Colin Elves

An art deco style burgundy and gold vanity compact

Mystery item is an early 1930s musical “camera-style” vanity compact which is also has a working musical component

Damn, that’s cool, I was gonna ask if it was a camera, as it looked like some of the early compact models, but a secret camera that’s not a secret camera is cooler, like a double bluff.

Sounds like a right sad git to me.

Fuck him.

The problem is the Trump admin is packed with billionaires and a substantial portion of voters believe money = intelligence and therefore the wealthiest administration must by definition be the smartest

There’s a fundamental disconnect between this core belief and the obvious truth they’re all dumb

I… uh… you know I actually feel quite good about that.

It’s like: okay, the past 40 years of British politics have been an absolute shit-show, except that one thing.

Because of the fundamental belief that money equals intelligence, being rich must mean you’re smart and an administration packed with billionaires must be the smartest, bestest administration of all time.

You might as well run on “vote for me, I hate Jesus.”

Liberals love tearing their people down, often a bad thing when it harms good people who made a simple mistake, but it does mean we ditch out bad guys.

Conservatives, on the other hand, automatically circle the wagons even if, often especially if, the monsters are on the inside.

The problem those Goldman researchers have, along with much of the global commentariat, is that the US administration made up of rich right wing people much like themselves, making it hard for them to internalise that those people are insane idiots with no plan and no idea what they were doing.

And yet, at the same time, immigration has remained at the top of voters concerns in the polling.

The government keeps doing all the things that polling says that people want including, and this need emphasis, *drastically* cutting net migration, but it is making no difference to the polling.

Everything has got *so much worse* ever since people got the control they wanted.

And subsequently we ended up with a succession of Home Secretaries introducing increasingly draconian measures, measures that are substantially more draconian than those that ordinary people think are fair when asked

I’d question your evidence for that latter statement, because a lot of people voted for Brexit on the promise of control over immigration, on the promise of an “Australian style points based system” then went completely mad as soon as they got it.

They’ll stop talking about net migration figures and talk about integration, or lifetime fiscal contributions, or english as a second language, or the threat of radical islam, or just basic dog whistling about “White-British becoming a minority”

For sure you can use the numbers in those stories, and conservatives clearly did, but if those numbers stop serving their narrative purpose they can (and do) go off and find other numbers - eg small boat arrivals instead of net migration figures - or they shift to another rhetorical tactic.

Right, but that’s the realm of government: good governance needs good data and needs to respond to that data.

But we’re talking politics, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Politics operates in the realm of story, in narrative and, to be honest, largely in fiction.

It’s like with drink driving: people just weren’t aware of the significantly increased risk of death and quite serious injury - even when “not going very far and going quite slowly”.

It’s just one of those things.

It’s quite telling that all the people in this thread who say they always wear a helmet are also the same people with a “my brother spent 2 weeks in hospital after falling off his bike and hitting his head” story.

Ah, see, the thing is that you are at significantly higher risk than when walking because you’re moving significantly faster in a manner with a significantly increased risk of falling: you’re body has evolved to walk upright, it hasn’t evolved to cycle.

You’ve got to roundly condemn racism whenever it rears its ugly head and not, and this is quite important, not pander to it with “legitimate concerns” arguments.

And in doing so everyone became convinced it was all about the numbers and not the racism.

But the reality is: ultimately it is just the racism.

You’ve got to combat that via cultural change, not spreadsheets.

You’ve got to have those positive role models in the media.

Yeah, because they’re trying to fight a cultural issue with data and that’s never going to work.

The biggest issue here is that the right jumped on that short and unusual window early this century when the rising salience of immigration did seem to correlate with numbers to justify their racism.

Yeah, don’t mean hire bikes (though I didn’t say that) although the “short trip” thing I still think is weird: you’re taking this big bike with you, just take the helmet, you can chain it up with your bike.

Honestly, people not wearing helmets just doesn’t make sense to me, but what *pisses me off* is the lack of decent cycling infrastructure.

Dual use lanes: fucking bullshit.

Cycle routes that end in the middle of nowhere when they hit a 40mph road: what’s the fucking point?

SUVs in cities: WTF?

Just because something is a low hanging fruit is no reason to avoid picking it nor a reason to get out the ladder and grab the mass of higher up fruits.

Hmmm, not sure me saying “I don’t get why people don’t do this simple cheap thing that will significantly reduce their risk in this activity in all situations ” is the same as me saying “so we don’t have to worry about SUVs.

There’s probably a Phd in there for someone to go on a bunch of cycling forums asking for people to share their videos.

Hmmm, interesting.

You know, these invisible helmets present a good opportunity to gather some data - because there’s a community there who a) don’t appear to wear helmets and b) are just the sort of cycling nerds who will own GoPros and film their rides.

Yup, basically the same with me.

Can’t believe nobody wanted to read the articles nobody bothered to write

“X and Y lead to similar outcomes, I can’t do anything about Y, therefore I won’t bother trying to do anything about X either” is an odd argument to me, but also: those 5% of injuries above the neck are generally pretty life changing.

I’m going to have to mute replies aren’t i?