G4Z

I had an argument with some pillock on facebook who was saying 'it was hot once in 76', I had to tell him his memory if obviously fucked because 1. data says so and 2. the changes since I was a kid in the 80's are massive and noticeable to anybody.

When I was a kid, you were lucky if you got a few days over 20 degrees over summer, if you had a week over 20 it was considered a heatwave of costa del sol proportions. For the last decade or so I've noticed spring starts a lot earlier now and summers go on a lot longer, even in winter I've seen cold like I've never seen on a few occasions (last few have been weirdly warm though).

Last year it was 38 degrees where I live in fuckin Newcastle for over a week, opening the door was like stepping off the plane in Florida. How fucking stupid do you have to be to be my age or older and not accept this reality staring us all in the fucking face?

The CAP has not been reformed successfully, you’re confusing task with goal

You've added that qualifier not me, depends how you define success doesn't it. My point was that things can and do change.

Wow, if you think wasting 66b is a sign of good governance, you’re lost pal

Heh, you know, I knew you were going to come back with this so I already have my answer to it.

Yes 66bn certainly does sound like a lot of money to waste, over a period of 8 years and between 28 countries.

Makes me wonder why you are not so bothered about the 200bn that this country has spent on this Brexit project, all on it's own in the same time frame.

Lol, those are the ones that got caught. Man, you are naive as hell

Oh right... so now you're pointing to the corruption that you can't prove exists?

Let me ask you this, what do you make of the blatant clear corruption in this country? specifically all of the pork barrel money related to Brexit like the Tees port scandal for example?

I'd like to think you'll be just as scathing, but somehow it seems like any cost associated with Brexit is worth it for some reason, even though you can't even tell me specifically what that reason is, much less prove it's a valid one. I wish I could say this was the first conversation I've had with somebody with Brexititus related Brexit blindness but when you get down to it, you're all remarkably similar.

The CAP has been reformed more than once and we were big players, most of the regulation UK gov wanted they got.

Vetos have been a problem wrt to foreign policy you are right, and there are talks about moving that to QMV as well. I don't think vetos apply to CAP though, I believe that's all QMV and has been since Lisbon.

As far as your examples, I think those are both fantastic examples of accountability on the part of the EU, in the first case they've commissioned a proper audit of the spending and the effectiveness of that spending, and now know what to address to make future spending more effective. wish our government did shit like that.

In the second case, all those people were investigated and arrested and are in court now, further they were voted out of their positions too, again something I wish our government would do.

You are doing a great job of making me even more sure I am right about this than I was before tbh with you.

I don’t see why people think centralising power, which is the result of ever more political union is a benefit.

Same reason you centralise anything, economies of scale. For instance, all this agri business regulation, if the UK just used the EU rules, then the UK can trade with the EU (and their other partners) no problem and the UK doesn't have to pay a load of it's own people to do the exact same work.

There you go massive specific and relevant benefit that anybody can understand. It is interesting you cannot really do the same the other way.

I’d like to see more decentralised government. A fediverse version if you like. Representative democracy is so last century.

Well I am loving feddit.uk so far, it's smashing. The right tool for the right job is an adage as true as anything in my experience and decentralised systems are great in some places and fucking useless in others. As far as democracy goes, most people simply don't have the time to gather all the knowledge you would need to actually govern effectively and make good decisions.

I mean could it be any worse than when we let these useless aristocrat pricks from Eton and Oxbridge who know nothing run riot? Might be less corrupt like, there is that.

Well I sort of see what you mean, my company does payment systems and I personally earned a nice tidy bonus for my work on the NI border project.

I really don't see though, how the government paying me that money to do that thing that didn't need to be done before is really a benefit.

Most of these opportunities you describe would have been just as availablein the EU, maybe even more so due to how much easier R + D collaboration was in the EU.

It sounds to me like you've kind of got the blinders on with this, vote for it by any chance?

I voted for lexit

There wasn't a vote for that, you voted to let the Tories decide for you.

It hasn’t even got started yet.

Oh yeah, I agree there :)

I mean, you said it was a gift, and now you're back tracking on that quite rapidly.

Vertical farming is just one aspect of CEA, and before covid and brexit the UK didn’t need vertical farms. Now we do. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Sure, but I don't see how they've made it necessary in the EU and have 2 of the biggest vert farm companies, and somehow we couldn't?

There are plenty of other areas that the UK can regulate based on science rather than feels now.

Right, but you've seen the shitshow we get from Westminster right? What makes you think policy will be any better, if anything our government seems to consistently make worse decisions than the EU does in my view.

On AI, that's just another lot of maybes, and so far I can't see any tangible benefit you can point to in that article.

Further, the EU changes and modifies it's legislation all the time as well, so any future 'benefit' over being in the EU could just as easily be undone at a future date and then whatever advantage we had will be gone.

I don't think any of this is anywhere near justifying or mitigating the enormous damage that has been done to this country, it would be nice if there was at least something but I don't see it.

Thank you very much, I've read it, but it doesn't support what you claim and it's actually quite a lightweight document.

Your claim was that Brexit was a gift in the agri tech on account of the disruption and increased costs of farming associated with Brexit.

This is the only part which strikes me as relevant to this claim

None of these is necessarily bad, and there is a wider framework to consider as technological change offers up what Gove called the ‘third agricultural revolution’.43 The coming of digitalization, and with it robotics, provides the opportunity to switch from labour to capital, and hence the restrictions of migrant labour and the associated higher wages may accelerate the process, and this in turn may increase productivity, which is low in British agriculture (partly because of the cheap labour reducing the incentives to digitalize). There may now be the necessity to, for example, get robots to pick soft fruits.44

The case for gene editing in agriculture is substantial. There are also considerable advances in indoor farming, urban farming, and the moves to insect- and plant-based proteins to replace meat production. British agriculture in 2030 and beyond will be very different, and in assessing the impacts of Brexit on British agriculture, the impact of policy on the deployment of new technologies will form a major part.

Lot of 'may', 'could' heavy lifting going on there. Certainly doesn't refute my point that all of this is/was entirely possible in the EU, and in fact the biggest vert farm companies are in the EU, not in the UK.

Sorry mate, I gave this argument every chance to prove a Brexit benefit, this one is still very much 'not proven' for me, unless you have something better?

It's paywalled, perhaps you can quote me something relevant?

No

What on earth do you mean 'No'.

Even by the measure that the OBR states, GDP per capita, UK was 2nd in Europe in 2016 and is still 2nd in 2022. The economic impact has been massively overstated.

What's that got to do with what I asked you?

I'm talking about a figure that's been spent/lost or not earned due to Brexit, and the OBR puts it at well over 200 billion now. Which is more than we ever spent on the EU in total over 47 years. Just a fact mate.

Investment may have been delayed, but that’s just delayed. There’s plenty of money looking at undervalued UK companies in deeptech and fintech

Or maybe, investment would have been even higher in the EU and we might have some of the top vert farm companies, like Germany and Finland does eh?

I really don't think you've demonstrated at all that Brexit has benefitted the vertical farm industry like you said it has.

Simply, no Brexit benefits here, as per usual when you scratch the claim even slightly.

How do you mean, I am new to this?

No, the disruption to supply chains from covid and brexit have driven investment decisions to grow more in the UK and to use tech to replace low skill labour that wasn’t possible with FOM providing serfs to grub about in the dirt. Cheap labour is a barrier to tech. Modern slavery is a big issue in farming

I agree, modern slavery is an issue as is paying these workers too little these are really domestic problems though which we still have thanks to the government farm worker visa scheme importing them from the RoW anyway. Germany and Finland both have FoM and they have 2 of the top vertical farm companies (one of them even has a project in Bedford apparently. So I don't really see how they can do it in the EU, and somehow we couldn't?

The CAP was designed to deliver cheap food during conflict, it’s failed at the first real test.

It was designed to ensure food security and nobody has gone hungry so that's not really true is it.

The CAP takes the largest slice of the EU budget and the ‘modern’ farming it encourages have destroyed biodiversity and soil

Natural resources including CAP,, CFP and any other rural and environmental measures so that's not really true either is it? Also, even if you do include all that, it comes second to Growth projects (38% vs 47.01%)

Policy to fix this has failed miserably to the tune of our entire net contribution to the budget of 66b

Hasn;t Brexit already cost more than our total contributions over 47 years? We were close to that according to Forbes 3 years ago.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/01/21/brexit-costs-close-to-matching-britains-total-eu-contributions-infographic/

So we've spent multiple times more than EU contributions would have been for the last few years to fix nothing, and stimulate an industry that is apparently already thriving within the EU.

Doesn't sound like a Brexit benefit to me, it's just loss after loss.

Maybe, I can understand that, we're all human.

Personally, I think perma banning should not be possible in most cases, maybe just increase the maximum ban time with each ban, or have a ban expire after 12 months. That way at least the account doesn't just become useless to you because of one dickhead mod.

Hopefully lessons will be learned for this platform! :)