In figures: Brexit and its most famous ad viz the European Union.

This was initially writen as a reply in a forum.

Damage report

If and when the UK officially leaves, its farmers and other fields will be bereft of all the EU subsidies, though the UK government has promised to continue (some of) those into 2020, though Brexit, if not stopped, might come into force in 2019.

Paint no evil

Every political ad is implicitly a promise.

The "£350-million-a-week" payments into the EU, an infamous and false claim that was painted on the "battle bus" of the Brexit supporters' "Leave" campaign, calculates to £18.2 billion for an entire year, and this is not the kind of money that the UK has ever annually paid into the EU budget.

Figure it out

The very generous estimate of a £50 billion divorce bill is more than five times greater than the UK's £9.4 bn net payment into the EU in 2016, despite the £18.9 bn gross contribution. (Source: UK Office for National Statistics, 31 October 2017)

The gross divorce bill could be as high as £89bn, which is 9.4 times greater than the net payment. (The Guardian, 29 Nov 2017)

While the UK budget presented on 11/2017 is £769 billion + £40 bn deficit (the deficit is 1.9% of the UK GDP).

The 2016 net payment of £9.4B into the EU is only 0.44% of the £2.131 trillion UK GDP in that same year. (The UK GDP calculated from the dollar amount of U.S. $2.629 trillion at the rate of U.S. $1.23321 for one pound sterling on 31 December 2016.)

All this means, that the UK practically gets half its money back — into projects, subsidies, and investments that Britain itself really hasn't had the thought to finance.

A New Hope

What I hope for, is a turn-around to cancel Brexit through a possible second referendum, which was alluded to by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk on 16 January 2018.

The Next Best Thing (or least worst)

The next-best option would be a soft Brexit, which would give the UK the same status as Norway: stay in the European Economic Area (EEA), and follow those same EU rules anyway — without the benefit of having any say in the decision-making on EU policy and external relations, and on those "pesky" regulations, current and future.

If the UK wants to sell (export) any stuff to the EU, then that stuff would still have to be designed according to EU standards, and there's no escaping that.

The digital divide in the Alien franchise

I wrote this first as a reply to a YouTube video that comments about why the tech in "Alien" is so outdated compare to "Prometheus", which canonically took place many years previous to the events in "Alien".

I think, that there's a digital and class divide of sorts: the miners get CRTs on the ships they run, which is just enough to get the job done, and the scientists get all the fancy stuff. — But not always, if the company knows, that any such mission with the xenomorphs is doomed from the outset. And anyway, the most advanced thing onboard Nostromo was Ash. The most advanced thing in Aliens was the atmospheric processor.

I can guess, that at some point, Weyand-Yutani might have thought it cheaper to recycle old technology than to mine and make new stuff, because they came to be short on resources back on Earth and any colonies. The Nostromo was sent out to bring back the very necessary readymade ore to manufacture new things, but its mission failed.

A good explanation is, indeed, that for certain objectives, obsolete[-looking] tech is used.