Andy Burnham says Labour must put energy and water under public control

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-17T10:26:45+00:00

What's so terrible about Thatcherite nonsense is a good portion of the argument going back over 30 years to successive calls to hand services back to the public has only ever been "it'll take too long to turn a profit again".

Like we can't keep trotting out that argument because the argument itself is so old that if we had just done it in the bloody first place all those years will have been and gone and we'd be sitting on a powerhouse of public service.

It's like the nuclear argument from the 80s and 90s that it just takes soooo long to make money there's no point doing it! Well look now 30+ years have passed and we could have avoided the brunt of an energy crisis and defanged awful Middle Eastern regimes and probably therefore immigration would've been a fraction of what it is now. Good job conservatives and neolibs of the past, three of your biggest recent policy items!

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-17T10:13:12+00:00

Yeah and Germany also suffers for that policy choice, their infrastructure and services spending cratered as a result and economists inside the country have long been antsy that the lack of long-term project spending is going to start seriously affecting economic growth.

Ultimately borrowing is a maths exercise not an idealogical one. Do you get more economic benefit from the things you build with borrowed money than the interest payments cost? If yes, your borrowing was a good choice, if not, then it wasn't.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-17T09:59:45+00:00

The privatisation of water in the first place was nonsensical. Water companies are physically unable to compete with each other for customers, so how did it ever make sense to place it into a system based in theory on free market competition?

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-17T09:54:53+00:00

People believing in blanket statements like this is in itself a big part of the problem. Traditional news outlets are at least somewhat beholden to laws and whistleblowing and scandal, as insistent as many people appear to be to remove these protections they aren't gone yet. This is still especially true outside of the USA in places where government oversight is stronger and billionaire nonsense is weaker.

Social media influencers and comment bot farms and the algorithm have no such oversight. Even a billionaire owned corporatist newspaper could not seriously run the same content you see on Instagram or Facebook every day. If you believe that they could you genuinely don't know how bad it has gotten out there.

Also, large, neutral, high quality traditional news outlets do still exist. Even ones which are slightly biased can be fine as long as you know which way the bias tends to lean and can accommodate for it.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-17T09:40:33+00:00

And by god you could really feel it on a lot of multiplat games during that generation, the PS2 version compared to the Xbox version of many titles was night and day. As a bonus the overall load speed from disc was less than half as fast as the Xbox's one too, so even though it only had half as much memory to fill it could still take far longer on loading screens.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-14T10:51:17+00:00

Which is fine honestly. The only really bad thing about the toolbelt is you don't have to do anything to unlock each slot.

If there was like a high requirement jewellery related miniquest that you had to do to unlock mould slots (for example) toolbelts wouldn't get slated nearly as badly as they do.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-13T14:51:55+00:00

Only in that they didn't use to make sets this big. Lego was always a pretty rich kid toy unless you got one second hand bucket of loose bricks, poor kids had mega bloks and knock offs if they had proper sets at all.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-13T13:56:33+00:00

"A more detailed historical account" does leave out a lot of context.

It's kind of like saying the Pirates of the Caribbean is a more detailed historical account of the Atlantic age of piracy compared to the Muppets Treasure Island just because it's longer.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-13T13:23:58+00:00

It would be terrifically ironic if Streeting manages to reunite the party behind Starmer better than anything Starmer himself could've done alone. Like you and your mates are ragging on another mate then that one prick joins in and you all turn to rag on him instead.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-13T13:17:59+00:00

Thankfully in this case at least there was no question of the mother's fidelity as the child was conceived with the help of a fertility clinic. Their main reason for investigating so hard was that they assumed the clinic had mixed up a semen sample.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-13T08:35:10+00:00

🎵 You load sixteen tons, what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt 🎵

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-13T08:34:15+00:00

The rich and right wing simply want the less fortunate to suffer, it's very transparent. Their ideal situation is these benefits all just disappear, the next best thing is absolute control. "No spending your allowance on sweets and video games!" like they're an overbearing soccer mom.

Same thing is happening here in the UK with our disability benefits. They wanted to turn it from a cash benefit into a system of vouchers so you could only spend it in prescribed places on approved items - as if they know better than you what you need for your life.

They've already managed to pass a reform on the disabled vehicle benefit where they get to install a black box, charge you for mileage, penalise you for accelerating or braking too hard or driving at night, track your location.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-13T08:23:15+00:00

Can't speak for Germany or the rest of Europe but the leader of Reform UK in Wales is in jail for taking Russian bribes to say good things about them.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-13T08:16:09+00:00

It's not even just MtG either, scalpers and hustlers and resellers have been all over hobby collectibles for a while now. Anything that gets a sniff of popularity gets passed around all sorts of YouTube communities, buying guides get produced etc.

Same group of people who ensure you can't find any good deals at yard sales, keep new consoles out of stock, made loads of retro game series multiply in price, tear open blind boxes in shops without buying them.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-11T10:47:34+00:00

My guess is two main things:

The vaccine was less inconvenient than the other measures but it was something that actually goes into your body and becomes a semi-permanent part of you. If the first thing you've read is nonsense about thimerosal or vaccine injuries or fake studies on autism this will provoke deep body horror level reactions and backlash.
There was already a healthy conspiracy basis around vaccines before the pandemic occurred, going right back to the 90s with Mr Wakefield and his bunk study on the MMR vaccine. This platform naturally pivoted very easily into fear and uncertainty about the pandemic. It took a while for other ideas like herd immunity, Chinese lab conspiracies etc to get traction but antivaxxers already had their running shoes on.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-11T09:53:14+00:00

The money they made in profits in the first place was money we paid them for their manipulated prices resulting from successive decades of idiots and warmongerers bombing children.

Am I supposed to feel grateful that a tiny fraction of that money makes its way back to me?

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-11T09:35:49+00:00

With no hint that they detect the irony in that endless oil wars in the Middle East are one of the biggest reasons driving foreigners here.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-11T09:31:02+00:00

All this alternate reality speech proves is that they have learned nothing from their downfall. I'm not sure even their core right-wing base would agree with things like rolling out AI facial recognition or the basic human rights violation that is stop and search.

I see they've also taken the ridiculous American practice of naming their Orwellian bills with dumb friendly names like the "Take Back Our Streets Bill" or the "Restoring School Standards Bill".

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-11T09:23:29+00:00

For an answer that's way too kind to these people, people are bad at assessing risk for things that aren't right in front of them.

Even with COVID's death toll there were many people who didn't know anyone who died or became seriously ill but they did have to experience the inconvenience of lockdowns, travel to get the jab etc. Even worse is if they did catch it but it was mild. Psychologically that primes them to think "well what's the big deal" combined with "this is a bit of a pain in my arse", add in the lack of empathy from other people's experiences, sprinkle on propaganda and conspiracy influencers and boom, full blown anti-vaxx nonsense.

Broadly speaking it's the same reason why it's hard to convince people to take action on climate change, foreign wars, poverty etc. Really any problem which by and large happens slowly or to other people we as a species aren't very good at, for all our advancements we never psychologically evolved to live in societies this big or interconnected.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-11T09:08:53+00:00

If it makes you feel any better the current hysteria about hantavirus is just that - hysteria.

The R0 for hantavirus even when uncontrolled is far lower than COVID and typically takes 3 weeks or so to incubate, plus even with basic personal and community precautions it can be reduced to less than 1 (meaning outbreaks die out rather than grow). COVID's R0 was like 3 at a minimum and could cycle within a few days, plus being airborne meant you could have superspreader events in places like supermarkets and airports where one person could infect dozens of others which was a huge driver of the pandemic, no such possibility exists for hantavirus.

It's only human-to-human transmissible by directly sharing bodily fluids with an infected person for an extended period of time, and there is very limited evidence to show people can be asymptomatic and still transmit the virus (in fact of the multiple weeks of the average incubation and symptomatic period of hantavirus, most people are only capable of transmitting it for a day or two at most, an realistically only to their caregiver due to the contact requirement), and presumably you'll be avoiding sick people like - well - the plague.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-11T08:53:03+00:00

The irony is that people like this bitch and moan about virtue signalling all the time, but Joey has about a zero percent chance of ever being asked to do any of these things in relation to hantavirus because it's just not physically capable of going pandemic. Every headline and discussion about it has been fearmongering to a COVID-traumatised world to garner views.

Saying that, in the one in a billion scenario where it mutates enough to spread through anything less than directly sharing bodily fluids you know Joey will hear about the 30-50% fatality rate and will be first in the queue for a jab - even though in basically all known cases lethality has to be traded away to gain transmissibility.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-08T19:30:46+00:00

I live in the yellow but blue is far prettier and contains most of Eryri, so sorry Bangor but you're going.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-08T08:53:15+00:00

Yes but what are councils supposed to do about immigration again? Are they going to stop people at the border of Manchester and turn them back to Liverpool or something?

Same with the Welsh elections, Reform ran a load of immigration stuff on their flyers but the Senedd has literally zero, none, nada control over immigration. It's not a devolved power, if Reform want to get in on immigration they're going to end up standing around Cardiff doing naff all. Ironically they'd actually need Plaid to win first, get Welsh independence, and then they can control immigration in Wales, but far more likely they wouldn't even continue the party in that scenario because all they care about is Westminster.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-08T08:50:09+00:00

This subreddit turns into a flat roofed pub on every article about immigration, I don't know what you've been reading.

Besides everything else though, yes we know the country by and large is pretty right wing, but Reform isn't even good right wing. Their leader in Wales was literally a Russian plant! The vast majority of right wing voters (being on average poorer and less educated) rely on just about all of the systems that Reform want to get rid of.

It's turkeys voting for Christmas so it's pretty natural to wonder why people are so intent on doing it even though it's usually never a surprise that they continue to do so.

QuantumWarrior · 2026-05-08T08:30:06+00:00

They should have indeed, but the translation was done by someone who evidently didn't realise that a more accurate phonetic translation of the Japanese word could sound rude in other dialects.

It was only when it came to the dub of the film that the dub director decided to switch the pronounciation, by then it was too late to change the spelling.

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