses of how grimy New York used to be, it's almost a character all of its own. Probably wasn't all that great to live there at the time but it makes a great background for a movie.

Apparently there is a version of that's dubbed in Comanche. I agree though, filming it like Apocalypto in the native language would have been interesting.

Prey - 6.5/10 Better than I was expecting it to be but still suffers from some of the same problems as most of the modern Predator films.