Onionman

I stand corrected! So, instead, here's Horace, about 20BC (Third book of odes) "The age of our fathers, worse than our grandsires, produced us still more flagitious [villainous], us, who are about to product an offspring more vicious [even than ourselves]. "

It's just a function of becoming older. As you grow older you forget that you were young once. Also, as you age, you sort out all the things that annoy you that are in your control. In turn you are more apt to become annoyed with anything that's not perfect outside your own life. It's been going on for a while: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” Written in 400-odd BC by Socrates. Some things never change.

Ah, derision regarding the metric system. I was one of you. I used to feign a blank look when someone said ten metres and ask, all cocky, "What's that in real money?" just like you do. I thought I sounded cool rather than a bit retarded. Then one day about ten or twelve years ago, I measured a piece of metal that was 1ft 5in 5/16 that I was cutting into four lengths. Do that one in your head. I noticed it was 440mm and I stopped using imperial that day. Never used it since. I measure in mm, I cook in grammes. Easy.

Here's an interesting article on that subject: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096 tl;dr Not anything like as much as you think.

Local car dealer friend of mine says cars are beginning to stick on his forecourt so he's running down stock. This is how recessions start.

Before about ten thousand years ago, the conveyor used to stop regularly and there were swings in average European temperatures of 10deg C or so on a regular (couple of thousand year or so) basis. There's a good reason to believe that the stable nature of climate since then (due to a historically unusual stability in the North Atlantic Conveyor) allowed the growth of farming and civilisation in Northern Europe. In short, it's normal behaviour for the Gulf Stream to collapse regularly - we live in an unusually stable time. And climate change runs a small risk of tipping us back into instability.

It's fascinating to me that people are so one-sided on a subject like this. I'm old enough to remember British people in the 1990s travelling across to Belgium (in particular) to buy cars because all the manufacturers charged more for cars sold in the UK than in Europe. Then the bad old, nasty old EU stepped in and made it illegal for car manufacturers to do so. It's a decision that has probably saved UK consumers tens of thousands of pounds over the past twenty years (even if you buy used cars, the price has been depressed throughout the period by the lowered cost of new cars). That was a judgment where countries' rules were overruled by the joint sovereignty of the EU, completely and utterly to our benefit. But that's all in the past and conveniently forgotten when something like this doesn't go our way. No, it's the nasty old EU that never gives us nothin'. Just saying...

It's a recoloured photo so the proportions are unchanged from reality.

Glad you like it - I do! Mrs Onionman is a graphic designer. She took the pic and did an astounding amount of work in photoshop to get it to look right. She's a huge fan of the old railway posters, you know the kind.

The current Mrs Onionman made this faux 1920's travel style poster for me from our last holiday. Thought I'd share it...

CO2 forced global warming on Venus took it to 460 degrees C. Closer to the sun, but not much. The science is settled. The peripheral details may not be (they rarely are in science) but man made climate change is real.

I do have them occasionally. I'd say Tony's book is the best of the introductory books I've read; genuinely enjoyable just as a read in itself.

I speak as a non-owner (yet). If you look at managed boat share sites, often they'll have a detailed breakdown of annual running costs for their boats. You can knock off their management fee and you're left with the cost of running a boat that's in the water, being used pretty solidly, for 48 weeks a year. If you're only going to do 4 weeks a year you can work out which of the costs are pro-rata and which not. In "The Narrowboat Guide" by Tony Jones (a very readable guide), in 2016, he wrote that a survey of 13 respondents with different profiles came out at an average of £6,826. Were I buying a whole boat I'd put £8K a year aside and hope that we'd build up a surplus over time.

What do you want the politicians to do? The evidence is that population growth is slowing rapidly. Plenty of overseas aid funds go to birth-control measures. They also go to help people out of poverty (something that massively affects birth rates) yet many of the same people who complain about overpopulation also complain about Britain spending money on overseas aid. Who'd be in politics?

I find it's always best to deal with the world as is it, not as I would wish it to be.