RandoEFC

I was playing the Tennis Elbow games a few years ago, loads of fun to be fair.

What's the opposite of "this didn't age well"?

Good work but it boils my blood that they need to step in.

Schrodinger's economy is back. The 6th biggest economy in the world who can afford to take a 5-10% hit to GDP by leaving a trading bloc that contains nearly all of our closest geographical members, and can afford to spend literal billions on the test and trace system that barely works. When kids who aren't having food provided to them by their families for one reason or another need £20 a week to help feed them though, it's "we don't have an endless supply of money". It isn't more complicated than this. A lot of the 322 MPs who voted against feeding children in poverty tonight have kids of their own. I'm paraphrasing a tweet I saw earlier but I wonder what they tell their own kids when they ask them "Daddy/Mummy, what did you do at work today?"

A League have been doing it for a while. Their argument against here is not picking up footballers swearing in the referee's face on the microphones before the watershed. This is a drum that has been banged before. If they're really interested in sorting it out they'll introduce an instant 3 match ban for any player caught using foul language by the officials' microphones. This will obviously be met with a mixed response but they manage it in other leagues and sports so it is objectively achievable.

Two weeks left to put up with it now.

Are you really picking this fight again? You're the one who was so desperate to exonerate the officials on Saturday that you were trying to convince everyone that Mane's elbow was actually his shoulder or something. I can't even argue with you on this because it isn't a matter of opinion anymore. Football is for the fans and no fans are happy with the current standard of officiating and the way games are being affected and dictated by bizarre rule changes and misuse of technology. If they want some sympathy from those criticising them then they should come out and tell us what they're doing publicly. They don't have to do it but they can't complain about people bemoaning a lack of scrutiny and clarity if they don't share anything with the public. It's because they're not arsed. If they were arsed, they'd do something about it. Abuse of referees is a completely different kettle of fish to pointing out faults in what they're doing on an internet forum. I'm not calling them a cunt from the sidelines or sending them death threats on social media. In fact, most criticism is currently aimed at the authorities messing with the rules rather than the referees themselves. If we're abusing referees by complaining about VAR then you're abusing me right now by calling me toxic and making insinuations about my job. I can only assume that you're involved in officiating in some shape or form and that you're passionate about it for that reason. That's fair enough if it's the case, but the majority are never going to share your opinion because the majority are simply football fans, and football fans feel a huge amount of frustration that unnecessary rule changes and their inconsistent implementation bring to the game. I mean come on, Saturday was the angriest and most competitive Merseyside derby there's been in years and yet Everton and Liverpool fans were (mostly) united in agreeing that disallowed goals like the one they had ruled out at the end is not the way the game is supposed to be.

A Labour MP for Bolton has been hospitalised with Covid-19.

Enough of the "you lot" thanks. I'm Manx not English.

Have the local lockdowns in Wales worked at all? Because in England it doesn't really seem to have helped. Some people are suggesting now that having blanket rules across the country for a short amount of time might do the trick a bit better because it'll be less confusing, easier to police and you don't have people coming in and out from places with stricter or more relaxed rules. The problem is all measures take weeks before you see any impact so you don't know whether the new tiered system is enough. I imagine it's not because it's basically just the local lockdowns that haven't worked under a different banner.

Someone over here took a private test the other day which came back positive. Caused an entire office to be evacuated and deep cleaned. Then took an actual certified government test and turned out to be a false negative within a matter of hours. Still my cousin was at the shop said he saw two people buying multiple 12 packs of toilet roll. Literally insane, it was one thing the first time but having been through a full lockdown and the shops being open all the way through how can you be so dumb over a small scare months later?

I can't get my head around the politics of this in the UK now. From the outside it just seems that everyone has totally lost their heads. Nothing makes sense, all you hear about are cross-party tensions, inter-party tensions. Fair does to Burnham for sticking up for his city but I think he has to be really clear he's fighting for a better financial support. If he fights against going into tier 3 and Manchester suffers more deaths than the tier 3 areas the finger will be pointed at him and he won't really be able to complain. Apparently Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson lost his brother to cancer 5 weeks ago and now has another brother in ICU with Covid. Tough times for him. ICU staff from both Liverpool and Manchester hospitals are talking about capacity being reached now.

I thought it was more about getting financial support for the companies that were being forced to close?

If enough people didn't comply with the first lockdown, that would have been unenforceable as well. Because almost everyone did comply, there was enough law enforcement to pick up the stragglers. People are calling restrictions unenforceable now when just a few months back the entire country shut down. How "enforceable" would that have been if enough people didn't fancy it? That's all I'm saying. The public attitude has now shifted away from "we're all in this together" to "why should we put up with this when that city and that city can still go to the pub?" and "my neighbour had 10 people round for a barbecue last weekend and I didn't snitch on them so I'm going to go to a house party after the pub closes at 10pm tonight".

Aren't basically all restrictions unenforceable though if enough people don't obey them? Theres only so many police, it's not like they can man mark a member of the public each. In normal times you can't even enforce speed limits. You can only pick up a minority of the most egregious offenders.

Footballers and blokes in their 20s in general misbehaving on holiday in Magaluf or whatever is old news that people just accept as part of being young and/or rich. Breaking Covid restrictions is a highly sensitive and politicised issue, a real hot button topic. People pay attention to it and in 2020 it's a cardinal sin to to commit Covid related offences. I can't find a better explanation other than Southgate making a calculation that playing Maguire after some banged up abroad shenanigans isn't going to cause enough outrage to disrupt the squad more than his absence would whereas Greenwood, Foden, Abraham, Sancho are all in that age group (and three of them also aren't white British if you want to suggest that's still a factor too) where the lazy stereotype of young lads with too much money and fame too soon can still be applied.

The restrictions should work. The problem is that they haven't been followed properly in all of the places that have already been under restriction. I don't know what you do, the horse has bolted. People in those areas are fed up of the government's messaging. Ordered back to work one minute and put back into lockdown the next. A lot of them will feel that they could have just carried on working from home where the majority continued to be productive and then continued to have a social life. It was in the balance until schools and especially universities returned and started to drive the second wave. All of the false promises don't help either. Boris Johnson spouting off "hit and hope" quotes because he wants to be Mr Sunlit Uplands. "We'll see this virus off in 6 weeks", "We'll be back to normal by Christmas". Coming out with this stuff isn't exactly smart in the face of the massive risk of him having to then reintroduce restrictions. I honestly don't know where it ends in England. People listened to the government for months and they just haven't put the protocols in place to manage a phased return to normality. And because of Brexit and the anti-Europe identity politics that this government relied on to get into power, there's no way they're going to look at Germany and Ireland to see what they've done to keep a second wave from really kicking back off.

The latest spitting image had a couple of decent sketches on Klopp in the first 5 minutes or so.

Just pause and think that this government are STILL leading in the polls. That's how much people are invested in Boris Johnson and Brexit. The lead has stagnated at about 2-3% over the past couple of months, the last slight hit they took was over the exams scandal. Starmer came out and publicly backed the circuit break lockdown yesterday so hopefully that'll see a little bit of a shake-up one way or the other. He's done alright so far, winning back a bit of support, but he needs to do more to create a real swing. More of the public support stricter measures than less strict measures which I don't necessarily agree with but you do feel a lot of those wanting stricter measures are already geared towards supporting Labour.

Sneezing usually means it definitely isn't it. It's a dry disease in most cases, dry cough and shortness of breath/fatigue. Might be worth a test just in case.

The whole point of the lockdown was to buy time to put the infrastructure and systems in place to control the spread of the virus. The whole pandemic started with one person having the virus. It was blindly obvious that unless literally nobody had it any more, there only had to be one case left in the country to kick it off again as soon as a return to normality was attempted. It was clear from the very start that a lockdown was never going to fully eliminate the problem. Some countries have used the lockdown to good effect, such as the Isle of Man and New Zealand achieving local elimination of the virus, and preparing protocols for controlling the spread when they opened back up. This has enabled those places to go back to pretty much complete normality. Now this approach isn't achievable in the UK because it isn't a small island nation and it's unsustainable to cancel travel in and out of such a major player in the world economy for an extended period of time. However, what was achievable was a functioning test and trace system and clear protocols for anyone who shows symptoms, tests positive, or returns to the country from some time away. Governments like the US and the UK that have treated the pandemic as some sort of flash in the pan inconvenience, rather than something that we need to live with for at least a year, convinced themselves that they could do a quick lockdown and then get back to normal without actually putting the work in to make sure workplaces, hospitality venues, universities, schools and households received the appropriate guidance that would minimise the spread of the virus. The British public haven't helped in England, but what do you expect - certain sections of the press and sinister individuals like Nigel Farage have been grooming them to be thick and irresponsible for years. Now suddenly those running the country, who got there by selling the biggest fairytale of all, need the public to actually act in their own best interests and listen to actual evidence and experts. Sorry, lads, you've sort of fucked it on that front. The UK is the obvious example because that's where most of us reside, or near enough to it. It's not the only country that has suffered a second wave but other comparable countries like Germany, for example, used the lockdown to quash the first wave of the virus, and put measures in place to stop the second wave from overwhelming them. The measures put in place by the British government (what even are they really?) have been indecisive and insufficient so they've left themselves with nowhere to go now, the virus is basically out of control again and the only weapon in their armoury for dealing with it is increased restrictions which should never have happened. Boris Johnson even admitted their strategy was a "whack-a-mole" strategy. A bit dumb as the thing with whack-a-mole is that the moles keep popping back up even if you do manage to whack them.

A lot of very intelligent people in a lot of places in that party turned a lot of blind eyes to a lot of things for Trump to get anywhere near that ticket in the first place and every one of them is culpable in this episode of US politics. When the election race was close, I was worried like many others about Trump trying to Houdini his way out of it or using some legal loophole to invalidate the result. At the moment it's a gulf between him and Biden in nationwide polls and in swing state polls. Maybe he can scrape it back but people are already voting. Unless there's a big change, the election won't be close enough for Putin's meddling to get him over the line, or for him to cry foul over postal ballots or challenge the result on some sort of technicality. After that, his only option is to outright refuse to hand over the presidency, stage some sort of coup with the help of the military or by mobilising his extremist supporters to take to the streets with guns or something. Let's hope it doesn't go that far huh...

Djokovic isn't even playing that badly but is losing 6-0 4-1.

Sturgeon did sack her. She's now an independent MP rather than a member of the SNP. Only the electorate have the power to actually make her not an MP. It isn't a straightforward process for an MP to resign either and very rarely happens for reasons besides health. She should resign though for sure.

London surely isn't a great example? In recent elections, they have voted overwhelmingly for Labour in both the mayoral and parliamentary elections. I suppose they could win seats there whereas they never will in Liverpool.