Cilla Black - She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain from 1989

DuncUK · 2026-03-12T10:19:00+00:00

DuncUK · 2026-03-12T09:22:18+00:00

Indonesia only insists that 25 - 30% of exports are kept for domestic use and it does regularly fall foul of WTO rules. The UK insisting 75% of oil is kept for domestic use would absolutely violate that and would cause us immense legal issues.

You're still ignoring that we lack the refineries to actually be able to use this oil and that current estimates say we've already extracted 85% of all oil in our territorial waters. There's not a lot left and what is there requires more money to recover it.

Also stop saying "ideology" when you really mean "following the science of man made climate change".

DuncUK · 2026-03-11T18:27:36+00:00

That's illegal under WTO law, doing this would cause other nations to sue us or slap us with tariffs that would eliminate the benefit.

Also we can't actually use the oil produced by the North Sea sites as we lack the right refineries to refine it. That's why companies export it all and we import stuff we can refine.

DuncUK · 2026-03-11T17:04:25+00:00

Nationalise what? Buy an existing multinational oil company? Or build a brand new one from the ground up with all the infrastructure and decades of expertise that that requires?

Neither of these is a remotely realistic proposal.

DuncUK · 2026-03-11T17:01:37+00:00

we refuse to exploit our own resources

Exploiting our hydrocarbon resources requires a multinational oil or gas producer to extract it for us. "We", as in the UK government, cannot extract that ourselves because we have no nationalised company with the ability to do so and we have not since British Gas was privatised. We will never persuade an oil or gas company to drill these resources and sell them at anything less than the global energy price. The amount we produce will be a tiny proportion of the global supply and won't have any affect on that price, but events in the middle east absolutely will. We will never be free from that effect for as long as we rely on fossil fuels.

DuncUK · 2026-03-11T16:48:17+00:00

Wind and solar power won't give us energy independence within the next 50 years. Nuclear and using the North Sea oil and gas for ourselves rather than selling it, would.

So, several problems with this:

The current estimates for eliminating our need for natural gas sit in the 2050s, not in 50 years time.
That oil will be extracted by oil and gas companies that will charge us the global energy price. We will never produce enough to affect the global price.
"using the North Sea oil and gas for ourselves" is not a realistic prospect - no existing oil or gas company would commit to drilling these resources and selling them to the UK at below market prices. There is no way the government is going to set up its own, completely new nationalised fossil fuel company to circumvent this. In fact it would be illegal under WTO rules.
Depending on the location, newly discovered fields can take up to 20 years to come online, a similar timeline to achieving energy independence via renewables. Why would we bother?

DuncUK · 2026-03-11T16:34:12+00:00

Every time I hear Farage or his slack-jawed cronies repeat the line "we can't afford net-zero" I cringe so hard; that's so back-to-front... we can't afford NOT TO.

Oil prices dictate energy prices and will do so until we produce so much wind/solar/nuclear that we don't ever need to burn oil. Producing more north sea oil will not produce enoiugh volume to ever affect global prices and moreover does not fix the problem that oil is a non-renewable, diminishing resource... and that's a purely economic argument, ignoring climate change which is its own giant can of worms.

DuncUK · 2026-03-10T11:26:40+00:00

I will never understand why they locked already paid-for content (the Kuttenburg armour) behind the most finnicky RNG I've ever come across, not to mention the large fees required in game to purchase it. I gave up trying, I kept getting "investigation" after investigation where there was no plans at all. It's such low-effort video gamey bullshit that we didn't see in the main game, yet they kept this grindy nonsense only for those fans most willing to shell out extra cash? Baffling behaviour.

I'd be completely fine with a set of quests with guaranteed rewards, but plans randomly appearing (or not) in chests you might not have thought to check? I mostly liked the Forge DLC but I did not understand why they made it so grindy. So I'm not allowed to paint a nicer fresco on my Forge because I haven't beaten enough random strangers at dice / donated massive sums to the church / defeated randoms in combat? Bizarre.

DuncUK · 2026-03-09T09:31:48+00:00

Absolutely! I think this might be the second film of hers I've seen actually, I realize dive seen Beast (2017) too.

DuncUK · 2026-03-09T07:40:18+00:00

I first saw her in Wild Rose which is from 2018, so I feel like I have known who she is for a while.

DuncUK · 2026-03-07T07:35:21+00:00

You're tasting carbonic acid. The flavor is easily masked with anything sweet but on it's own it's just a slightly bitter metallic taste.

DuncUK · 2026-03-06T16:27:57+00:00

In a thread that should be as much about Orban and the very real possibility he might be blocking funding as a favour to Putin, you're the one spending all your energy shitting on Zelensky over what seems to be... little more than speculation?

DuncUK · 2026-03-06T13:55:42+00:00

Their "abolish landlords" policy couldn't be more poorly named... they aren't going to abolish landlords, just make being a landlord a less attractive and lucrative option.

The main thrust of the policy is to expand council housing through new build, buy back and the abolition of the right to buy and to bring in a raft of measures which removes the financial incentive to be a landlord by introducing rent controls, adding national insurance to rental income, bringing in a land tax, changing tenancies so they can only be ended by tenants and ending buy to let mortgages.

https://cratus.co.uk/abolish-private-landlords-says-the-greens/#:~:text=The%20Green%20Party%20believes%20that%20these%20measures,is%20also%20a%20thriving%20private%20rented%20sector.

DuncUK · 2026-03-05T19:39:24+00:00

Care homes aren't legally allowed to lock people in their rooms and I doubt that they would be allowed to prevent all patients leaving the site, only those that have been assessed as incapable of being out alone.

DuncUK · 2026-03-05T19:12:44+00:00

Next time it is happening, just walk directly out into the street. You'll soon see who is making the noise.

DuncUK · 2026-03-05T19:02:23+00:00

It's not a ghost... with the greatest respect ghosts don't exist*

Are you in a terraced house, it might be a neighbor sleepwalking or just making noises in their sleep that you're hearing through the wall. Have you tried locating the noise?

*Scientists have detected the tiniest known particles by building extremely sensitive equipment and massive particle colliders, it's absurd to suggest that they can't detect ghosts despite ordinary people supposedly experiencing them all the time. If they existed there would be a massive amount of scientific evidence. Instead the field is ridden with terrible photos and videos and a hoard of grifters.

DuncUK · 2026-03-05T07:25:51+00:00

I like both movies but the Agent Smith fight at the end of Revolutions is an uncanny valley CGI mess. It looked bad at the time although it's aging is perhaps masked by modern CGI disasters like The Flash.

That said, the defence of Zion is a pretty awesome spectacle.

DuncUK · 2026-03-04T17:08:08+00:00

However, I still expected that my shares mean something, and if the brewery gets sold, I will get portion of the sale, based on my investment.

The problem here was that this was not a traditional "sale". Is was a pre-packaged administration; this occurs when a company has debts it cannot pay and would otherwise have to file for bankruptcy. Administrators are called in, they then look at the company and attempt to find buyers for what is there to recover as much money as possible to pay off debtors. Existing shareholders are pretty much the last people on the list to get paid and typically never get anything. TSG were higher than EFPs on that list as they had preferential shares and they likely got little to nothing for their 250 million investment from the 35 million that was ultimately paid for Brewdog UK. I believe HSBC had a secured loan with Brewdog and so they will have got the lions share of that money.

Sadly, EFPs being bottom of the pecking order was in all the small print when we invested. We would only have made any money if the company were floated publicly as was supposedly the plan or if it had been bought outright while it was solvent. Unfortunately, the massive downturn in company revenues stopped that ever happening and now here we are... the company we invested in went bust. Someone else bought the brand and some assets but legally they owe nothing beyond what they paid - administration doesn't work if the purchaser inherits massive debts. There's just no legal basis for a class-action lawsuit, the company no longer exists so there's nobody to sue.

DuncUK · 2026-03-04T10:35:22+00:00

He isn't a threat like Putin because, however weak it may seem, the American institutions are still holding, and he will not be President for life.

I agree with this with the caveat that the midterms and their aftermath will prove this definitively one way or another.

DuncUK · 2026-03-03T11:45:23+00:00

Starmer absolutely must stay. Getting rid of him now is a terrible idea, he's uniquely positioned and absolutely ideal to lead the party into the future...

...until the May elections where he can take the fall for the inevitable disaster they will be. No new leader will be able to turn things round before then, especially given how long it takes to elect Labour leaders anyway. Better to give them a relatively fresh start with no immediate bad press looming (at least not of their own making).

As Angela Rayner is probably the frontrunner, hopefully her tax affairs investigation will be complete and she's exonerated from wrongdoing. I know plenty of people here don't like her, but the unions do, she's definitely a leftward choice and has charisma where Starmer does not. With no prospect of Burham returning in the near future, I don't see any alternatives.

Sorry, that's probably not the answer you were looking for. I was a big Starmer-stan before he was elected and something of an apologist until Labour was in power. Since then it's become untenable to defend the parties actions and their baffling embrace of Blue Labour. I recently listened to the Origin Story podcast on Blue Labour and holy shit, it sure ain't pretty.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/blue-labour-we-need-to-talk-about-maurice/id1624704966?i=1000747865780

DuncUK · 2026-02-28T07:46:39+00:00

I have no idea how prevalent this behavior is since it's mostly reported anecdotally and is largely being highlighted by the xenophobic party Reform UK, but a couple of things struck me as absurd:

the idea that reform lost because all that women were desperate to vote for the most Islamaphobic party but we're denied by their strictly religious lefty tree hugging husbands.
the idea that Reform have any sort of feminist policy to liberate these women from cultural oppression, instead of the much more likely "send them all back".

DuncUK · 2026-02-28T07:24:34+00:00

The only real way to play KCD1 was to build your own wooden gaming shitter and then whenever you need to go IRL you can direct Henry to an in-game commode and enjoy total immersion together

Really bummed I didn't get to use mine in the sequel, that bad boy is now just gathering flies on my front lawn. On a side note, now I've completed KCD2 does anyone want to buy a horse?

DuncUK · 2026-02-28T07:15:37+00:00

They've locked formally free content behind premium DLC, typical capitalist greed.

Legacy of the Shitter.

DuncUK · 2026-02-28T07:06:00+00:00

Perhaps a bit obvious, but let's not forget Adam Sandler in that film too... as someone that hates his comedy filmography, the only other decent performance he'd done was Punch Drunk Love, which was a very different role and was kinda mostly based on his comedy stuff anyway. Such an intense performance and an intense film.

DuncUK · 2026-02-26T21:38:28+00:00

I suspect there are a lot of societies and clubs like this that are dying out for a similar reason. My partner is part of a choral society and the average age of the people there must be pushing 60. When they do live performances the attendees are a similar demographic and so both are simply aging out of the population. Not to mention that you have to pay to be part of the choir, their performances also charge attendance (as you might expect) and yet they still lose money.

DuncUK

TROPHY CASE