yoda

Awesome I'll pick up the second one and take it from there.

I finished "Dune" recently. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Are the sequels worth checking out? I'm tempted to pick up "Messiah". Even more recently I finished "The Expendable Man" by Dorothy Hughes. Really terrific. A 100% certified page-turner; I was totally pulled in and fired through it in two or three nights. I think I might have preferred it to "In A Lonely Place".

Donaldson started off okay but he had a habit of switching off and making silly mistakes (usually giving away cheap penalties). Although that's a criticism which can be levelled at pretty much every County centre-back over the last three or four seasons. On a positive note: signing him was a power move that probably kept Inverness Caley Thistle afloat.

Arsenal have completely lost the head. You can't really blame the referee for that. It's probably a penalty too (and if it happened 50 yards further up the pitch it would be given as a foul).

I get that Adam Mckay doesn't do subtlety but I wasn't particularly enamoured with Don't Look Up. It's okay - not good but not terrible - and I laughed a few times but it was about 30 minutes too long. On a separate note, I saw West Side Story last week and enjoyed it. It does some things better than the original and misses the mark with others. I actually liked Ansel Elgort's version of "Maria" but he was a bit of a personality vacuum. On the other hand, Ariana DeBose as Anita was, by some distance, the stand-out performance.

BrewDog (I know) do a decent GF pale ale. The Black Isle Brewery do one too (Goldfinch, I think) and they serve it in cask and keg at their bar in Inverness. The GF bread you can pick up in the supermarkets is mostly shite.

We're only a point better off than St Johnstone. There's hardly a vast chasm of quality between the two teams.

Going back to the hospitality stuff from several pages ago. In the 2018 and 2019 festive period I did shifts in a relatively busy bar / restaurant. Most nights you needed at least 6 staff on (and usually you'd have eight people on) - every weekend in December and then every night in the week before Christmas was heaving. I was in on Friday for a couple of pints. It was dead. Apart from Christmas Eve they're estimating that they'll only need 3 staff a night. There's obviously an element of some people being cautious but the government "advice" has obviously had a huge impact. At least last year you had furlough. You got your pay packet topped up a wee bit. This year... nothing.

More club officials need to publicly call out referees. It seems to work.

Self Esteem is getting top spot on a few end of year lists. Difficult to disagree with that - it's awesome.

We're splitting hairs but that is a very awkward definition. The majority of people would define it as a sustained increase in price level. The Bank of England, for example, literally define it as that. The Federal Reserve too. What a way to spend part of my Thursday night. Discussing the semantics of inflation.

Take it you didn't do o-grade economics ??? To be fair (tbf), I don't agree with a lot of Detournement's takes but they've got a point here. And it's not exactly an uncommon take either. There's a number of people questioning how much of an impact it'll have. There's obvious forward guidance implications but - and this is my amateur opinion - I'm not convinced a rate rise will have much effect either way. Although I think there's more reasons to oppose rate hikes at the moment than there is to support them. Citation needed. Because almost every textbook or central bank website I've read defines inflation as a sustained increase in the general price level. Inflation causes a decrease in purchasing power, which is a reduction in the value of your money.

I believe I covered this in my previous post about anti-Highland sentiment. Thank you.

It's a continuation of anti-Highland sentiment that started with the Clearances and continues to this day with an orchestrated refereeing campaign designed to keep the Premiership a teuchter free zone.

Six minutes of injury time. Sinister stuff, I suspect.

Parking the impact on businesses to one side and looking at workers. It's pretty bad that they're doubling down on the "advising not legislating" approach to hospitality. There's going to be a lot of folk (predominantly those on minimum wage with "flexible" working hours) out of pocket, with no immediate or obvious way for them to cover that loss of income.

The celebration after the first goal. What.

You're being deliberately obtuse. Plenty of smaller workplaces will book a restaurant for dinner. They will pay a small deposit per head. They won't pay for everything up front.

People drinking bring in less money than people eating and drinking. A few grand a day has effectively evaporated. And of you're on a zero hour contract then you're not getting paid. I've no issue with masks or table service but actively telling people to avoid hospitality - but not offering support - is obviously going to have a horrendous impact. Particularly after last Christmas being a write off (rightly or wrongly).

I gave Quasimoto a listen a few months ago because of your avatar. Some really good stuff.

Well... yes. It's a bit simple to just blame Brexit although it obviously hasn't helped matters. Other countries have inflation caused supply chain issues too. There's a global supply issue - shipping containers, semiconductors, and pandemic effects on literal production lines. I'll see if I can dig out the article looking at demand - it's The UK household savings data is a bit misleading. Lower income households haven't really seen an increase in savings. And those on furlough (directly receiving government cash) saw their savings decrease (or so the BOE say). This is a good piece by Duncan Weldon with a bit on debt servicing costs: https://duncanweldon.substack.com/p/britains-macro-policy-mix-is-a-mess As an aside: a lot of the debt fear mongering ignores the alternative. Lockdowns without deficit spending. With an end result of, well, the government having to spend lots of money anyway.

Yes, it's a concern (although it's objectively not hyperinflation) but Reuters had a breakdown of what was driving UK inflation. Big increases in energy prices (obviously) and the second hand car market is going wild (because of supply issues that were discussed in the summer of 2020). It's not exactly controversial to say that it's supply side driven rather than the result of government spending.