Carl Cort's Hamstring

According to the ONS, the average household income in the UK last year was £60k. I agree with you that households with two earners on that sort of wage shouldn't need help based on the October price cap. I'd worry if any of the current forecasts for January or April are even vaguely accurate though. I realise it's very London-centric, but I think there will be lots of decent earners down here who don't have a huge amount of wiggle room at the end of the month. Certainly, if the cap was to go up to £6k or 7k, we'd be paying for it partially out of our savings (I realise we're in a fortunate position to have savings and many don't) and, by national standards, we have a reasonably high household income.

Almost a third of working adults are on <£20k a year. It's interesting to look at the government's figures on income percentiles. If Zahawi is saying that people on £45k and below will need help (which they will), that covers 80% of the country. It's going to need furlough levels of cash from the government.

Celtic look worryingly good, but I don't think I've ever seen so many players clearly not trying as that United team in the second half.

This time last week, our new Prime Minister was saying the thing she hates seeing most in the world was solar farms in the countryside.

I don't see how smaller businesses, especially things like restaurants and pubs can possibly survive what's coming without huge state intervention. There are going to be a huge number of people losing their jobs.

Fair enough, I stand corrected.

Their navy needs a home warm water port.

This is a take https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/1561963305320779776?t=I2jb6QG8VUduk-FW5LKPWA&s=19

So tomorrow we'll be 6 months into a war I think most of us thought would have finished (with a Russian victory) in a few weeks. It's interesting to look back over the first pages of this thread to see how some of the most forthright posters on here have been stridently and consistently wrong about almost everything.

The funniest thing in all of this is OF fans pretending they'd welcome some sort of competition from anyone else. Just had a look back at the match report from one of the games that hurts most from the McInnes era: when we got beaten 4-0 at Parkhead in early March 2014. We had been absolutely flying in the league (I think it gets forgotten just how good we were in his first 4 seasons), unbeaten in 12 games with 10 wins and 10 clean sheets. A win would have taken us level on points at the top of the league. It was a genuinely big game. The attendance? 39,000 They don't want a competitive league and wouldn't be interested if there was one

As I say, he was offside when the original pass was played. It's clear as day. That's not how the rule works though.

The ball clearly came off a German defender guys. He's onside...

I'd have had a big problem with this 4 years ago when we were aspiring to finish in the top 2. As it is, we're shit and need to start making up ground on Hearts and get back into Europe. If he's better than what we have, get him in on whatever basis.

I think that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan seems pretty fanciful based on what's happened in Ukraine. The Russian military had recent combat experience in Syria, Georgia and Ukraine, was fighting on its own doorstep, had an enormous advantage in equipment, airpower and naval power and have still experienced a colossal disaster. The Chinese military haven't fought anyone for the best part of 40 years, apart from their own citizens. They'd have to cross 100 miles of open ocean, opposed by a reasonably large (if old) Taiwanese navy and a large, modern Taiwanese air force. I don't see how they could do it.

You wonder how long the Russian government can keep up the pretence that everything is going to plan when things like this happen. It must be the first sinking in the history of naval warfare where both sides have claimed responsiblity.

Quite something to lose your fleet's flagship to an enemy that doesn't have a functioning navy. Not quite as bad as when, in the 18th century, the Dutch navy had an entire fleet captured at sea by a French cavalry regiment, but pretty embarrassing nonetheless.

A policy that will be incredibly expensive, impose pointless cruelty on already vulnerable people and will do nothing to fix the problem it's supposedly designed to solve. Absolutely peak Tory.

Out of all the various gatherings he was reportedly at, the birthday was the one that bothered me the least to be honest. The stories that they were having parties in their flat are more serious and be more damaging if/when he gets fined for that. What gives me some hope is this on Twitter from a former Tory advisor who runs a polling and focus-group company:

The Met yet again doing their best to be helpful to their masters and doing this while parliament is in recess for Easter.

Something I've noticed on Twitter in the last month is that the pro-russian bots/trolls/useful idiots are almost exclusively Indian or African. I wonder if their propaganda isn't really aimed at Europe at all, but more towards countries who aren't naturally hostile towards Russia.

We didn't start the fire

I suppose it's better to be hated than ignored. That would be a good motto for Brexit Britain.

We've already seen film footage of Russian soldiers opening fire on apartment blocks and civilian cars, shelling evacuation corridors and trying to murder a Sky News crew. It's not as if they've earned any benefit of the doubt

This held up well.