[-] david@feddit.uk 50 points 5 months ago

The truth is that Rishi Sunak is very happy to sacrifice the young to bad outcomes because he doesn't think they'll vote for him anyway so he can punch down without fear of electoral impact.

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submitted 5 months ago by david@feddit.uk to c/uk_politics@feddit.uk
[-] david@feddit.uk 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Reminder: all this incorrect fuss about a potential couple of thousands of tax is just to distract from the former actual Conservative Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi having to settle an unpaid tax dispute from HMRC of how much now? An estimated £5,000,000. Yes, five million pounds.

And he breached the ministerial code three times that I know of: he didn't declare to officials that he was under investigation by HMRC when he was appointed Chancellor by Conservative Chancer-in-Chief Boris Johnson, he didn't declare that he'd paid a settlement for tax avoidance when he was appointed to cabinet by Conservative Economy-Crasher-in-Chief Liz Truss, nor when appointed again by Conservative Chaos-and-Non-Chief Rishi Sunak.

£5,000,000. When ordinary folk don't pay their taxes, it's called tax evasion, it's a crime, and you go to prison. When rich people don't pay tax, it's called tax avoidance, and if they're found out as breaking the rules, they pay a bit more than they would have done and no-one goes to prison.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/nadhim-zahawi-sacked-tory-party-chair-tax-affairs-rishi-sunak https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/15/nadhim-zahawi-to-pay-millions-in-tax-after-dispute-over-family-finances

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submitted 5 months ago by david@feddit.uk to c/uk_politics@feddit.uk

So.... not compulsory then? Or do you just get fined or something? Anyway, earliest policy U-turn of the Conservative campaign so far - will it be their best?

[-] david@feddit.uk 42 points 1 year ago

Fantastic video, but it winds me up when they add padding to a phone video to make it landscape, as if no one in existence might possibly be viewing their phone-generated content on a phone.

[-] david@feddit.uk 66 points 1 year ago

Oh, I thought it was the CEO's online reputation and the fact the people are hearing more and more that their after sales service is shit, eg being charged £17000 for a new motor which is apparently the driver's fault for driving it in the rain. In Scotland.

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/motors/couple-charged-17000-tesla-broke-27925815

Apparently the problem has been known for some time:

https://insideevs.com/news/534878/tesla-models-motor-fail-rain/

[-] david@feddit.uk 87 points 1 year ago

This is great, but republicans are gonna hate it. They want everyone to hate taxes with a passion, so they make it difficult, time consuming and expensive to pay your taxes, and make government services as bad as possible so even poorer people who don't pay much tax feel they get a bad deal out of taxation.

If ordinary people found it easy and convenient to pay taxes they might notice that they get more out of government than they put in and that rich people are bearing more of the cost than they are. If they thought that, they might support tax increases or things that horrify republicans like medicaid for all.

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[-] david@feddit.uk 70 points 1 year ago

Top troll trolling.

[-] david@feddit.uk 125 points 1 year ago

I don't know who you are, or what you write, but thank you.

[-] david@feddit.uk 31 points 1 year ago

Bold. I guess being left to die in am armed insurrection stings a little.

[-] david@feddit.uk 132 points 1 year ago

When you find out about Dunning-Kruger and realise that that's why everyone else in the world is so stupid apart from you.

[-] david@feddit.uk 37 points 1 year ago

Yeah I thought it was weird when so many Bernie supporters switched to Trump. They're political opposites.

[-] david@feddit.uk 41 points 1 year ago

You didn't scroll as far as the "total earnings in your lifetime" and "total earnings of a doctor in their lifetime", then, I take it.

[-] david@feddit.uk 67 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I feel I can explain this discrepancy with a bit of history.

TL;DR in the last paragraph.

The EU has a numbering system for additives, preservatives, colourings etc that have been tested and approved for human consumption, so instead of putting Sodium Sulphite, you can put E221. They used to be very very commonly listed in ingredients in the UK. The difference between Sodium Sulphite (E221) and Sodium Hydrogen Sulphite (E222) is unclear and unimportant to most consumers, so manufacturers just listed the "E numbers" instead.

In the UK, when it was discovered that certain food additives can trigger conditions such as ADHD, instead of naming the specific chemicals that were causing the problem, the British media just called them E numbers.

Cue a fair bit of hysteria about how E numbers are harmful and some legitimate concerns, and suddenly the public start checking their food to see if it has any of those nasty E numbers, and they find to their horror that a lot of processed food contains a lot of E numbers, because preservatives, flavour enhancers, food colourings, sweeteners make food more appealing, and people re-buy appealing food. Suddenly it's very much in the manufacturers' interests to name the chemicals instead of the shorter E number so even today in the UK it's more common to name the chemical than the E number, which was never required anyway. To prevent hysteria over "chemicals" in food and to inform, it's become common to label then with their purposes - flavour enhancers, colours, preservatives etc.

There's still some really quite noxious chemicals that are perfectly legal to put in food. My son's A-level chemistry teacher saw him drinking the same brand of squash every day and commented "You drink a lot of that. Are you sure there's no aspartame in it? There's no way I would deliberately put aspartame inside my body." Make of that what you will.

Anyway, the media storm around E numbers dies down because the manufacturers largely just avoid naming them that way, and carry on pretty much as before. Some kids have had reactions and occasionally news stories come out, but the media persist in avoiding using chemical names.

There's some perfectly sensible advice that says that it you eat less processed food, and especially less "hyper-processed" food, and instead eat more food made from more natural ingredients, you get a more balanced diet with better vitamin and mineral intake, thus feeling feeling fuller for longer. (If the food is designed, with proper experimental testing, to get you to buy it more, it is inevitably also designed to get you to eat it more than you need to.)

But how can you tell if the food is processed or not? What's the difference between me spending half an hour mixing the ingredients and then mixing them for me and precooking it so I just bung it in the pan? Well, a random member of the public almost certainly has salt and pepper, maybe even a few herbs and spices, but probably not any L-alanine. Look out for ingredients that you wouldn't use at home, they're probably a sign that it's highly processed.

Hence the nearly good information that there aren't any artificial flavours or colours. Nearly good, because it doesn't mention preservatives and nearly good because it is definitely and certainly processed food designed to maximise profits rather than health.

So the UK food processing industries continue to aim naturally for maximising re-buying which includes reassuring the consumers that this is the healthiest (pre-prepared, highly processed, addictively tasty) low-priced convenience food they can, whilst being attractive to supermarket profits with longer shelf lives. If the bacteria and mold-killing preservatives aren't as kind to human biology as just making it yourself and eating it sooner, and a few people have had reactions, it's just not obviously bad enough for it to be something people will do anything about.

**TL;DR ** So, my understanding is that the hysteria about artifical flavours and colours was highest in the UK and the folks from the other countries aren't looking for technicalities to reassure them about the ingredients because they were never trained by their media to hunt for nasties in the small print - those that care can see straight away this is very firmly in the processed food category, and those that don't, don't.

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Can't believe I managed to bag the username david!

Tip: join feddit.uk while the good usernames are still spare! Thanks @tom@feddit.uk

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david

joined 1 year ago