Cont: Brexit: Now What? 9 Below Zero

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Vixen said:
No need to over-think things.


Jacob Rees-Mogg mentioned standing six feet apart on PMQs. Now we all understand what six feet is without a second thought.

Two metres, and you have to think, ah, two yards or two times three feet, to get the idea.
Six feet is a measure people can immediately visualise, whether it be height of fence, height of man, length of win, or paced steps across a room to calculate apx area.

It is all very simple!
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Only for old people - apart from miles kids and anyone under the age of what now 45 thinks in terms of metric units. And only a statistical insignificant number of those would be able to tell you how many yards are in a mile.

And being a transitional I can use yards or metres but metres is always my prefered unit.
 
Vixen said:
No need to over-think things.


Jacob Rees-Mogg mentioned standing six feet apart on PMQs. Now we all understand what six feet is without a second thought.

Two metres, and you have to think, ah, two yards or two times three feet, to get the idea.

Six feet is a measure people can immediately visualise, whether it be height of fence, height of man, length of win, or paced steps across a room to calculate apx area.

It is all very simple!
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I propose we use English cubits. 6 feet = 4 cubits.
 
Earthborn said:
Cuneiform numerals are super simple.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_cuneiform_numerals

This system is referred to as "base 60", but it's really not. Numbers up to 60 are really represented by a mixture of base 6 and base 10 numerals. These are alternated in a repeating fashion, forming a sort of super-structure of base 60, but it directly decomposes into alternating 6-10 base. It's not a true base 60 where there are 60 unique characters.
 
Tolls said:
Quite.
There are plenty of jobs that the employer cannot afford to pay high wages, and the current wages are not sufficient for the local workforce to want to do the job (either by the nature of the job, or how things like benefits work, or a mix).
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What should really happen in these cases is that the business should pass along the higher cost to it’s customers. If the customers refuse to pay more for the product, then it was inherently low value to begin with and is makes sense to abandon it in favor of producing something of higher value.
 
lomiller said:
What should really happen in these cases is that the business should pass along the higher cost to it’s customers. If the customers refuse to pay more for the product, then it was inherently low value to begin with and is makes sense to abandon it in favor of producing something of higher value.
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I always figure that if your business doesn't make enough money to pay your essential employees enough to live on you literally don't have a business, you have a charity masquerading as a business.

I'll except early startups from this. Maybe.
 
Vixen said:
I have zero problems calculating the metric scale. Although the four-minute mile sounds so much less romantic when put in metres. Who cares about an odd couple of inches or centimetres when judging social distance?
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Great. I work with ease with both. Now what are the advantages of imperial measure over metric.

Or shall we start posting speed limits on the road in units of furlongs per fortnight? That is a perfectly valid imperial unit of speed.
 
3point14 said:
I always figure that if your business doesn't make enough money to pay your essential employees enough to live on you literally don't have a business, you have a charity masquerading as a business.



I'll except early startups from this. Maybe.
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A lot of this relies on "rational actors" though. Not referring to your perspective exclusively, mind you.

I have caught glimpses of this mythical creature on occasion in the wild. The bulk of my experience with them is only in clinical settings :9.

I like trash/sanitation as a go-to example of how disconnected we are from giving fair approximation of value to the service.

Giant trucks squeezing down tightly packed old residential streets. People performing enormous feats of athletic prowess for hours on end (that would have most Americans wheezing with chest pains in 10 minutes). Then an entire reclamation plant process that absolutely involves material physics and biological sciences.

I'm not saying the entry level needs a degree. But certainly a healthy respect for the processes on par with a research assistant doing data entry.

Do they know what it means or how to interpret it? Perhaps not.

Should they be able to adhere to process, exercise care in accuracy, maybe form an intuitive sense of patterns leading true or false? Absolutely.

Even high cost of living areas the average seems to be about $40/mo. (£32.68) per family to stick 2 bags of solid waste on the curb every week and never worry about it again.

Calculate your own time in sorting the trash into a dozen groupings, hauling it to a dump, checking in on the scales, proceeding around the facility to the dozen piles, checking back out on on the scales, and returning home.

Let's say it's half the cost that way. $20/mo (£16.34). Assume a month of your trash, how long will what I described above take you?

At 2.5 hours, you're getting down to minimum wage territory already.

End result: One has to assume their own time and resources worthless in order to declare the same of someone else's.

ETA: sorry for the U.S. figures in a U.K. discussion, I've added appropriate currency equivalents. Our federal minimum wage is $7.25 (£5.92). High cost of living areas are around $11/hr. (£9)
 
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Vixen said:
Because you end up with a long string of decimal points!

Imagine if time was decimalised. 12:37 would become a nightmare 12.616666666666.
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That depends on how much precision you are after. 12.62 hours is plenty good if all you are after is the nearest minute.

If you want seconds then even with HMS you still need to add two more digits. And to get beyond that you have to switch to decimal anyway.

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Consider 'seasonal hours'. The day has twenty four hours. Sunrise to sunset gets twelve of them. Sunset to sunrise gets the other twelve.

Yes. The hours were different lengths depending on the time of year, and the length of an hour was rarely the same at night as it was in the daytime.

And yet, this was the system that entire cultures used for many generations, and it really hasn't been all that long since it fell out of favor completely.

That's just one example. It's all a matter of what you are used to.
 
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lomiller said:
What should really happen in these cases is that the business should pass along the higher cost to it’s customers. If the customers refuse to pay more for the product, then it was inherently low value to begin with and is makes sense to abandon it in favor of producing something of higher value.
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Except all UK governments want a degree of food production.

We either bin our food production and simply, as you imply, produce high end food only (or change land use entirely) and import everything we really eat, or possibly reduce our food standards...which is something the current government seems hell-bent on forcing on us when it comes to a US deal.

The next couple of years will be interesting for farming.
 
Net migration to the UK from countries outside the European Union has risen to its highest level for 45 years, the Office for National Statistics says.

Figures show an estimated 282,000 more non-EU citizens came to the UK than left in 2019, the highest since the information was first gathered in 1975.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52752656

So much for leaving the EU reducing immigration.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Net migration to the UK from countries outside the European Union has risen to its highest level for 45 years, the Office for National Statistics says.

Figures show an estimated 282,000 more non-EU citizens came to the UK than left in 2019, the highest since the information was first gathered in 1975.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52752656

So much for leaving the EU reducing immigration.
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Yes, but now we've left the EU we can control those non-EU migrants as opposed to when we were in the EU and we were compelled to have open borders with every country. :rolleyes:
 
In among all the usual stupidity about sinking boats with asylum seekers trying to cross the channel I am starting to see a lot of twitter threads criticising the RNLI for rescuing asylum seekers from boats.

Typical comments this morning

"The RNLI should be disbanded as they're acting like a taxi service for illegal immigrants"

"The RNLI are aiding and abetting criminals who are trying to illegally enter our country"

"RNLI should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting criminals who are illegally entering our country".

"The RNLI are a registered charity I would urge people not to donate anymore."

"The RNLI traitors are still escorting dinghies and boats full of illegal immigrants into our country"

"RNLI Treason! Boycott the RNLI, govt should act"
 
Captain_Swoop said:
In among all the usual stupidity about sinking boats with asylum seekers trying to cross the channel I am starting to see a lot of twitter threads criticising the RNLI for rescuing asylum seekers from boats.

<snipped horrible comments>
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That's why I give Twitter a wide berth (and why I used to give certain pubs and individuals a wide berth). :(
 
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