What Do You Think Today?

[Kizza]

Yep. The building fire disaster there needs to be on the public address system and actioned accordingly.
Hopefully the planning and development department get wiser to related issues too.
Has there been an actual confirmed count of people yet?

[Avatar]

Officially it's 79, but it looks like a lot of people are saying it's considerably higher...

--A

[peter]

Had it not been for Grenfell Tower, neither would it have been on the agenda here. It's the knee-jerk nature of the thing post the tower fire disaster that grates; absolutely bang on about the not cutting corners Sorus - how could these dwelling places ever have been clad in highly flammable polystyrene based cladding in the first place. How does such a product ever make it onto the market?

[I'm Murrin]

It's cheaper and the law doesn't specifically disallow it. Capitalism!

[Sorus]

Had it not been for Grenfell Tower, neither would it have been on the agenda here. It's the knee-jerk nature of the thing post the tower fire disaster that grates.

Yes, it grates because they knew about the danger and didn't do anything until it was too late. But it's still better than what's happening here - which mainly involves people living in warehouses and other spaces that aren't zoned for habitation. There was a bad fire a few months ago - 36 people were killed and blame was thrown around, but they also made a big deal about 'where else are all these people going to go?' There were a few evictions, a few safety improvements here and there, but most have settled back into their 'it won't happen to me' routines. If seeing the worst-case scenario isn't enough to make people pack up and leave voluntarily, what else can you do?

It's cheaper and the law doesn't specifically disallow it. Capitalism!

Exactly. And the company has now stopped selling the material for that use (when they already knew it was dangerous) - but the people at the top of the food chain who profited the most from it will probably escape the level of punishment they deserve.

[Avatar]

There were a few evictions, a few safety improvements here and there, but most have settled back into their 'it won't happen to me' routines.

Thing is, the majority of those people are right. It won't happen to most (almost all) of them. It's just the few unlucky ones, statistically speaking.

--A

[peter]

Ben Okri, a UK poet has written a poem for the victims of Grenfell where he spends some time on this cladding, using it as a metaphor for the superficial decorative surface that he sees extending over much of our society - intellectual cladding, emotional cladding, political cladding, material cladding etc - and having much the same dangerous combustible properties as on the tower block. Grenfell now stands, a black monument in the heart of our capital, as a warning to us all of where our system, if given free reign, could take us.

[peter]

There is no such thing as globalisation when disaster strikes and the unthinkable happens. Then there is the state and only the state - there is nothing else.

[Avatar]

Which is why external enemies are so important to it.

--A

[Sorus]

There were a few evictions, a few safety improvements here and there, but most have settled back into their 'it won't happen to me' routines.

Thing is, the majority of those people are right. It won't happen to most (almost all) of them. It's just the few unlucky ones, statistically speaking.

--A

That's true to a degree, but common sense (or lack thereof) does come into the equation - if you're jury-rigging an illegal electrical system that sparks or shorts out every time you use an appliance, you're far more likely to die in a horrible fire than someone who is living in a place that's up to code.

It's terrible for the people who were displaced from the other towers, but while it's unlikely that two similar disasters would strike in a row, imagine the fallout if it did happen again and they hadn't done anything. Yes, the authorities are covering their own rear ends, but it's better than leaving the problem unattended for a few years and hoping nothing bad happens. Arconic should be forced to cover the expenses for everyone who was displaced, and their execs should be charged with murder, but good luck with any of that.

[Avatar]

Something bad will always happen. If not this, then something else.

--A

[Sorus]

Hey, I'm supposed to be the pessimist here.

[Avatar]

It's not pessimism, it's reality.

--A

[peter]

Much ridicule was heaped upon Labour in the last election campaign by the Tories, for their belief in a 'magic money tree' the shaking of which would provide cascading windfalls of cash with which to fund their ambitious program of public spending. Ok, fair enough - but have we not already seen the money-tree in action? When the elites of the western world saw their fortunes threatened by the world banking collapse of 2008, was the money-tree not then shaken to within an inch of its life in order to prevent the failure of the system - yet when it comes to the provision of services which benefit and protect those at the other end of the social scale the tree retreats back into the realms of fantasy where in the eyes of the vested interest elites that enjoyed it's earlier emergence, it belongs.

[Kizza]

In between the laundry, playing dads taxi all over town for the boys rugby, grocery shopping and a movie over the weekend, I picked up Nelson Mandelas "Long Walk to Freedom" again.
Madiba understood the power of selflessness, and still delivered it with charming humility. (Sometimes my wife reminds me of him..)
The world could use more leaders like him right now. And I mean on all sides of the political divides.

The old chestnuts of self serving, ego stroking, selfish capitalists seem more prevalent than ever early in this 21st century. I will just put it down to more widespread communication.

Now, can anyone tell me if Sam Burgess the Rabbitoh should have been a giant or a bloodguard?

[Avatar]

Yeah, scant few years since he died, and already it's like he was never there as far as our politicians are concerned.

--A

[peter]

Much noise is being made about the need to lift the one percent pay cap on public sector workers and I'm amongst the first to say that these frontline workers doing skilled and demanding jobs deserve to be well paid and see their wages keep pace with inflation. But a bigger scandal in the UK is the condition of workers at the bottom end of the scale - those struggling in the gig economy and on minimum wage zero hour contracts. These people rub along on a wage of about one third of that recieved by a fireman or a nurse, are often employed in manners that circumvent even the minimum legal requirements of employment (eg not being paid travel time between jobs, being classed as self-employed in order to not be paid holiday pay or stamps) and, because they have no representation at any level to make their voices heard, get no media coverage, no attention to their plight and scant thanks for the solid work they perform in making our society continue to function on a day to day mundane level. Theirs may not be the 'fire-brigade' stuff that catches the news, but we'd be screwed without them.

[Avatar]

Thing is, most people will never find that out, because there are always enough people willing to do that work under those conditions that even if the people doing it now all stopped, somebody else would probably be doing it by the end of the day.

--A

[peter]

But saying we accorded work a value proportional to its utility in the society it operates in; how much it's removal would affect or inconvenience the society. Then we might see very different values being placed on different types of work than we do now. In this sense the value of 'training' or qualification we currently use ( or often do at least) begins to seem very arbitrary.

[Avatar]

Nice idea, but don't see how it's going to happen...CEO's are not going to be keen on swapping wages with dustmen.

--A