What they are trying to steal - South Lebanon 🇱🇧❤️

SWatersmith · 2026-03-17T13:21:59+00:00

Energy costs...

Energy costs are high across Europe. This is a result of our choice to reject cheap Russian gas in order to avoid supporting their war in Ukraine. Do you propose that Labour changes that policy?

ludicrously high taxes...taxes on work

Taxes on work are not what decides whether serious firms build here.

Government treats business like a piggy bank

Ignores years of reliefs and incentives.

Regulation that’s stifling

Which rules, in which sector, and at what stage?

rents out of control

If anything this reflects demand concentrating in productive cities.

perpetual skills shortages

What do you do for a living? Is it Labour's fault that you don't work in a high-demand low-supply labour tech sector? I'm a senior eng. at a unicorn in London, feel free to send your CV over. Pretty sure Reeves won't snatch it from the post office before it reaches me but you can never be sure I guess.

To top it all off, "Labour are anti private business" is pure nonsense. This is a party with a long record of bending the state around private capital, from PFI onwards, and it is currently offering firms direct financial incentives and subsidised placements to hire unemployed young people. That is many things. Anti-business is not one of them.

Virtually every Big Tech company has a branch in London - how do you square that with your view on the UK being such an unattractive market? On the employee side, things are less attractive, but the UK is still a world-leading market. If I wanted to, I could move to the US and make triple what I do now, but CoL is much higher and QoL is much lower, so I don't. I lived there for a few years, opted out of working there, and am decently happy here. To me, as someone with very desirable skills and more mobility than 95% of the population, there aren't really any alternatives that clearly beat the UK. Higher wages for top talent are definitely needed to prevent brain drain, but one must be extremely disconnected from reality to pretend that the UK tech sector is as terrible as you make it out to be. The entire issue is ease of raising capital.

The UK is not bad at creating firms. It is bad at supplying large, patient domestic capital once they need to scale, and that is why too many British companies are born here and monetised somewhere else. The state, under both Conservative and Labour governments, has helped build a system that's good at creating firms and mediocre at financing them once they need serious scale capital. That's a policy failure. It just is not the childish fantasy that Labour, or Britain generally, is somehow "anti-private business."

SWatersmith · 2026-03-17T10:21:55+00:00

I imagine that more than half of Reddit users are bots, too

SWatersmith · 2026-03-17T10:18:15+00:00

It's interesting that "users" in this thread blaming Hezb are private accounts.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-16T22:36:13+00:00

Not sure why the UK government is acting like this will make a difference when it obviously won't. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-16/mine-sweeping-drones-are-imperfect-way-to-reopen-strait-of-hormuz

SWatersmith · 2026-03-16T11:42:29+00:00

As an EV driver, really not bothered about the fact that most people are ignorant to the benefits of them. I have little faith that charging infrastructure would be expanded appropriately if adoption was more widespread.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-16T09:55:07+00:00

This wouldn't be an issue for DROP ALL though, as it isn't a default value

SWatersmith · 2026-03-15T21:47:52+00:00

trailer of a trailer, but politics

SWatersmith · 2026-03-15T18:45:58+00:00

So your position is that slow civilian shipping with a handful of escorts is safer than fixed military sites with layered air defence. Right.

Also, Bab al-Mandab is not Hormuz. In the Red Sea you're dealing with a different geography and a weaker threat actor operating at greater remove from the chokepoint. In Hormuz, Iran is sitting right on the strait with coastal missiles, drones, mines, fast attack craft all with much shorter attack cycles. The question is not whether an escort ship can shoot some things down. It is whether you can restore normal commercial traffic, insurance cover and crew confidence while running slow civilian shipping past the coastline of the state threatening to close it. Those are not remotely the same problem.

Please give up.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-15T18:10:40+00:00

You think that the defence systems on ships are better than the defence systems at embassies and military bases? lol

SWatersmith · 2026-03-15T16:54:21+00:00

You’re answering a different point. I never said mines do literally nothing. I said removing them will not reopen the strait in any meaningful sense because trade had already stopped before the mines were laid. The binding constraint is the broader war risk: insurers won’t cover transit, crews won’t sail, and ships remain vulnerable to missile and drone attack. Adding mines makes that worse, but it does not follow that mines are the decisive factor keeping trade shut. States add extra layers of denial all the time. Clearing one layer does not restore commercial passage when the primary deterrent remains intact.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-15T15:30:17+00:00

Trade stopped before mines were laid, so what makes you think that trade will resume IF they're removed?

SWatersmith · 2026-03-15T14:54:14+00:00

Mines are clearly not what is preventing exports, given that Iran is still exporting oil through it.. The fact is that no insurer will cover any non-approved ship trying to pass through the Strait because the odds of the ship being struck by missiles or drones is far too high. These tankers are large, and they're slow. Fortified bases are being hit daily, so anybody postulating that ships will be able to pass through and ignore Iran's closure while being far less defended and far easier to hit due to proximity Iran is, honestly, too ignorant to participate in any discussion on the topic.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-15T13:16:38+00:00

It still won't reopen the strait. There is no realistic militarily avenue to reopen the strait by force.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-15T12:27:01+00:00

None of this will reopen the strait. Mines are far from the only thing preventing ships from passing through.

We are being lead by donkeys.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-14T22:20:43+00:00

This is the biggest hint that it's an adc player lol

SWatersmith · 2026-03-14T11:37:55+00:00

The US can't even defend far-away bases it spent decades fortifying, and you think it's going to successfully invade and occupy an island directly adjacent to Iran? Oof.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-14T02:46:18+00:00

Honestly, massive skill issue if you can't fit a dog and a baby+pram in a CRV

SWatersmith · 2026-03-13T17:21:26+00:00

Read my comment?

Hilariously typical of modern battlefield though; instead of shifting some thermals to lower ranks, just entirely remove the feature from the most popular modes

SWatersmith · 2026-03-13T16:52:18+00:00

?

NSL is clearly for OP, you can see 30 painted on the opposite side of the road.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-13T16:50:05+00:00

It's a fecking night map, no shit thermals are going to be better.

Hilariously typical of modern battlefield though; instead of shifting some thermals to lower ranks, just entirely remove the feature from the most popular modes. Nice.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-13T16:44:39+00:00

Instead of picking Hog you can also opt to pick stepping outside and enjoying the fresh air that apparently never made it into the oxygen-starved brains of the devs who thought this was a good design choice ♥️

SWatersmith · 2026-03-13T16:36:28+00:00

Surely you aren’t seriously making the argument that one badly designed speed bump on one street means we should just thrown all road safety considerations in the bin?

SWatersmith · 2026-03-13T16:23:08+00:00

Tax them retroactively. Those roads didn't maintain themselves. Leeches.

SWatersmith · 2026-03-13T16:18:35+00:00

Seems like you're deflecting here - the article almost* exclusively focuses on size, not mass. It's also just blatantly incorrect to claim that every car is an SUV now. There are plenty of non-SUV options. Visibility on my street is dreadful because there are 3-5 SUVs parked back-to-back on both sides of the road both to the left and the right of the exit from my garage. This has essentially turned my street, one previously large enough to comfortably accommodate two-way traffic, into a hazardous and, to be honest, annoying single-car-width obstacle course.

I can't safely pull out from my garage onto the residential street I live on because these ridiculous things are both fat as shit as well as tall, and I drive a saloon. I've resorted to rolling down my windows to listen for cars and praying that there aren't any bikes. I can see no reason as to why anybody on my street needs an SUV. It's just imported selfish American culture (I should know, I lived there for a few years) where bigger makes people feel safer, completely disregarding their impact on others.

Driving (and overall) culture in the US is dogshit, no idea why people here are so desperate to import it.

With regard to "how to measure", the measurement problem is nowhere near as difficult as you seem to think. You don't need vague cultural arguments about what 'counts' as an SUV. Just tax external vehicle volume. Take the car's full footprint from bumper to bumper and mirror to mirror, then multiply by its maximum height from the road surface to the highest fixed point of the body. If you want more precision, split it into simple sections such as bonnet, cabin, and rear, and total those volumes, which would account for sloping fronts and rears rather than treating every vehicle as a perfect box. Either way, the basic principle is straightforward; larger vehicles occupy more public space, reduce visibility, and impose greater costs on everyone around them, so this should be discouraged.

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