I don't know who you are, or what you write, but thank you.

When you find out about Dunning-Kruger and realise that that's why everyone else in the world is so stupid apart from you.

This is great, but republicans are gonna hate it. They want everyone to hate taxes with a passion, so they make it difficult, time consuming and expensive to pay your taxes, and make government services as bad as possible so even poorer people who don't pay much tax feel they get a bad deal out of taxation.

If ordinary people found it easy and convenient to pay taxes they might notice that they get more out of government than they put in and that rich people are bearing more of the cost than they are. If they thought that, they might support tax increases or things that horrify republicans like medicaid for all.

Top troll trolling.

I feel I can explain this discrepancy with a bit of history.

TL;DR in the last paragraph.

The EU has a numbering system for additives, preservatives, colourings etc that have been tested and approved for human consumption, so instead of putting Sodium Sulphite, you can put E221. They used to be very very commonly listed in ingredients in the UK. The difference between Sodium Sulphite (E221) and Sodium Hydrogen Sulphite (E222) is unclear and unimportant to most consumers, so manufacturers just listed the "E numbers" instead.

In the UK, when it was discovered that certain food additives can trigger conditions such as ADHD, instead of naming the specific chemicals that were causing the problem, the British media just called them E numbers.

Cue a fair bit of hysteria about how E numbers are harmful and some legitimate concerns, and suddenly the public start checking their food to see if it has any of those nasty E numbers, and they find to their horror that a lot of processed food contains a lot of E numbers, because preservatives, flavour enhancers, food colourings, sweeteners make food more appealing, and people re-buy appealing food. Suddenly it's very much in the manufacturers' interests to name the chemicals instead of the shorter E number so even today in the UK it's more common to name the chemical than the E number, which was never required anyway. To prevent hysteria over "chemicals" in food and to inform, it's become common to label then with their purposes - flavour enhancers, colours, preservatives etc.

There's still some really quite noxious chemicals that are perfectly legal to put in food. My son's A-level chemistry teacher saw him drinking the same brand of squash every day and commented "You drink a lot of that. Are you sure there's no aspartame in it? There's no way I would deliberately put aspartame inside my body." Make of that what you will.

Anyway, the media storm around E numbers dies down because the manufacturers largely just avoid naming them that way, and carry on pretty much as before. Some kids have had reactions and occasionally news stories come out, but the media persist in avoiding using chemical names.

There's some perfectly sensible advice that says that it you eat less processed food, and especially less "hyper-processed" food, and instead eat more food made from more natural ingredients, you get a more balanced diet with better vitamin and mineral intake, thus feeling feeling fuller for longer. (If the food is designed, with proper experimental testing, to get you to buy it more, it is inevitably also designed to get you to eat it more than you need to.)

But how can you tell if the food is processed or not? What's the difference between me spending half an hour mixing the ingredients and then mixing them for me and precooking it so I just bung it in the pan? Well, a random member of the public almost certainly has salt and pepper, maybe even a few herbs and spices, but probably not any L-alanine. Look out for ingredients that you wouldn't use at home, they're probably a sign that it's highly processed.

Hence the nearly good information that there aren't any artificial flavours or colours. Nearly good, because it doesn't mention preservatives and nearly good because it is definitely and certainly processed food designed to maximise profits rather than health.

So the UK food processing industries continue to aim naturally for maximising re-buying which includes reassuring the consumers that this is the healthiest (pre-prepared, highly processed, addictively tasty) low-priced convenience food they can, whilst being attractive to supermarket profits with longer shelf lives. If the bacteria and mold-killing preservatives aren't as kind to human biology as just making it yourself and eating it sooner, and a few people have had reactions, it's just not obviously bad enough for it to be something people will do anything about.

**TL;DR ** So, my understanding is that the hysteria about artifical flavours and colours was highest in the UK and the folks from the other countries aren't looking for technicalities to reassure them about the ingredients because they were never trained by their media to hunt for nasties in the small print - those that care can see straight away this is very firmly in the processed food category, and those that don't, don't.

Oh, I thought it was the CEO's online reputation and the fact the people are hearing more and more that their after sales service is shit, eg being charged £17000 for a new motor which is apparently the driver's fault for driving it in the rain. In Scotland.

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/motors/couple-charged-17000-tesla-broke-27925815

Apparently the problem has been known for some time:

https://insideevs.com/news/534878/tesla-models-motor-fail-rain/

The truth is that Rishi Sunak is very happy to sacrifice the young to bad outcomes because he doesn't think they'll vote for him anyway so he can punch down without fear of electoral impact.

Fantastic video, but it winds me up when they add padding to a phone video to make it landscape, as if no one in existence might possibly be viewing their phone-generated content on a phone.

You didn't scroll as far as the "total earnings in your lifetime" and "total earnings of a doctor in their lifetime", then, I take it.

Yeah I thought it was weird when so many Bernie supporters switched to Trump. They're political opposites.

Bold. I guess being left to die in am armed insurrection stings a little.

Completely awesome content, thanks. I was hoping that some older cities were more random, and I was not disappointed.

Reminder: all this incorrect fuss about a potential couple of thousands of tax is just to distract from the former actual Conservative Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi having to settle an unpaid tax dispute from HMRC of how much now? An estimated £5,000,000. Yes, five million pounds.

And he breached the ministerial code three times that I know of: he didn't declare to officials that he was under investigation by HMRC when he was appointed Chancellor by Conservative Chancer-in-Chief Boris Johnson, he didn't declare that he'd paid a settlement for tax avoidance when he was appointed to cabinet by Conservative Economy-Crasher-in-Chief Liz Truss, nor when appointed again by Conservative Chaos-and-Non-Chief Rishi Sunak.

£5,000,000. When ordinary folk don't pay their taxes, it's called tax evasion, it's a crime, and you go to prison. When rich people don't pay tax, it's called tax avoidance, and if they're found out as breaking the rules, they pay a bit more than they would have done and no-one goes to prison.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/nadhim-zahawi-sacked-tory-party-chair-tax-affairs-rishi-sunak https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/15/nadhim-zahawi-to-pay-millions-in-tax-after-dispute-over-family-finances

Nah, Rump is a looser who hates admitting he lost even to himself. This will bug him for the rest of his life.

It's so annoying when you can't just pay people to shut up and agree with you or sack them if they don't!

Actually made me laugh, thank you.

I'm confused. The Mrs was clearly not ovulating, so I checked out pretty much all the homies for the rest of the month, but it didn't seem to me like any of them were either, which seems statistically unlikely. Does this mean I'm the one on heat? Do I switch from pitcher to catcher on months like these? Is that why Alex.... well, Alex, you know what you did, and that's not what we agreed, was it, and and I think you know full well I couldn't say the safe word at that point and I think you deliberately misinterpreted me slapping your admittedly cute butt dimple.

I was fired for "fraternisation in the workplace". Teenage me was caught snogging the boss's daughter, no less, in the stock area by said boss. Cue "get your hands off my daughter" (he didn't know we were dating) and a meeting later that day being told much more calmly I was being let go for fraternisation. I said it was unfair because he kissed his wife in front of us the previous week, and he said "not that way," and he had a point, but it was still obviously unfair.

Anyway, we started deliberately dating in secret instead of her just not really telling him, and when she rang me she always called me Samantha, which I then used to find exciting (Freud eat your heart out).

I'm convinced that she found it exciting to be disobeying her dad, and would complain to me about her dad saying something like "he's just trying to take advantage of you" and we would reassure each other that I wasn't but she would be much keener those days, it felt like.

When you're a teenager and you find a magic button that gets you nice things, you don't hold back on pressing the button, so if she got a bit unenthusiastic about meeting up, I'd just ring her at home knowing full well that her dad would shout at me if he answered and her mum would quietly also refuse to put me through but tell her to stop me from ringing because it might upset her dad. She'd argue with her parents and get revenge by seeing me and behaving in a manner she new her parents to find improper.

It was really fun while it lasted, but in the end I felt like I shouldn't have to provoke her dad to get with her and stopped doing it. We drifted apart, I don't know whether her heart wasn't in it when she wasn't cross with her dad or I just started worrying about that too much, but I'm pretty sure her dad had been my unintentional wing man all those months. I really think it's properly messed up.

She later dated a guy who I think really was trying to take advantage of her. Also messed up.

Anyway, I got a job at the big chain version of his store and of course she and her friends started shopping there, which resulted in more arguments with her dad.

I guess the moral of the story is make sure you're on good terms with your teenage daughter or she might just go against everything you said just to spite you.

I am British and I love this.

"66% are only interested in finances as a way to support their other interests in life"

WTF is money for if it's not to support other interests in life?! You've got to be pretty dead inside if a big $ number in itself is your main fulfilment.

I think being an independent suits Corbyn. He's always been more of an independent campaigner than a party MP. All the best to him now he's free of the whip.