Politics Thread!

[KlaxonCow]

What I hate is, on the news, when they're talking about energy prices, they insist on using bizarre units of measurement that are of no use to anyone.

"Price rises in oil will mean that the typical household - whatever the fuck that is - will gain £358.54p as the energy price cap is introduced, which will be cancelled out by the rise in oil, estimated to add £527.24p to the typical household over a 93-day period, since last Tuesday."

This is not remotely useful. It's also dumb because a simple unit of measurement exists. The kilowatt. You know when you look at your electricity meter and it goes up by 20 - that's 20 kilowatts. We have a standard unit of measurement and it's literally what your electricity meter measures, so you can directly see how many kilowatts you used in a month, by your meter readings directly.

And it's also literally how the price caps are defined. The maximum amount they can charge per kilowatt. So you can literally announce it directly: "the price cap is lowering the maximum to 21p per kilowatt" or whatever. And people can actually use that information - look at your meter readings and if you used, say, 128 kilowatts on your meter, then it means the price cap can be no more than 21p x 128 = £268.80.

But, no, let's invent this "typical household" - and, of course, the thing about averages is that no-one is ever actually average (you can't actually give birth to 2.4 children), so this represents absolutely no-one - and then convert it to some metric: "If an elephant was the size of Wales, then your energy bills are expected to rise by three toe nail clippings".

Rather than just literally reporting the actual price cap directly in its actual units - "the current price cap of 21p per kilowatt will drop to 19p per kilowatt" - which are the exact same fucking units that your electricity meter measures, so you can very directly work out that if it's 21p per kilowatt, this is how much it costs, and if it's 19p per KW, this is how much it costs. Because it's just a simple multiplication.

Why do they do this? It's annoying as hell.

Yes, let's report rising petrol prices... in quarts per square furlong. Comparing it to how many metaphorical elephant toe nail clippings this would be to a 1954 "nuclear family", living specifically in Cleethropes and nowhere else.

Very useful, I'm sure. Clear as mud.

[Harlequin]

Quarts per football field, surely.

[KlaxonCow]

Quarts per football field, surely.

It depends on whether Jacob Rees-Mogg is in charge of the units and measurements.

He'd consider "furlongs" far too modern a measurement. Bring back cubits!

[Little stoned kiwi]

Elephants are used for weight, football fields for distance, Empire State buildings for height, and Olympic swimming pools for volume. Energy doesn't have units because you can't see it...perhaps the amount of energy you need to boil an elephant in an Olympic swimming pool could work?

"The proposed data-centre will use x Olympic swimming pools of water and enough energy to boil y elephants."

[PFVA]

There we go again.
After several days of relative quietness the media channels are all by the fences of the Base in Azores.
Lots of movement there.

[F-ZeroOne]

Regards what Trump wrote after the death of Robert Mueller... well, talk about writing (most) of your own epitaph...

[F-ZeroOne]

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/ ... s-36926538

We all know he likes the thought of taking over islands. Irelands. Greenlands. Islands.

[F-ZeroOne]

Two sailing boats taking aid to Cuba that started their journey in Mexico have gone missing. Am not taking bets on what happened to them...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp84kw1y337o

[PFVA]

Nothing like watching news channel.

The drones whatever, whatever, I can't make the difference between types of war drones are here, that's in the Azores, and have been for a while.
It's the first time they are seen here.
We don't have those things ourselves.
They look big quite big and apparently are the same type of some used in Venezuela.
They cost 40 millions each.
From here they are going to an American base in Jordan.

And left reps of our Parliament want the centre-right government to explain why they authorised them to to be in the Azorean US base.
Fm what I understand the agreement on the base doesn't allow it to be used for an ilegal war.
I'm sure they are right but if the government would say know the Trump Administration would just take over the Azores.
They already love islands.

[PFVA]

This is getting poetic.
"... and out of the fog and the rain the (whatever) drone appears like a ghost, barely seen with only 2 lights.
A loose translation of what a poetry oriented reporter said when informing about the coming and going of the famous drones.
He also added that is quite a scary thing.

[F-ZeroOne]

"Trump says 'a whole civilization will die tonight' if Iran does not make a deal".

Meanwhile, in tonights episode of "The Lunatic in the Whit - Gold Castle", its stunningly revealed that the contents of the mysterious films include something about e-mails? And a weird laugh?

[F-ZeroOne]

Meant to post this earlier, but couldn't due to apparent forum issues - VIRILE SHAVEN WAR MAN Pete Hegseth announced a new US security doctrine (the name of which sounds to me more than a little like the "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" Imperial Japan once sought to impose):

https://openthemagazine.com/world/great ... nald-trump

During his speech he made the following statement:

"This is what we did in World War II. Just like we sank ships with torpedoes in World War II... "

Torpedoes. Of all the examples of historical US military might he could have chosen, he picked that one. [1]

[1] While eventually they did fix the problems and make a significant contribution to US victory in the Pacific, for the first few years of World War II US torpedoes suffered from numerous design flaws which meant one actually working as intended came as much as a surprise to the vessel that fired it as it did to its target... )

[F-ZeroOne]

[tufty]

They really don't want to win, do they?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/governmen ... 026-04-10/

[F-ZeroOne]

Elsewhere in Europe, I've got Hungary eyes...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c2d8zw2d3rkt

I guess Orban should consider himself lucky to just be losing an election, considering what happened to the last guy JD Vance visited...