Yes, yes, we really shouldn’t laugh and yet deep down we know this is darkly funny:
Memorial for Swiss bar fire victimns catches alight
Yes, yes, we really shouldn’t laugh and yet deep down we know this is darkly funny:
Memorial for Swiss bar fire victimns catches alight
These were innocent victims.
Memorials for far less deserving individuals have escaped a similar fate to date. Karma is playing the long game.
On the subject of thoughts one wishes one had not had, it did occur to me that it was better for the waitress who carried the incendiary device to have died rather than for her to have survived … in the sense of, who would want to be in her shoes had she survived?
She could have worked for the BBC or the Graun. Would have been a star employee, but wouldn’t have reached the very top. Too white, y’see. Well, before the fire, that is….
I have always thought sparklers inside were a bad idea – the probability of a fire is very low – but the potential bad outcome very dangerous, I really wish I had never been proved right.
Agreed. I can remember the first time I saw people lighting little indoor fireworks at a Xmas celebration. “Mad bastards” was my instant reaction and I was right.
Poor kids. But I have to say, what a dumb idea, waving sparklers about under a plastic ceiling. It seems at no point did anyone do what everyone here would have, which was take a look and think, “you sure?”
I think this is a generational thing. I encounter it all the time with Millennials and GenZ who are adept at operating device UIs but have no clue about or interest in the underlying functionality, are helpless when there are problems, and seem both uninterested in and unable to predict likely consequences of actions. Clever but gormless.
That said, I also snorted when I saw that headline. What a bastard I am.
Is a sense of homour what G Brown had when he gave P Mandelson a peerage?
There’s some statistics about home fires and how they’re like spotting a unicorn nowadays and it’s basically about lighting, heating and oven chips.
The only time I’ll have a candle in the house is on a birthday cake.
Here’s a Worstallian sort of joke:
Headline – “I had an abortion due to climate anxiety.”
Advice includes
“On some level we should all have climate anxiety. Yet we all walk around with disavowal, dissociation and denial”
https://archive.is/CfyZt
Of course, they’re going to speak to the sort of shrink that they know who believes in it.
I have zero anxiety about the environment because even if you buy into all the IPCC stuff, are OK with the doctored numbers, the lack of consideration of heat island effects and so forth, it’s barely going to affect your grandchildren.
And it’s just not worth exploring beyond about 150 years. Brownstone houses in New York have steps up because of all the horse shit. People would have thought you were insane if you said that in 150 years there would be no horse shit.
Nice theory but UK houses of the type & period were built the same. It’s because they were built as single family townhouses with servants. So building elevated “ground” floors provided basements with natural light for the servants’ work.areas. They also usually have garrets for the servant quarters. Recognisable by the simplified skirtings, architraves etc & the rough plastering. You’ll usually find the void under those steps provided coal storage space.
Horse shit in those days was actually a valuable “resource”. It didn’t lie in the streets for long.
Also because the building method was to dig out the basement and use the spoil to build up the road. So you ended up with the house going “down” and the road going “up”.
That’s what I’d heard.
But the general point is, lots of things change in 150 years. I think, at best, you can probably take how things are now and go forward 30 years. 50 at a push. If you plonked someone from 1926 into our world they’d be amazed at Easyjet, Toyota, Tesco, the survival rates of childhood cancer.
Even the IPCC stuff (if you disregard the Summary for Policymakers: written by politicians for politicians) rates thermapocalypse as very unlikely.
That may be the most Guardian article ever.
It does seem like the simulation gets more and more blatant over time.