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Inequality


AngryOfTuebrook
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1 hour ago, Bruce Spanner said:


You’d have been a great teacher as long as grades, application, discipline and outcomes weren’t important and an in-depth knowledge of popular culture between 1978-2005 were the criteria for success.

 

Ever regret the Milian wankfest? 

 

Think of all the kids out there who'd be able to do Sopranos quotes at the drop of a hat though? That's a country I'd want to live in.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57724779

 

Quote

Four-day week 'an overwhelming success' in Iceland

Trials of a four-day week in Iceland were an "overwhelming success" and led to many workers moving to shorter hours, researchers have said.

The trials, in which workers were paid the same amount for shorter hours, took place between 2015 and 2019.

Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces, researchers said.

A number of other trials are now being run across the world, including in Spain and by Unilever in New Zealand.

In Iceland, the trials run by Reykjavík City Council and the national government eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which amounts to about 1% of Iceland's working population.

Many of them moved from a 40 hour week to a 35 or 36 hour week, researchers from UK think tank Autonomy and the Association for Sustainable Democracy (Alda) in Iceland said.

The trials led unions to renegotiate working patterns, and now 86% of Iceland's workforce have either moved to shorter hours for the same pay, or will gain the right to, the researchers said.

Workers reported feeling less stressed and at risk of burnout, and said their health and work-life balance had improved.

Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, said: "This study shows that the world's largest ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector was by all measures an overwhelming success.

"It shows that the public sector is ripe for being a pioneer of shorter working weeks - and lessons can be learned for other governments."

Gudmundur D. Haraldsson, a researcher at Alda, said: "The Icelandic shorter working week journey tells us that not only is it possible to work less in modern times, but that progressive change is possible too."

Spain is piloting a four day working week for companies in part due to the challenges of coronavirus.

And Unilever in New Zealand is also giving staff a chance to cut their hours by 20% without hurting their pay in a trial.

In May, a report commissioned by the 4 Day Week campaign from Platform London suggested that shorter hours could cut the UK's carbon footprint.

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On 03/07/2021 at 18:44, AngryOfTuebrook said:

So, without rules a school becomes Lord of the Rings?

 

I assume she means that you don't study hard enough for your exams and then...

Lord Of The Ring GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY

Think she’s confusing it with Lord of the Flies. Top teaching.

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1 hour ago, Paulie Dangerously said:

When I worked in offices I mustn't have done more than 3 hours in an eight hour shift, so the four day week makes absolute sense. 

 

Be interesting to see how many people are are still for it, if it means they have to spend their extra day off with their child, assuming schools could be included 

I dont think a shift should be longer than 6 hours. We should aspire to life beyond work, families should spend time together, people should have more free time, the 8hrs or more seems arbitrary.  The option to work longer if you want to should always be there.

 

I remember the tories giving a big push for the gig economy saying its great for everyone that flexibility you can choose when you want to work, if only bills were so flexible. Where I worked if anybody on zero hours said I'm not coming in tomorrow they where told then you won't be back at all. The flexibility was entirely in the employers hand. One tory Mp said he has a vision of people bartering for their pay saying I'll do it for 10 quid and hour and somebody then saying oh I'll do it for 9 quid, like it was a great thing the exploitation of desperate people.

 

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5 hours ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

I dont think a shift should be longer than 6 hours. We should aspire to life beyond work, families should spend time together, people should have more free time, the 8hrs or more seems arbitrary.  The option to work longer if you want to should always be there.

 

I remember the tories giving a big push for the gig economy saying its great for everyone that flexibility you can choose when you want to work, if only bills were so flexible. Where I worked if anybody on zero hours said I'm not coming in tomorrow they where told then you won't be back at all. The flexibility was entirely in the employers hand. One tory Mp said he has a vision of people bartering for their pay saying I'll do it for 10 quid and hour and somebody then saying oh I'll do it for 9 quid, like it was a great thing the exploitation of desperate people.

 

It's exactly how the tendering process was designed to work and has now expanded to include business in general. They couldn't get away with it with no immigrants or desperate people living in poverty so its always so hollow and hypocritical when the crack down on 'immigrants' and 'scroungers.' They are their whole business model.

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/06/uk-councils-failing-to-provide-paupers-funerals-investigation-reveals

 

Councils in England and Wales are abdicating their legal responsibility to provide so-called “pauper’s funerals,” often turning away low-income families who cannot afford to pay for relatives to be buried or cremated, according to Quaker Social Action.


The anti-poverty charity said its “mystery shopping” investigation into 40 local authorities’ approach to public health funerals in urban areas of the UK found 10 did not carry out their legal duty, and two-thirds did not follow government guidance.

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54 minutes ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

 

These obscenely rich fuckers have no shame any more. They have been mandated to basically fuck the poor and lower classes and the mandate was handed to them by the poor and lower classes! I expect to start seeing new Charles Dickens novels top the book charts any time soon.

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On 07/07/2021 at 13:12, Bruce Spanner said:

 


From an MP who last year claimed £3614 a week in expenses .But I’m sure the cunt will say he needed it 

And ……

 

At the beginning of the MPs' expenses scandal, The Daily Telegraph reported that Rosindell "claimed more than £125,000 in second home expenses for a flat in London, while designating his childhood home 17 miles away – where his mother lived – as his main address" and between "2006 and 2008 claimed the maximum £400 a month for food

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Rosindell

 

 

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I'm not arsed about their charity or philanthropy I don't even care how rich they become or what they spend it on as long they pay a fair amount of taxes and anybody who falls under their employment gets decent pay conditions and hours, if somebody becomes a billionaire without exploitation who has ethics, morality and genuinely does the best they can to have a positive impact then I'd be happy for them to be the first trillionarre. 

 

Lobbying, bullying, influencing politics with your wealth to shape laws, regulations, manipulate markets in your favour and then to say when I'm old or dead i may gift you some of my wealth if I feel like it. Fuck you, the larger the slice of pie you take the more it costs, its the way to fund civilised society, you'll still be insanely wealthy the world is your playground and the lands in which you live won't have crumbling infrastructure, tent cities, favelas, huge divsions or people with tumours the size of tennis balls that can't afford to go to the doctors. I've zero qualms against people attaining huge wealth, you provide something popular whatever it may be then good luck to you as long as you don't exploit, abuse or shit on the world because having all the money you couldnt spend in 100 lifetimes isn't enough for 101 lifetimes. I keep repeating this sentiment because it just massively annoys me, wanting better ways doesn't make me a communist or a socialist, laying down ethical regulations or rules for the sake of the greater good isn't Marxism. The vision for people shouldn't be freedom is the right for a person to make profit at all costs. Applying the rule that a boards only directive is to create profit for its shareholders to all of humanity is going to kill us one way or another. 

 

Were fucking it all up, rhe people we give too much power too are fucking everything up, short term wins with long term consequences.

 

 

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I’m sure this will make a successful comeback. Empire 2.0.

 

https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Two-Penny-Hangover/

A Very Victorian Two-Penny Hangover

The term ‘hangover’ is universally understood to mean the disproportionate suffering that comes after a night of over-indulgence. But where does the term actually come from? One possible explanation is, somewhat strangely, Victorian England.

 

During the Victorian era the practice of paying for a ‘two-penny hangover’ was incredibly popular among the country’s homeless population and the term ‘two penny hangover’ was so commonly used that it made its way into contemporary literature. A two-penny hangover is not the description of a very cheap night out, nor is it the amount it would cost you to get drunk in Victorian England. It is actually somewhere you could go to sleep if you were one of the thousands of homeless and destitute living in the country’s main cities at the time. If you lived on the streets and had managed to make some money during the day, depending on how much you had, you could spend the night in one of three ways; paying a penny to sit-up, two pence to ‘hang-over’, or 4 or five pennies to lie down.

 

Victorian society was struggling to pull itself out of centuries of poverty, degradation and ‘Mother’s Ruin’. It could be argued that society was suffering from a collective hangover from the country’s previous struggles through the industrial revolution, disease outbreaks and poor laws of the 18th century. In contrast, for some people at least, Victorian England was also a period and place of prosperity and innovation.

hogarthsginlane.jpegHogarth‘s ‘Gin Lane’

The population of Britain at the time lived in both amazing luxury and devastating poverty. The first time the term ‘Victorian’ was used was in 1851. Queen Victoria had been ruling since 1837, and would in fact go on to rule until 1901. 1851 was also the year of The Great Exhibition, this showed off the very best of industrialisation and innovation from Britain and around the world.

 

This exposition, based in London, was visited by over 6 million people, rich and poor alike.

Victorian England exemplified a capitalist entrepreneurial work ethic, a sense of individualism and hard work. It is no coincidence that Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ was also published at this time. The popularity of his work further cemented the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ into the public consciousness.

 

Unfortunately what brought prosperity to some brought degradation to others. This was coupled with a ‘laissez faire’ economic approach from the government which saw a surge in poverty in England’s cities. Although the Empire was flourishing, unfortunately so were the cities’ slums, especially London’s.

overlondonbyraildore.jpeg

The population had tripled in the 19th century and there were simply not enough resources to go around. People migrated from the countryside into cities causing overcrowding and lack of work for many. Starvation and degradation were, unfortunately, commonplace. There is a reason that Victorian England is often portrayed in contemporary literature as a dark and depressing palace for its poorest inhabitants. There were 30,000 homeless children in London alone during this time. It is therefore unsurprising that there was so much reference to poverty in contemporary literature. From the street urchins in Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist’ to the child chimney sweeps in Charles Kingsley’s ‘The Water Babies’. In fact Dickens actually used one of London’s most notorious and overcrowded slums, or ‘rookeries’ as they were called, ‘Saffron Hill’, as Fagin’s lair for the vagrant children he trained as ruthless pickpockets. For the poorest members of Victorian society life was incredibly hard, especially if you were homeless. It was even harder at night, where as well as contending with exposure and hunger, there were also the added dangers associated with the fall of darkness. If you were homeless you had very limited options. However, if you managed to scrounge up a penny you could at least get out of the rain at a ‘penny sit-up’.

 

Penny sit-ups

These are exactly as you would imagine them to be. For a penny a homeless person could pay to ‘sit up’ on a bench all night in a hall. Oftentimes this was the only option for people to get off the streets, particularly desirable in England’s wet and freezing winters. Sometimes the rooms would be heated but sometimes they wouldn’t, and the homeless person could also be provided with food but that wasn’t always guaranteed either. The only downside to these arrangements was that they weren’t actually supposed to sleep in these ‘sit-ups’. Some places even went as far as to employ monitors to ensure that no one fell asleep, as the right to sleep was not included in the penny price. It would seem that the majority of the homeless who used these sit-ups were men, but women and children were also documented as having frequented them. Although safer than the streets, most were still associated with being places of squalor, poverty and discomfort.

 

 

two-penny-hangover-300x186.jpg

 

Two-penny hangovers 

For an extra penny you could pay to sleep literally hanging over a rope. This was possibly marginally more comfortable, as if you fell asleep the rope would prevent you from slipping onto the floor or head-butting the bench in front of you. It still wouldn’t have been an overly relaxing experience though. People were crammed in as tightly as possible, and to make sure you got your money’s worth but no more, the rope would be unceremoniously cut the next morning at 5 or 6am. This was done for the dual purpose of freeing up the space, but it also served as a reminder to those lowest in society of just where their place was. Once the rope was cut, the homeless would be kicked out onto the streets once more. Even with the protection that these places offered, they were also not necessarily heated and it was not unheard of for there to be one or two people who could not be woken the next morning, having frozen to death during the night.

 

The term hangover is unlikely to have come specifically from this practice, it more likely refers to the lasting after effects of alcohol felt the next day. However the two-penny hangovers remained a grim reality of Victorian England regardless of the tenuous link to the etymology of alcohol. Particularly as ‘two-penny hangovers’ have also been mentioned in Paris, and the French for ‘hangover’ is ‘gueule de bois’ which is literally ‘mouth of wood” so nothing to do with ‘hanging over’ at all. But a fairly accurate description of how your mouth feels after a night drinking gin!

Fourpence_coffin-300x242.jpg

 

Salvation Army Coffins

Perhaps the creepiest of these peculiar Victorian sleeping arrangements, for those too poor to have a fixed place to sleep, were the four or five penny coffins. Thankfully they weren’t actually coffins. Instead they were small wooden boxes that bore a striking and unpleasant resemblance to coffins. They would be laid out in rows on the floor, and because the idea was to accommodate as many homeless people as possible, the dimensions of the ‘coffins’ were small and not very comfortable. People would also be given an oilcloth or leather blanket to cover themselves with. Often the price would include a cup of tea or coffee and a piece of bread as well. Inevitably people that used them would wake up cramped and sore the next day, although considering they were sleeping in coffins it was likely considered a bonus that they woke up at all!

 

However, these makeshift beds were still very much appreciated, as compared to the two previous options, at least in the ‘coffins’ you could lie down horizontally and sleep properly. These coffins were one of England’s first attempts at homeless shelters, and they were started by The Salvation Army, which was itself founded in 1865. The sheer levels of homeless and destitute had been noticed by the recently formed Christian charitable organisation, and this was one of the earliest solutions. In fact, in one contemporary newspaper the number of people using such a shelter nightly in Sheffield was estimated at between 200-300 people a night. The need was clearly very great. Time progressed though and in the latter half of the century homeless shelters began to operate free of charge, doing away with these early unusual solutions.

 

These peculiar sleeping arrangements have been commented upon by both Charles Dickens in his ‘Pickwick Papers’, which were published in 1836, and George Orwell’s work ‘Down and Out in London and Paris’ published in 1933, which he wrote whilst living as a vagrant for research. It is unsurprising that these scenarios are used in fiction as they do sound fanciful but as is often the case, the truth is stranger than the fiction.

Two-Penny Hangovers in literature:

“The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little higher than the Embankment. At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning.”


– ‘Down and Out in London and Paris’ George Orwell.’

“The Coffin, at fourpence a night. At the Coffin you sleep in a wooden box, with a tarpaulin for covering. It is cold, and the worst thing about it are the bugs, which, being enclosed in a box, you cannot escape.”
– ‘Down and Out in London and Paris, George Orwell.’

“And pray, Sam, what is the twopenny rope?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.
‘The twopenny rope, sir,’ replied Mr. Weller, ‘is just a cheap
lodgin’ house, where the beds is twopence a night.’
‘What do they call a bed a rope for?’ said Mr. Pickwick…They has two
ropes, ’bout six foot apart, and three from the floor, which goes
right down the room; and the beds are made of slips of coarse
sacking, stretched across ’em.’
‘Well,’ said Mr. Pickwick.
‘Well,’ said Mr. Weller, ‘the adwantage o’ the plan’s hobvious.
At six o’clock every mornin’ they let’s go the ropes at one end,
and down falls the lodgers.”
– ‘The Pickwick Papers’, Charles Dickens.’

By Terry MacEwen, Freelance Writer

Published: September 8, 2020.

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