HelloThere

Is that it?

Or, who.

Was?

Well, exactly.

If you know exactly what you need, then specs are great. Proven solutions for known problems are awesome. Agile is pointless in that circumstance.

But I can count on one hand the number of times stakeholders, or clients, actually know what they want ahead of time and accept what was built to spec with no amends.

When there is any uncertainty, changing a spec under waterfall is significantly worse. Contract negotiation in fixed price is a fucking nightmare of the client insisting the sky is red when the signed off spec states it’s to be green.

The bill was 350m in the same way that the bill for a meal deal is >3.50, until the discount is applied.

When you pay, tesco don’t take all the money then give you a refund as two separate transactions, they apply the discount first, and you pay that price instead.

Telling people a meal deal costs 4.12 or whatever is the same claim, which is a clear lie.

We did send 350m to the EU. So it was just a claim about what we can do with it. As the savings not existing is a claim about future actions. Nothing will ever proove it was a lie

But here’s the thing, we literally didn’t, even the treasury confirmed it

https://fullfact.org/europe/membership-fee-eu/

Separately, your grammar and wording are fine. We all can be a bit more concise, but you aren’t repeating the same thing over and over so it genuinely isn’t a problem.

It is infinitely more important to write in a way that is clear and easy to understand, than it is to be ultra consice.

There is nothing wrong with always wanting to improve a skill, but if anyone has made you feel bad about how you write, they are wrong and should ignore them.

None of these are lies. Manipulation of the same family certainly. It was true that we sent £350 million per week to the EU, except it really wasn’t and yet if you offered evidence that it was a lie it’d be easy to produce evidence that it wasn’t. Truth is complex.

Just to nit pick a bit, because of how the rebate worked we literally didn’t transfer that 350m figure, as the discount was applied immediately, like, er, a meal deal? 😁

https://fullfact.org/europe/membership-fee-eu/

I agree this needs to be tackled, but I have a few thoughts.

What we saw with Johnson, et al, is that our system does not have protections in place against bad actors. All processes presume people are honourable. This is one of the main reasons why you cannot accuse another MP of lying in the Commons, but you can disagree, debate, bring other evidence, explain why their reasoning is wrong, etc.

That may sound like symantics, but lying isn’t the same as being wrong. Lying is when you know what you are saying is false, and you say it anyway.

And because things are less black and white than we’d like - especially in politics and economics, neither of which are hard science - you have a pretty big grey area where good faith research can show very different outcomes.

As such you’d need a burden of proof that is very pretty high, because you’d need to prove the person saying X knew it was false. If it isn’t high enough, then it would absolutely be abused by bad actors commissioning biased research to compel their opposition to stop saying X.

The 350m example, and Sunak’s 2k one, are both clearly lies. In the first case we literally didn’t send the money, and in the second the Civil Service had already told ministers privately the figures were not reliable.

Having these two examples being criminally prosecutable would absolutely be an improvement on our current postion, and waiting for perfect is worse than a step forward, but we’d need to be very very careful to not bring in legislation that can be abused by bad actors to silence legitimate opposition.

You’re presuming self interest is inherently rational.

It isn’t.

Yeah, but any other leader would be 20, 25, er, 30 points ahead!

Sorry, I don’t understand the motivation here, you want to not let Google spy on you via their OS, but are perfectly happy to give them your entire payment record?

Yes, and the members overwhelming rejected the attempt to add unrelated clauses to a bill in the final stages, thus keeping with convention.

The LibDems knew this would be the case, so it’s cheap posturing and point scoring aimed at people who don’t understand how the house operates.

My current theory is they purposefully try to cause splits in the left. There’s no other reasoning for them to continue to be this bad after very nearly a decade of continually publishing utter tosh.

So, this isn’t particularly difficult to investigate.

The Criminal Justice Bill has already passed the committee stage, see here:

https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3511

Amendments of the sort the Lib Dems tabled here are outside the scope of the bill, as described. See New Clause 91, just below division 152 here:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2024-05-15/debates/70FB3786-C2A3-4CFE-90EA-CC2CB5AE5CCE/CriminalJusticeBill#division-51075

Unlike the USA, tacking unrelated stuff on to bills is not how our system works, especially at the final reading, which is why loads of members abstained (all of Labour, all of the SNP, even 6/15 Lib Dems, etc).

Now, do I want it to be a criminal offence to pump literal shit in to our drinking water? Of course I do, fuck the bastards.

But please don’t let yourself be tricked by this political gamesmanship.

I’d say The Canary should know better, but this sort of thing is why they are an absolute joke.

Edit: added link to clause and fixed typos

It’s almost like low quality mechanisation is something that should be resisted. I wonder where I’ve heard that before…

As yes, because that will solve poverty. Bring back debtors prison I say, and we’ll party like it’s 1824!

It’s an old, bad, joke on the two definitions of revolting.

And they smell bad too!