Moving to UK

Personally I'm more concerned about the 30pc of British children who
grow up below the UN-defined poverty line.

 

So you only ever post stuff that you're 100% certain is absolute fact.
Hence any opinion you express here is fact?

My mistake. Bad post construction. The first paragraph referred to the
fora/forums issue, the second "this case" referred to the 'fact' that
the English only ever live in ghettos in France where they subvert the
glorious French culture.

Ah, right so it was spurious.

I don't know who was. Don't really care either.

However I do know that you're bullshitting about the fora issue. More
to the point I know that *you* know you're bullshitting.

 

Ben Blaney was seen penning the following ode to ... whatever:

Just looking at the average annual income is very, very misleading as
it doesn't tell you anything about the state of a country's
infrastructure. Wearing the economist hat, I'm afraid I have to tell
you that in order for the above figures to become meaningful, you'll
have to normalise them using some kind of cost of living index or
similar.

I wouldn't call public transport and certain other public services
here first world. No offense, but the UK seems to follow the US in
this respect (public services, roads and other public infrastructure
there have recently been lambasted for being fit for a third-world
country, not a first world one; And as we all know the UK follows the
US by about 10 years).

A country where privatised utility company can let its infrastructure
go to the dogs to an extent that a faulty transformer can take out
half the 'leccy grid in the country's capital doesn't have a first
world infrastructure, sorry.

The joke here being that this part of the grid was/is owned and or run
by EDF...

And before someone here suggests that I should be going home because I
dare critisising anything around here, consider the following:

I like living here despite the problems that Veggie Dave mentioned,
which I also see to a certain extent. Not as grim as Dave, though.
But the fact that I like living here doesn't mean that I'm not
allowed to see or indeed point out some of the flaws I see.

 

Why would I care?

 

Ben Blaney was seen penning the following ode to ... whatever:

.... while the gubmit is flushing money down the toilet in a country
that they had to leave in a hurry about 80 years ago.

Has _anyone_ actually ever met someone who is pro this war and isn't
part of Tony's cronies. Just like, asking?

 

*Way* off the mark. New research was published on this topic this week.

 

I haven't met any, but I'd guess: readers of The Sun.

 

Yes, quite. I was just looking for a quick rebuttal of Des' ridiculous
claim that the UK is borderline third-world. I was simply to lazy to
google for a whole range of figures.

But what you aren't taking into account is that there are other
countries in which a faulty transformer *could* take out half of the
grid in the capital, but because it hasn't happened - it doesn't enter
the equation, and nullifies your argument.

 

Ben Blaney was seen penning the following ode to ... whatever:

Understood, but they're meaningless. No, really.

No, it doesn't. We've got a first world country where the failure to
cut back some trees in the name of higher profits left a third of the
country in the dark. Literally. Several other European countries had
similar power outages this summer, and all of them have been accused
of neglecting their infrastructure in the past.

Several _other_ countries haven't got this problem - I've never heard
of this kind of blackout in Switzerland for example, and those guys
have rather more periously conditions to overcome when supplying water
or electricity. You'll find that in both the US and the UK, the
capacity to deal with spikes in power consumption has decreased in the
last ten years or so, making basic services less reliable than they
used to be. Which is why every bank I know has their own generators on
site.

I've spent quite some time this year to read a lot of 'rogue'
economics stuff as the course this year was a bit too neo-liberal for
my liking so in order to get a more balanced view, I mixed in some lit
from the leftish side of the spectrum. What is surprising is that most
countries that embrace the neo-lib economics regime _all_ suffer from
worsening public infrastructure. If that makes a country borderline
third world or not isn't quite the issue here, but the fact remains
that France (to cite on example) appears to make a better job of
maintaining their roads and railways than, for example, Britain or the
US.

 

Des Coughlan was seen penning the following ode to ... whatever:

I wasn't implying that they don't, but you'd have to agree that you've
got to be somewhat more fluent in French to read Le Monde than to read
the French equivalent of The Sun, if such a beast actually exists.

That's certainly both the source of beauty and frustation. My view on
mastering French is probably slightly skewered as I haven't lived in
France (yet) but even when I had more practise in French I was
surprised that seven years' of school French didn't quite get you as
far as five years or so of school English...

 

Ben Blaney was seen penning the following ode to ... whatever:

IOW Rupert, 'cos it's good for (his) business? Figures.

 

Des Coughlan wrote:

ITYM "barbarisms such as", as "barbarisms like" is itself a barbarism.

The practice of beginning sentences with but or and is longstanding.
The first smelly old book to hand, by Mrs. Henry Wood, commits the
solecism.

Who cares? They are only words.

 

Well, you don't have those mass cultural exchange visits like in the
olden days, do you?

 

<snip>

Well you make a pretty poor job of it des and since you're a
professional communicator I'm shocked.

You're right, I can't be certain but I'm confident to a very high
margin. It's your ridiculous insitence that what's patently true is
false that gives it away.

You seem to spend a lifetime googling to the extent that you've a link
for every occasion and yet you're unable to find one to prove the
fora/forums thing.

 

Des Coughlan wrote

Lack of red meat innit.

I have spent the last week on my fruit bat diet and all it has done is
give me an overwhelming desire to taste blood.

 

Ben Blaney wrote

Literacy rates, don't forget to mention the falling literacy, literacy,
literacy rates.

 

Ben Blaney wrote

Even then. The nearest I have seen to actual support is a sort of
resigned feeling on inevitability.

 

You'd still insist you are right.

 

Des Coughlan wrote

Watch Sky then.

Near enough every channel has been running programs about the
development of English over the last few months.

In summary

Our core language seems to have formed from two others about 2.5k BC,
one in the north and one in the south, and developed a mind of its own
under Druidic rule until the Romans came over. We adopted /some/ of
their Latin words but kept the overall native grammar and structure.

A thousand years later and we picked up new words from all over Europe
and the near East as we went off a crusading.

Another half a millennium on and zillions more nouns and a few thousand
verbs were imported from the various pink bits on the map.

A hundred years or so along the time line and English, along with German
are the mainstream languages of science and English gets the job of
inventing the new words to go with our new knowledge.

And thus we arrive nicelyistically at the form you see today. What
Latin there is in there is only a small part of the most powerful tool
for communication that mankind has ever mistreated.

 

Des Coughlan wrote

Yes they fucking do. Seen it with me own eyes I have. The last one of
yours I followed had me cleaning me glasses cos the layout looked
familiar but wrong. Turned out to be google in frog.