John Oliver on Brexit: the EU is the least-worst option, and racists support Leave

I’m not. Certainly that added to their profits. It was amazingly short sighted, though, to invest everything into cotton. Imagine slave run factories. They would easily out compete the North in costs of goods, but they weren’t early embracers in the industrial revolution.

Al Murray’s FUKP promised to have the UK out of Europe by 2025 and on the edge of the Solar system by 2050.

I only wish more people had voted for him.

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Buses have tachographs like all heavy goods vehicles. You’re only supposed to do eight hours. I’d rather wait for a relief driver than have mine fall asleep and crash into a tree.

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You’ve been asked already how they would do so. You failed to answer the question.

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Um, no thanks. I already have better things to imagine.[quote=“GilbertWham, post:43, topic:80100”]
I’d rather wait for a relief driver than have mine fall asleep and crash into a tree.
[/quote]

Sounds like you miss your nanny. Go on then little boy, run back and hide under those nanny skirts!

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IIRC it was a private touring company. They drove us to Stonehenge and then some of the other lesser known stone formations supposedly along ley lines and used by modern Witches/Wiccans/Pagans.

I am aware of the need to make sure bus drivers aren’t over tired. While I can’t remember all the specifics (over 12 years ago), his opinion (as a bus driver) was that the rules were over protective, and included overall time, not just the length of the current shift. So a delay at the end of the week might result in him having to pull over for a relief driver, even though he wasn’t over tired that day.

What does driving a bus have to do with being a manly man? 0_o

And sure, safetly laws have their place. But I am sure you can find some examples where even you find them ridiculous. (Then again, maybe not.)

The USA has drivers hours rules, not sure why you find this amusing.

I don’t know how they are recorded in the states, but here it’s on the Tacho, used to be with a paper disk, now a digital card. Bigger companies also use remote tracking. There are routine stops to check the condition & paperwork of the vehicle, and to check the driver is in compliance with the hours. This is strictly enforced on anything larger than a Transit Van. A tired van driver (No tacho in these) recently killed four people on a local motorway, so these rules do have a real world influence.

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Oh, not at all - I’m well aware of that prejudice. And let’s not forget the Romani people, too. And that’s the background of the current anti-EU sentiment for sure. No question about that.

But it’s just so much easier to get people to focus on that one, cosmetic difference that’s easy to see (and easier to get Romanian and Bulgarians who’ve been in the UK for a while and might now be citizens to support this, too). I don’t think that UKiP and the Brexit campaign would have gotten the same traction without the refugee crisis that’s been so visible. The movement of people within the EU certainly caused tensions, but this is a new level, given the numbers of people at one time we’re talking about.

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The Russians attempted that with Serfs apparently… did not work out.

And don’t forget that while the backbone of the slave economy in the south was cotton, slaves engaged in all sorts of other labors (for themselves, their communities, and for the plantation owners) that supported the southern economy.

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Ok - maybe it is a bad example a the rather exhaustive number of regulations the UK has. It came to mind as, and again I can’t remember the specifics, the bus driver found the regulations to be beyond basic safety to the point of being absurd.

The point was, Brits bitching about EU regs, when the UK has regs for EVERYTHING as well. And you would still have to re-negotiate regs with the EU for trading between the two.

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I bet it could have worked. Many former slaves moved north to work in factories. Or coal mining. My point though for suggesting this is people who poo-poo the idea the Civil War was about slavery, saying it was “on it’s way out”. Which wasn’t only not true at the time, but if one just thinks about how it would have expanded had it remained legal, it isn’t hard to see them being put to use in factories, coal mines, and other labor intensive jobs.

Certainly. I am sure I have posted this before, but this is an excellent source of first hand accounts of what slavery was really like.

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Of course it gave them a boost. I still think you are selling the other 80% of UKIP’s history a bit short. It was not the refugee crisis that got them their greatest electoral success in the 2014 European parliamentary elections. The whole refugee crisis is just the latest episode in a much larger story.

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Surely the existence of subjectively “ridiculous” regulations indicates a need to get rid of all regulations, regardless of how they were crafted or exploited. Step aside, OSHA, we’re on to you!

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I wish there was a bit more coverage of the benefits of immigration to the UK. It seems like there’s a large portion of the press devoted to immigrant bashing, but not much in the way of headlines that redress the balance.

We need educating to see past instinctive[?] tribalism and resistance to change. Here’s some snippets from an excellent piece New Scientist ran in April.

“Concern about immigrants falls sharply when people are given even the most basic facts,” says Peter Sutherland, the UN Special Representative for migration. One analyst even says that removing all barriers to migration would be like finding trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk.

“More people expand the economy,” says Goldin, because people are moving from where they cannot work productively to where they can. In a survey of 15 European countries, the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) found that for every 1 per cent increase in a country’s population caused by immigration, its GDP grew between 1.25 and 1.5 per cent.

Based on recent numbers, Britain should conservatively expect 140,000 net immigrants a year for the next 50 years. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s fiscal watchdog, calculates that if that number doubled, it would cut UK government debt by almost a third – while stopping immigration would up the debt by almost 50 per cent.

Fair enough… but we’ll see if the Brexit vote manages to trump that. Given the sheer numbers of refugees created by the wars of choice in the middle east, it’s an important part of the current story.

That is exactly what I said. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

I bet your garden is immaculate, free from any pesky crows with that level of strawman building.

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How about, “Surely the existence in any country of a lot of rules that prevent injuries and death means its citizens are being hampered and coddled by a nanny state!”

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Thank you, but I had already heard of the greatest issue my country has been facing in recent years.

Of course it part of the current story and of course it is very important in general. However it is no more than part of a conflict decades in the making. You seem oddly eager to reduce this issue to the aspects that resonate most in America and with people who haven’t been following european politics much. In other contexts you are not so fond of derailing.

I dunno. I hear that “All laws concerning public safety are prudent and just with even enforcement and are an excellent use of tax dollars, resources, and labor. Anyone who disagrees just wants a return to the anarchist “wild west” and are selfish jerks who don’t want to protect their fellow man. I’d call them “heartless bastards”, but that would assume they had mothers, and weren’t just spawned from Satan himself.”

But that’s what you’re trying to do here, dismiss legitimate regulations against unsafe drivers by appealing to “ridiculous” laws that you haven’t even bothered to introduce, suggesting instead that someone seek out an unjust regulation in their imagination if they wanted to know why regulations were a bad idea.

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