ECCOnoob

But the wonderful thing about politics is if they don't walk the white line in the middle, they don't get anywhere. If they commit too far right they lose. If they commit too far left they lose. The fickle voting public and the even more fickle media controlling the steering wheel change their minds, loyalties and priorities on a whim, flip flopping from one extreme to another. Staying centre is the only place to be.

Not particularly targeting you. You just happen to come up with many opinions that I disagree with. I also will admit that when people use lazy tropes like "nanny state" it does grind my gears. There is not a single thing in the original article that mentions university students or newcomers to the city or suggests that those are sorts of people are more likely to 'go off the rails whilst they get used to things'. All of that is complete stereotyping and wild assumption that you have created in your head - which personally I find quite insulting to uni students as if supposedly lesser educated working class older drinkers are automatically much more responsible and free from such behaviour. Well clearly they aren't. They go drinking in city bars. They are just as capable of getting too drunk and walking out into the road. They are just as capable as innocently being forced off the pavement because there's no room - so why they need to be singling out? Yes the barriers are temporary. But as it sets out in the article - that is only an interim thing whilst they undertake permanent works to widen out the pavements, on the cards for next year. My comments about the state are slightly in jest given your posting history on this forum. However, the basic principle doesn't change. People can't have it both ways. You are always banging on about the NHS funding, more and more things should be put into the state's hands rather than those greedy corporations. Well, is it such a wild arguement to suggest that if taxpayer monies are funding state healthcare to fix people once they've been injured, taxpayer monies could be more wisely spent to prevent accidents happening in the first place. Sometimes that easy target criticism of "nanny state" might not always be justified when it's the same state with having to pay to deal with the consequences.

Well as someone who's often championing expanding state owned this... state run that... state-funded other.... you should be right behind it. At the end of the day, if it's 'the state' paying for someone's treatment and healthcare after an accident occurs, why shouldn't it be 'the state' taking increased steps to prevent one from happening. Also like how you've done some nice wild assumption that these people needing safety barriers are all young irresponsible university graduates. Last time I checked it's not just middle class young uni students drinking in city bars. Plenty of older salt of the earth working class lowly educated people's go drinking in city bars too. Anyone is capable of having one too many and stepping a bit too close to a moving car. Anyone is more than capable of innocently getting too close to the edge of the payment because it's full with other people or they are queueing up waiting to get in somewhere. People don't cry nanny state when the football matches temporarily close off part of a road to deal with a crowd. Most adults are perfectly capable of crossing a road, but people don't cry nanny state when they install crossings at specific busy locations or junctions. Most adults are perfectly capable of walking along the platform without plummeting to their death, but they don't cry nanny state when they put up a balcony or balustrade edging. It's just sensible precautions.

Well that's your choice. But I'll be fascinated to know how exactly you think he's going to rejoin the EU by stealth, Do you think the EU is going to magically accept us back in with open arms without years worth of debates, paperwork, negotiations, approval processes, votes, formalised agreement. Do you think Starmer can somehow quietly do all that shrouded in secrecy without the rest of parliament being involved, voting on it, approving it. Do you seriously think it feasible that parliament could possibly attempt to get away with that without journalists finding out, reporting it to the public who in turn would react accordingly and demand a formalised referendum process. Goodness sake, be realistic. Look, I certainly didn't want Brexit to happen. But I reluctantly accepted the outcome of the referendum vote and now we are out with the consequences that have come with it. But equally, hardened brexiteers need to accept the fact that leaving the EU didnt mean we leave europe. We still have to co-operate and liaise with them as they are our closest allies. They are our closest and massive traffic bloc. Our newest partners when it comes to cross business, economy, military, security....with plenty of us Brits scattered living and working the EU countries just as plenty of EU citizens are still living and working here in Britain. I don't agree with Starmer on many things and certainly wouldn't vote for him. However, one thing I will agree on is there was far too much anti-europe rhetoric being thrown around and it's only right for it all to be calmed down. We are ultimately all still European no matter what the flag shaggers plead otherwise.

Show me another event that has a million plus people all gathering in one area over 2 days. How does the supposed 'out of control crime hotspot' that you describe compare to other mass gatherings. If you have say 100,000 drunken football fans, how many of them potentially commit a crime during the festivities and then scale that up x10 to make it a fair comparison. Even a child of below average intelligence will be able to work out that if you have a million plus people gather together in one place it is almost impossible for it not to be totally crime-free. Some of those crowds will inevitably be there to cause trouble and harm people. It's how the police respond. That is the key and seemingly they responded quite well given the arrest numbers. As I have said multiple times on this thread even with the updated crime and arrest figures from the Carnival, the number of people committing crimes versus the number of people attending is still absolutely minimal. People like you exaggerating it out of all reasonable proportion to try and push some agenda precisely proves the point in the article.

Ok, fair enough. But a similar scenario can easily be applied to the railways. No longer are people having to contact National rail enquiries to check the times and routes, then go go down to the station to queue up at the booking office and wait for the booking clerk to ask 101 questions, type war and peace into the computer whilst they print off your tickets. People can be in their own homes, sprawled on the sofa press some buttons on their phone and bingo. They see exactly what trains are available, select it, make the reservation, pay it and then just rock up to the station with a e-ticket on their phone to scan through the barriers or show the guard. Some of the apps will even go as far to tell you exactly what platform the train will be coming on in advance and where to stand for your coach. Again, all without having to try and find a member of staff, queue for the information booth or decipher the boards. Like I said earlier, whilst I'm sure it is not for everyone, this is the direction of travel and it isn't going to stop now.

Yes, you have still got to queue up but as I said, your individual time at the desk will be much quicker because you are just grabbing a key and not going through the whole check in process. Times that up by the number of customers in a day and its all relative. Add on that more and more customers will start using self-check in so leading to even less people waiting around in the queue stuck behind someone going through all the paperwork.

But it is. If you've already done all the check in forms online, all you are doing is rocking up and grabbing your key. It might seem a miniscule time saving to the individual, but times that by the number of guests each day, over the course of a week it makes a great difference to both the staff resources and customer wait time. Some hotels now have gone even further where they are doing digital room keys on people's phones. In theory, someone can be checking in online, gets notification when their room is ready and just go straight up without even having to go near reception. For regular travellers and loyalty members customers it's what they want. Just think of it similar to the whole airport process now. Dependant on the airline and the country, I can check in online, get my boarding pass on my phone, rock up to the airport straight to bag drop, get my own label and send it off on the shoot, use my phone to go straight into security, use my phone to check through the gate and use my phone to find my seat allocation. No standing in a long queue waiting whilst every passenger gets checked in, sorts out their luggage, goes through all the questions, squabbles about their seating allocation.... The internet world of instant everything and physical business interaction is becoming more blurred. The next generation are expecting everything on tap when they want it at the click of a button. Businesses are clearly having to adapt for that. There's being lots of reports about how the next generation don't want the levels of human interaction compared to predecessors. They are living here world where everything is online and button control on their whim. Unfortunately for some, we are now too far down the rabbit hole and we aren't going back.

Yes in a couple of hotels I have and I don't recall having the interference that you did. Someone came up to me asked if I was okay using the self-checking, I said yes, and they left me to it. Maybe you have just been unlucky. The fact that one receptionist can keep an eye on three or four self-check terminals at once is clearly going to be streamlined than having to stand behind a desk checking in one person in full at a time while other guests are queueing up waiting.

Oh and just to top it off, the impact of those scathing reviews on the Waitrose website can't have been that severe because the product in question is still scoring an average of 3 and 1/2 stars

Jeez, newspapers more than anything are masters of making something out of nothing. "Shoppers revolt" my arse. What they mean to say is one grumbling pensioner goes crying about it to The Times and a handful of the Twitterati make some comments about it on the internet. To top it off, the Daily Fail then creates a completely separate story reporting about the story from some bloke commenting to The Times. Part of me really would love to sit one of their editorial meetings just to see how they possibly manage to create so much excrement to fill their websites and print 'news'papers everyday.

Corrected that for you. Very sensible. Why the hell would any organisation put their employees at unnecessary risk unless absolutely needed.

You say "deserve a safer environment" and "needs to be better policed" Unless you are aiming for absolute zero incident and zero crime which is clearly an impossibility - I dont know how much more you expect to be done. Bad people do Bad things. There is no such thing as absolute zero risk they will keep doing bad things - we have to be realistic and proportionate. As I keep saying. Look at the ratios of incidents, arrests against numbers of attendees. Whichever way you spin it, its still averaging less than 0.0xxx......levels of percentage of people being affected. Its reported that the event already has 7000+ police officers, which as a comparative, is more than double the entire number of officers who serve the whole of South Yorkshire Police - so just how many more do you think would be needed?

Nobody is brushing anything under the carpet. The small number of incidents have been widely reported across all sorts of media and directly confirmed by the police. But let's not make out, as you clearly were suggesting, that the carnival is some feral out of control crime hotspot where everyone attending puts their lives at severe risk the moment they step outside their door.

90 arrests according to you.... out of a recorded 2 million people attending over the two days. It's maths.

0.004% of attendees cased trouble and were arrested. So very very clearly for the vast majority of attendees, police staff, and volunteers, it was such fun. Stop exaggerating problems that don't exist to try and desperately justify some point.

But a question that needs to be asked is when did the cladding become non-compliant? Was it at the time it was built? Post Grenfell? Last week? It's all well and good everyone jumping up and down demanding something happens... All well everyone demanding the landlords and owners cough up and change it.... but things don't happen overnight. They certainly don't happen without massive costs and disruption which all cause just as much outrage, upset and conflict as the incidents themselves. Let's take the average block of flats, plenty of the people living there will be leaseholders. Are they are perfectly fine to to be hit with a bill of tens of thousands of pounds because the cladding is suddenly deemed no longer compliant compared to standards that were set 20, 30 40 years ago at the time of it being built, approved, signed off by the authorities..... Is that fair? Would people willingly accept their mass eviction notices so the landlords can spend months/years stripping or pulling down to rebuild it again to modern day compliance standards. As with all of these things, the knee-jerk emotion always seems to outweigh the practical realities. Yes of course buildings should be made safe. Yes of course standards evolve over time. but it all takes time and money and it doesn't happen by some magic wand. Even more so when standards suddenly change. We don't pull down or gut every older building just because they're non-compliant with previously nonexistent 2024 standards. I can imagine the outrage now if they did.

Are the general public not shareholders in companies? Do they not rely on jobs and income from the business and operations of their private company employers who need to be making profit in order to sustain themselves and keep offering such employment? Do the general public not have savings and investments based on that private sector companies being profitable and contributing to the economy? Do the general public not rely on pensions which are all balanced with good performing economies? Do the general not happily take advantage of competition, access to a global marketplace, price differentials, open supply and our country's performance on the global stage? Yeah yeah. blah blah blah. The public sector is all sooo wonderful except of course when it runs out of other people's money to spend.

But it's not so hard to find out these days. For example, if we're looking at a McDonald's UK menu the whole ingredients list for every item is all set out on their website. The beef patty for instance is just that. Beef and a bit of salt and pepper. That's it. 'Stories' are just Stories otherwise if they were accurate they'd be facts. Companies are much more open and transparent these days with all the litigation risks over allergies and contamination. The majority, if not all of the big chains publish that information all over the internet. In their restaurants they will have big books ready for inspection of anyone who has to query what a dish contains, whole folders filled with tick box sheets and checklists setting out contents of everything from a piece of bread to a prime cut of meat. We have all seen the consequences when it, thankfully rarely, goes wrong. Like I said earlier, "junk food" always seems to be some easy target. I think it really isn't a million miles apart from what people are making in their own homes everyday, no matter how posh the label or expensive the price tag.

Compared to what though? It's a burger and fries. A beef patty and fried potatoes. In terms of the raw ingredients, it's probably not a much far apart from the sorts of things that people are cooking in their homes everyday. It's still the same basic makeup of a £35 burger and fries being served in some Michelin star restaurant. Of course it's not the healthiest food in the world, but then again it doesn't claim to be. Very few people are regularly cooking from complete scratch at home. Even less of those people are going to be buying straight from 'the farm'. In these modern times, nearly all of the food we buy has a heavy amounts of processing. In fact, cutting out any inevitable rose tinted delusion, it has in reality been that way since post wartime. I bet if you took the raw basic ingredients in most junk food meals, there would be massive amounts of crossover with what's been sold in the supermarkets, delish, greengrocers and butchers. Even the poshest stores and the packets with things like finest, premium, extra special, taste the difference, organic... Most doctors will say diet is about moderation. It's quite right that no one's going to do well from eating so called junk food everyday but equally, I doubt gorging on free range, freshly slaughtered, skinless, extra lean chicken and a pile of cale everyday will be good for the body either. There seems to be a lot of food snobbery over cheap fast food, but take a look at the menu in some artisan gastro pub or Michelin restaurant or private estate farm shop . Look at the rich game and meat based dishes, the gargantuan portions filled with pure butter sauces, laced with alcohol, cream and spices. You could get gout just looking at it. At the end of the day, life is short and there's nothing wrong with the occasional treat in moderation. It's convenient and quick and tasty. A lot of our longevity is in our genes no matter how desperate people try and be to be healthy. You could have someone who is super fit, eats nothing but organic vegan food exercising regular and still snuffs it in their 60s with cancer. On the other hand, you could have a long-term smoker, heavy drinker, eating nothing but pies living into their '90s.

Tim Lindon is a great example of what we are talking about. He is a guy who has been in the world of TV. He did the whole stepping stones of holiday camp, blue coat style entertaining for years, no doubt lots of auditions and knock backs, bit parts, got a few very low rent TV presenting gigs fronting shows on obscure cable channels and quiz networks, doing the odd corporate video before eventually starting his Youtube walking channel during lockdown which has now turned into full blown travel blog reviews ranging from seaside crumbing hotels to palace suites in Dubai and LA. Some would argue that its almost a downgrade going from the magic dreamy world of actual TV to that crappy internet Youtube but just shows how the reality is for those naive (and often delusional) fame hungry wannabe stars. I bet Tim is more well known, "influential" and respected now than he ever was fronting cheap quiz channels on proper TV networks. However, its probably taken him 15+ 20+ years to get there.

I partly agree but I do find tagging them all as some differing level of "influencers" to be quite insulting to the ones who actually do it as a real job and put the effort in. Personally, I would equate successful YouTubers who are doing genuinely entertaining, comedic, educational, nostalgic or even longform documentaries with genuine facts, interviews and statistics to be equated not as "influencers" but calling them presenters, comedians, performers or documentary makers. After all, for many in the current generation, YouTube etc is their television equivalent. The ones who are doing travel videos, factual product reviews, technical breakdowns or accommodation reviews to simply be called critics or consumer journalists because that's what they are doing just on the internet rather than on some TV program or newspaper column. As you say, the ones who are doing podcasts, interviews vlogs are equated to basically same as any radio host. Then we have two very distinct tiers of 'models'. The one's pouting away on Instagram, taking pictures of their dinners, showing off their hands and eyes covered the latest makeup trend or wearing X brand's gear might as well just be called fashion models or advertorials because as you say, they're equivalent to the sorts of tabloid newspaper and magazine posers of yesterday. The ones who are wiggling their bums for clicks on certain types of or website getting piecemeal donations from their 'fans' are influencing sod all (except a certain part of the body), so might as well categorise them exactly the same as the models doing it on late night television. They're simply pornography actors. As for everyone else with a YouTube/insta page/tiktok channel with less viewers than the test card, well let's just call them what they are. Hobbyists. They're nothing more than people back in the day going round with a camcorder filming their home movies to share and giggle at with their friends, nothing more than the amateur photographers who might every now and then throw some of their work onto a market stall to make a few quid just that's it. They are nothing more than people sat in their bedrooms recording their own voices, singing away, making their mixtapes or recording copyrighted works off the radio to replay it out with their commentary on. For that lot, the modern buzzword of influencer is far too grand. It's just people having a hobby and the reality is, that's what 99% of the so called "influencers" really are. Just the same as yesterday there was the millions of wannabe pop stars.... the millions of desperate hopefuls who think they are so beautiful ready to be the next Kate Moss.... the millions of people in their kitchens who think they are only a step away from being the next Gorgon Ramsay..... and barely anyone actually makes it to the top. So, back to the original post. The fact is if that's what she wants to do, she will need to treat it as the same mindset as those desperate wannabes described above from back in the day. It may well be doable IF (and it's a huge if) they having enough talent, draw, personality and skill to stand out from the crowd, get a following and get noticed. But like many of their predecessors who have done it off the internet world, it can take years. It will take knock back after knock back. All the while they will need to make damn ensure that they have a real world job to fill in the gaps. Just like all of those things I mentioned, there are thousands of wannabes just waiting to be the next big "thing" and only a handful of them ever make it.

Plenty of parents have always worked despite having kids. In fact, most of them still do. Like I said, these are decisions responsible parents think about before they make the commitment to having children. Given the changing times, there's never been more agile and flexible working available. Certainly more than my parents had but they have both coped and continued to work. They just made damn sure to juggle their hours around the kids and the moment the oldest sibling could be, she was in charge looking after the rest of us when there was overlap. As the next oldest grew responsible enough it passed down the line and so on. That was how it was. Oldest sibling did the after school hours, as one parent came home from work. The other parent went off to their work in the evening. Come the morning the roles reversed. One parent came home after dropping kids off at school while other all went out to work round and round it went. It was a tough life but that's how it was for many families. Like I said, understanding the commitment and taking the responsibility. I'll work with people right now who are both full-time parents and full-time employees. One comes in early, the other late after dropping kids to their various schools/services. Then of course one finishes earlier to be ready to do the after school pick up whilst the other finishes later... Why should it be free after school this... after school that.... When do schools become some unofficial child minding service for convenience of parents. Why should it be the school responsibility to teach basic life skills on everything? Why should it be the school responsibility for nutrition? There's really does seem a line increasingly blurred between education and offloading parental responsibility onto teachers.

Really. Well that's your opinion. Either way it doesn't detract from the point. Becoming a parent is a serious responsibility. Something that needs to be considered very carefully before such 18, 20, 30 year life commitment is made. It shouldn't be for the state continually be propping people up for their irresponsible behaviour and apathy, nor should it be for the state to be some point of instant blame when people's own failures happen. Yes, there has been cuts and shrinking of SureStart but it's pretty obvious there's been a dramatic change in the world since Gordon Brown introduced such a scheme including a major financial crash whilst on his watch . Just like every other aspect of governance, budgets and priorities have to move and change in the 25 plus years since the scheme was launched. It doesn't mean there aren't still provisions and services available. As I've pointed out, things still exist and there are seven different centres in Sheffield alone. Local authorities have an entire budget towards provision for children's services. It's part of government policy right now. There were plenty of dual working parents long before SureStart was even a draft policy on paper. Not every one of those parents had an easy life. Some of them faced plenty of tough times but they managed, they got through, they scrimped and saved ,they brought up their children the best way they could. They weren't sitting there waiting for the state to sort it all out for them. They weren't expecting school teachers to raise their kids for them or to feed them three times a day on taxpayer money or or now seemingly being toilet training them... Something has clearly changed in society's attitude to parenting and it's certainly not just as simplistic as blaming the Tories and budget cuts. That's a complete cop out.

I used the term "knickers" colloquially. I didn't specific one particular gender of parent, I used the word if THEY i.e. both.