Deke

Posts tagged with "UK"

Why is Britain still in recession? Ooh er... Let me think.

Friday, November 13, 2009 11:15:42 PM

It's official. The UK is still in recession. 'Why is this?' demand the papers (Oh, and her majesty's opposition).

Let me hazard a theory or three.

1/ Britain went into recession later than most of the rest of the world, so it's coming out later.
2/ Other countries had deeper recessions than ours, so ours is just as bad as theirs. But shallower.
3/ As the CBI has been reassuring us ever since Thatcher demolished our manufacturing base, what Britain does best is to add value to the work of other, less well paid, artisans. So we have to wait for them to come out of recession and start manufacturing and shipping stuff over here again for us to add value to. We also need to hope that 'they' haven't noticed what value we're adding and started adding it themselves.

I'm guessing it's 1% option one, 1% option 2, and 142% option 3.

We're stuffed.

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The lunatics are taking over the hospital.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009 10:12:15 PM

USA, healthcare, UK, hawking ...

In Paris two rival mayors, one conservative, the other socialist, have both instigated road plans to get the traffic out of their area quickly. They've both turned one road into a one way street. The problem is that it's the same road and they've made it one way in opposite directions. You'd think that would be the craziest thing on the news, but nooooooo....

In the US's ongoing healthcare debate things are getting more and more silly. 'Investors Business Daily' has posted an editorial making various strange claims, like senior citizens will have to undergo mandatory euthanasia counseling every five years. Fortunately for the aforementioned senior citizens this is probably bilge because this editorial also claims "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless” They might have a point.

Well, if it weren't for the fact that Hawking is a citizen of the UK not the US, always was and still is. He lives here and works here and, oh yes, is on record as saying "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." It's certainly safe to say that he would never have been able to pay for the treatment which allowed him to communicate with the rest of the world and enabled him to reveal that there was a genius living inside that husk of a body.

Critics of the president's healthcare plan have said it would "Introduce a 'socialist' system like Britain's". No it wouldn't. It would introduce a sytem like those of the rest of the civilized world's. Don't these people realise that it's not just us? The USA is the only 1st world nation not to have all-enveloping healthcare.

Whilst they're banging on about "Obamaland" they seem to miss one or two rather salient points. 1/ Britons have a longer life expectancy than USians, but pay half as much per head for it. 2/ Cubans have a longer life expectancy than Britons. A child born in Cuba today has a 5 times better chance of living to adulthood than a child born of parents of Cuban heritage living in the US, and upon surviving has a better chance of outliving his US counterpart. Cuba, for those who don't know, is a socialist country with a socialist healthcare system.

It seems like the current US system isn't a right to choose, it's a right to die.

11 comments

The sence of nonsence.

Saturday, August 1, 2009 6:07:18 PM

imperial, definitions, USA, UK ...

It's amazing how one bit of bad information can stay with you all your life. One day our English teacher set us an essay on the subject 'The sense of nonsense', and he said he would give zero points to anyone who misspelled it. To emphasise his point he wrote 'SENCE' on the board. Ooh, and I so nearly got it wrong. I copied it down and used that spelling throughout my essay.

He thought I was trying to be funny.

I, on the other hand, had to check the spelling before I could write this piece thanks to his little attempt at humour.

The first time I saw the word 'halcyon' I read it - dyslexia being what it is - as 'halycon', and the first time I used it I mispronounced it, much to the amusement of the surrounding throng. So I made a mental note that what I thought it was was wrong, and now I get it right about 50% of the time.

If only I could remember which was right and which was wrong in the first place...

With thanks to either a typo or someone's rank ignorace I once read that a mile was 1,700 yards. Since the author of that little gem was a citizen of the USA I assumed that this was just one more of those little things that the USA did differently to everyone else. For several years of my life I went around telling people that a US mile wasn't as long as an imperial mile. I didn't actually go around just telling people of course, but if it came up in conversation I was ready with the trivia, so there are probably several hundred people who now think that US and UK miles are different things, and that if you're a USAian you can drive slightly faster over here...

Now I've finally got it right someone's going to write and comment that a US mile is 1,700 yards. Go on, feel free to screw me up some more.

When I was a kid I knew that bi- meant two and tri- meant three because of bicycles, biplanes, tricycles, and triplanes. It was therefore obvious to me that a billion was two million and a trillion was three million. I explained this to a whole lot of my friends and acquaintances. Finally my dad put me right. A billion was a million to the power of two, and a trillion was a million to the power of three. I thought it was silly - why would anyone need numbers that big? - but it did make a kind of logical sense.

Enter the USA again. For reasons best known to some obviously subnormal maths teacher they decided that a billion was a thousand million, therefore a trillion was a million to the power of two. Now I'm sorry but I can find no logic in that whatsoever. Try as I may I can make no sencese of that, it's positively the most stupid thing I've ever heard of in my life (Well close anyway), and when the government of Britain decided to go along with the US definition I was right there at the forefront of the don't be silly campaign (We're just so polite over here...).

Thanks to the credit crunch I now feel more than justified in that particular opinion. There are people on the TV news talking about trillions like it's small change. Now what are we going to call a really large sum of money? I think this time the USA should adopt our logical definition before they have to start inventing new words.

Which I will, of course, only have trouble with.

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Now here's an interesting little thing that I discovered whilst typing this little missive. If your right hand slips one key to the left whilst you're typing, 'mile' comes out as 'nuke'.

You learn something new every day.

3 comments

Special relationships. Every home should have one.

Thursday, February 5, 2009 3:13:52 AM

UK, special, miliband, USA ...

I guess there was always an assumed special relationship between the US and the UK although the first time my attention was drawn to it was by the reports of a certain 'sexual tension' between Thatcher and Reagan, it kinda faded during Bush the firsts 4 years but Clinton seemed to get on OK with us, in fact he was of serious help in solving the 'Irish problem'.

Strangely, when Clinton was replaced by Bush II the special relationship seemed even stronger. Where you would have expected them to be like two magnets of reverse polarity Bush and Blair actually became almost as one. It was special relationship at first sight.

Now great store is being placed upon the fact that Brown was the first European leader to be 'phoned by Obama, and, get this, he was also the first leader to be contacted by Obama for something other than necessity! Oh good grief... Today (Technically yesterday I guess, it's getting late), just to be on the safe side, Miliband and Clinton got together to reaffirm the special relationship, live and in living colour on TV in your gaff.

Oh yes, and the US government has told a British court that if certain details concerning a Brit currently residing in a detentionary hotel situated in Guantanamo Bay Cuba are revealed during the course of proceedings, they will break off all sharing of intelligence with Britain, which would probably hurt us a lot more than them, since they seem to ignore us except when we're offering them a load of bilge that they need as an excuse to invade Iraq.

I wonder if Miliband and Clinton chatted about it before going public with their celebration of the special relationship.

Me, I can see the possibility that there may be a similarity in the ambitions of the 1st and 4th wealthiest nations in the world, but I have another theory for the special relationship.

We both speak English.

2 comments