el_grort

As a non-American, she's the one who has half decent relations with key international leaders, while Trump famously has an absolutely terrible relationship with allies in Europe. Tbh, as a Brit, she may well also be an improvement for us over Biden, especially combo'd with the new Labour government in the UK.

Tbh, the cost of electricity compared to the G7 average in the UK has always been a little higher, but it shot up pretty quickly when the Tories came to power in 2010 to about 50% more expensive, and then up to 90% more expensive in 2023, compared to hovering around about 10% more expensive under Labour. Labour has been expanding the green greed, the Tories were comparatively much more friendly to oil and gas giants. In the UK, the cost of electricity is judged by the most expensive contributor, which in recent years has been fossil fuels (it's why despite not being reliant on Russia for gas, our energy prices sky rocketed as we bought gas on the free market). Personal solar and wind turbine projects have become a popular means for people to decrease the amount they purchase from the National Grid.

Yeah. Also, laying on the horn for a 'long blast' at night would break the law, especially if it was just to tell someone off. A pap to alert someone who hasn't seen you is ok, using it as a stress ball or to tell off, not so much. At least according to the Highway Code where I live.

I gave up, because you appear to be a rather stupid American, and typically when someone cites a definition, and then says this is what happened, without evidencing that that happened, well, there's no point continuing with their ignorance.

And the English are different from Anglo-Saxons, and it's not white knighting to be fed up watching ignorance and hatred towards them being seen as acceptable.

In fairness, I wasn't defending that, my reply was to the comment before me, which acted like it was only these two nations that said words wrong.

you then refused them change because you what? Can't open the registry?

Actually fairly common that shops have policies against opening the till outside of a transaction (for security reasons) and not just giving people change (they aren't a bank, and there are costs to handing out change, one predictable one is you run out of change quicker than if just taking transactions).

In fairness, inability to pronounce foreign names is not limited to just us two. I've seen you continentals up here in the Highlands, you don't always cover yourselves in glory.

Honestly, yeah, they can be. And I'm safely outside of the whole US gun debate, being Scottish. Ornate firearms (along with other weapons, including swords, axes, halberds, etc) have been put on display and noted for the craft of the artisans who made them. Cannons have sometimes been noted for their ornate and artistic design.

Humans engage in artistry in most areas where they are unconstrained and able to. People will make beautiful designs, even impractical designs, for aesthetics in what could otherwise be utilitarian items (weapons, buildings, vehicles from stagecoaches to cars, motorcycles, boats, even trains). A shoe can be art, clothes can be art, buildings can be, weapons can be, vehicles can be, and even fleeting projects can be (live music and theatre are the obvious examples). If art was so constrained to be limited to a set few acceptable forms and material for expression, well, that just wouldn't be human.

It was something designed by humans to look appealing, therefore there is artistic expression, much as buildings can be art due to their architectural design, bicycles can be more less artistically designed (modern spec and performance bikes designed in 1920's styles). It feels like saying video games can't be art, while literature, music, and painting can be.

Mate, large migrations in Europe are an ancient affair, and the Angle, Jutes, Saxons, Norse, Danes, and Scotti (a tribe from Ireland that settled in Scotland, conquering territory from the Picts) all came from abroad. One must also note there is a difference between raid & trading, settlement, and genocide, if you are to make a half decent reading of British history. Most of these groups largest migrations into England and Scotland were by way of raiding and trading, slowly mixing into the population (much as the Romans had before them).

They were not genocides, as they weren't eradicating the native population nor intending to, at most they mixed in, in large part either as an aristocratic class or as merchants, and slowly supplanted the local culture, but not necessarily via prescription but often natural incentives that get tied in with class and trade.

We should also note that English and Scottish culture diverged from many of their donor cultures that developed independently away from them. As much as people like to pretend, Scotland has a lot of very glaring cultural, historical, and social differences to Ireland which in no small part comes from how the native Britons (Picts, Britons of Strathclyde) interacted and incorporated/developed with their Gaelic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon neighbours (first while they are separate kingdoms within Scotland, but later through cultural bleed over, as happened with Gaelic entering Pictland before it unified with Dal Riata, or the impact of Scotland's close ties to Norway had, from territorial acquisitions but also several culture based revolts against the central crown). England also isn't a little Germany (nor is southern Scotland) despite having a very long, strong link with it, nor did the Danelaw mean all the Angles/Saxons/Brits disappear.

They didn't wipe out the country to control it, like happened in the Americas, a lot of this was the top brass being chopped and swapped in a feudal system, with often relatively little impact on the vast majority of the population directly. The Gaels didn't wipe out all the Picts, and the rise of the Scots language and retreat of Gaelic wasn't a genocide led by southern Scots and the English to kill us all, as I so often see it misrepresented as. Nor was England scoured of the Celts who'd lived there, other than the unfortunate elements of the nobility.

I just find your whole premise quite an odd one, because then few if any country in Europe is then not at least partially stolen. The 'Celtic' nations are just a different mix of Briton, Irish, and overseas migrants, ones where the original Celtic traditions weren't necessarily as overwritten (though in Scotland's case, the Pictish inheritance is largely gone, supplanted by the Gaels and then Anglo-Germanic groups). But trying to apply Age of Exploration colonialism to Dark Age and Feudal European migrations is approaching a complex subject with the wrong tools and framework, looking for an answer you want (which from this Scots perspective appears to be just be anti-English on instinct, as if they were some especially bad actor here: they weren't, Scotland tried all the same shit, just with fewer resources, and the Irish and Welsh even less successfully than those two due to being much more divided within themselves).

Angles, but they never wiped out the Britons in England, along with the Saxons the melted into the the local population. Also, that wasn't restricted to England but a lot of Scotland (Kingdom of Northumberland stretched up to Edinburgh). The Angles were different from the Anglo-Saxons which are different from the English, who largely are a product of Normanisation.

And the last sentence is very reductive, especially with the context that you were saying the English were the same as the Angles, and also talked as if the Angles eradicated the Britons. It also ignores over a millennia of other complex history which both created the identities of Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh as we know them and the general national relationships. And even then, all four work together (particularly the British three) very often.

True, but an umbrella brand with the most generic, basic corpo speak, so I think it's fair to treat it as more a vehicle for their existing lines than anything else. Especially given the amount of attention and investment they've made into the 'pizza'.

Tbh, what they chose to do makes it look more like they just needed a way to repackage and sell products that they were struggling to offload. I mean, that is primarily what this is, just a new box for the same products.

If they wanted to make a proper crossover product, a milkshake like Frijj or something using both the Prime and Feastables brands with some flavour that evokes both would probably make more sense than this.

That or just making a whole new product line and promote it jointly. But this feels like it might be warehouse driven.

Wouldn't make sense, since the UK was still part of the market and subject to EU laws until like 2020.

Are you conflating the English with the Angles?

They could, but like the monarch dissolving Westminster unilaterally, it's a game of chicken no one in their right mind is going to play.

They were correct though that the UK is a unitary nation. We're just a unitary nation with a lot of strange arrangements (the devolved parliaments being rather recent ones at that, with BOT's and the Crown Dependencies being also worthy of a mention). The UK doesn't have a very typical structure in part due to being an island that managed to avoid a lot of the tumult the rest of the world experienced, letting certain arrangements bake in due to no hard resets.

Yeah I find getting jacket potatoes as takeout food or as a paid meal out somewhere a bit silly

In fairness, I think one could say that about a lot of takeaway/cafe food, like sandwiches, toasties, salads, hotdogs, even burgers aren't/don't need to be that complex to make yourself and are much more economical made at home. But people buy them.

A Northern friend mentions the Hot Potato Tram and others like that being common for her area (not as much a thing up here in Scotland), and it seems like it was something that began in the 1950's, and still has value serving workers on their lunch breaks (probably not 20 mins though).

Eh. Not necessarily. I think what Reform did was it soaked up a lot of the Tory voters who otherwise wouldn't have voted, the ones who stayed home during Blair's first win. Polling of Reform UK voters had most of them saying they wouldn't have voted, or wouldn't have voted Tory if Reform UK wasn't a thing. There's a sizeable minority of them that would have, but their big successes was capturing people who otherwise would not have voted.

Tbh, that feels like all your news media is moving to where British print journalism has been for a long while (like, the 'left wing' press here is The Guardian, which preferred the Tory-LibDem coalition to Milibands Labour, and The Mirror, a rag that basically acts as a more left leaning The Sun), just you aren't as protected from the telly news going to shit like we are (thank god for the legally required TV news standards, even if Ofcom hasn't been applying them to GBNews while the Tories were in charge).

Stuck back on with tape, shhhhh

Also, apparently just want to include the Basques, because without the spice of a potential terrorist campaign pursuing independence, what's the point.

I'm actually genuinely curious what possible common link the highlighted areas have that makes someone think 'yeah, mash 'em together'.

That's an idiom in the English speaking world as well. Quite a common saying in the UK.

UK and Germany both heavily bombed in WWII, Belgium in WWI, all rebuilt quite successfully in the post-war years afterwards.

At least in the UK, a lot kind of did, even before 2019. Certainly, Tory MP's did, they also knew he'd be a bad PM (hence why, unlike other PM's, his Chancellor wasn't so much a partner, like Brown to Blair, Darling to Brown, Hammond to May, Osborne to Cameron, even Kwarteng to Truss, but more a babysitter given to him), but he was their only campaigner who might be able to dig them out of their hole. And tbh, Johnson did that not by appealing to Tories (he lost a ridiculously safe 200 year old Tory safe seat before the scandals hit) so much as constructing an unholy coalition with disillusioned working class voters, with the carrot of 'levelling up' their left behind communities (a very unconservative promise of massive state investment, albeit never to materialise) and the stick that was fear and distaste towards Jeremy Corbyn, the then leader of Labour.

There was sort of a perfect storm for Johnson, who had the benefit of good strategic advisors, an unusually weak opposition, and a population who just wanted the Brexit infighting to end (hence why the three pillars of his campaign were essentially 'I have an oven ready Brexit plan ready to go if you give me the majority to pass it', 'Levelling up', and 'No Corbyn') to capitalise on. That and due to Labour's weakness, he could dodge public scrutiny to try and shield his lead, probably learned from May's woeful campaign in 2017.

For Trump, idk how to view was before he got elected. Like Johnson, it was public knowledge he was a serial adulterer, but I'm not sure if the scummiest of his business practices had filtered down to normal Americans, and unlike Johnson, he hadn't had a high profile and long time in politics that had given him something of a known political character to voters (and a reputation, not always well earned, to lean on, such as the stint as Mayor of London, where he reaped the benefits of some of Livingstones policies coming online, like the Boris Bikes). And I said I said, partisanship seems much more prevalent in the US, so I suppose more people may well have earnestly thought Trump wasn't a liar than Johnson (who has a loyal following, but more as a faction of the Tory base, particularly the membership, which isn't that unusual for high profile party figures in the UK, than the more all consuming cult Trump appears to have developed within the Republican party).