I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
No.
They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all the world using fluid ounces, cups, quarts and gallons.
Living in America, I've adjusted. But it may take a bit of getting used to for you.
My daughter, who is quite into baking, showed me a recipe containing cups and asked which size cup she should use. When I explained the US has specifically sized "cups" for it she began lecturing me on what a stupid system it was. I'm still not quite sure why it was my fault. When a 12yo realises the measurement system is stupid then quite why the whole of the US can't realise this is a mystery.
Good practice though. As she becomes a teenager more and more random things will become your fault!
Late Covid retail/hospitality sitrep. Marylebone High St. Down here for John Bell & Croyden and a PCR test.
January 17. 4 pm. A rather pleasant clear crisp winter day. Bright cold sunshine
Seems thriving. A few shuttered shops but they are well disguised by the De Walden Estate. Hospitality not noticeably suffering. In fact there is a bizarre number of people having full meals with booze. At 4pm?
Pret sitrep. There are TWO Prets on this street. Within 100 yards of each other. Both are quite busy 🤷♂️🤷♂️
This prosperous quarter of central london is doing just fine
Marylebone is pretty residential, so no surprise it's prospering more than the more office-centric parts of London.
Gray report says rotten culture but not damning on PM knowledge; Big mea culpa + clearout of inner circle; More letters go in but 54 not hit; Major move to address April cost of living crunch; better than expected May locals. (Theoretically) https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1483098095634329600
There's really no way out. Boris is permanently damaged. People's attitudes have been transformed. He may well (in fact probably will) survive for now. But hanging on is just further damaging the Tory brand and preventing a recovery by a successor, as they and the party will be implicated in whatever squirm-inducing manoeuvres are employed in keeping the "big dog" in place.
The electorate believes a price should be paid for what has happened, and the price is Boris's head. No alternative and there will be no forgiving. Boris and his circle are kidding themselves if they think otherwise. If he doesn't go the voters will just react by slinging the whole party out in due course.
All seems perfectly obvious to me. He really does have to go but, I suspect, won't. Good news for Sir Keir. Playing out nicely for him.
Quite a vindication of SKS not opposing for opposing's sake during the rougher bits of the pandemic. He failed to piss too many people off, and now has two years to drip out a bit of forward-looking policy which wouldn't have got a look-in during the "Teatime with BoJo and Whitty" days.
I'll admit I inaccurately thought the dip in Boris's fortunes around now would have been down to an economic crisis which thankfully hasn't (yet) materialised, or maybe the PPE etc chickens coming home to roost. But in some ways, the fact it's down to ill-disciplined spaffing of his reputation in a truly Borisian way is even more rewarding.
Yep, Starmer has played things well. He's quietly manufactured a vibe of steady, serious, competent & patriotic, unsullied by policy, that now looks good. He's been lucky with all this Johnson scandal, sure, but he needed to get Labour in the right place to benefit and it appears to me he has. Plus he's done it quite cleverly. By and large those he's pissed off are either leftists who'll vote Labour anyway or rightists who *wouldn't* vote Labour anyway. I think he's got a real shot now.
Agreed. He's got his opportunity - now we'll have to see if he takes it when he reaches the point that (a) his opponent isn't Boris, and (b) he needs to propose and promote some actual policies.
Yes, 2 big challenges there. Although I personally am not ruling out Johnson leading the Cons into the GE. I do make it odds against but not by such a lot.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
The comments section on the recipes resembles PB at times, and you sometimes realize the username of the person criticizing elements of the recipe is themselves a well known chef.
Though the best comments are always the ones that go something like this - "I didn't use chicken but goat, and substituted beets for potatoes and vinegar for wine. I also boiled rather than broiled the meat. This recipe sucks."
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
Yes. A few months ago I decided to master Singapore chicken laksa, a quite complex but amazing dish if done properly
I browsed BBC food, but all their recipes were way too simplistic. I looked at a couple of famous tv chefs - just didn’t seem right. Quirky yet misguided
Then I found this. A woman in Australia who has basically dedicated her life to creating THE recipe for Singapore chicken laksa. Free on the internet along with explanatory videos
I followed the recipe and Wow, it is superb. Exactly what you’d get in a brilliant laksa restaurant in Singapore (I added dashi)
Incredible specialisation. Fantastically well done. No one can compete with that - in terms of laksa. Tho I wonder how the writer makes any money?!
Again, is on YouTube, 70 million views. Sells e-books. Also contributor to Good Food Australia and quite big social media following.
Its the new model. Be a specialist, be bloody good at it, and there is money to be made.
Aha! That totally makes sense
She deserves it. Her laksa is THE BIZ
I think I am going to have to try it.
You have to like those S E Asian hot spicy slightly sweet umami-filled coconutty curries. But if you do Laksa is maybe the peak. The most complex. A work of art
WTF did S E Asians eat before the Portuguese brought them chilis from the New World?
Possibly as true today as it was then: although the Internet had transformed things further.
There is a significant aspect to my career that owes a lot to this programme in the 1980s. I grew up with Acorn computers (BBC B, initially) and learnt to program on them with my final Acorn a "Risc PC" before Acorn sadly went out of business. Although I am not a pure programmer now, there have been aspects in all my job roles where a solid technical foundation and being able to get one's hands dirty with coding have been extremely useful. I am sure there are many, many people like myself.
I know lots of people who had exactly that sort of experience. Then again, I worked for Acorn.
It would not surprise me if the BBC's computer literacy program in the 1980s, with the government's help, had generated billions of revenue for the UK over the past four decades.
But again, that was the 80s....every kid I know, if they don't know something,,,,www.youtube.com , and 10 minutes later they can use photoshop or code along with a raspberry pi.
Oh indeed, the world's moved on. But the Micros in Schools project helped shape the country's IT industry of the 80s, 90s and 00's - probably even up to today. An acquaintance of mine (late 40s in age) did not have a home computer as a kid, because his parents could not afford one. He used to stay at school late just to play with their computer. He started and now runs a very successful computing SME. That probably would not have happened without that computer in the school.
(Also, the fact he was allowed to stay behind to play with it.)
The Raspberry Pi project was started precisely because the 1980s generation of kids had gone through University and the next generation was, for the most part, only able to use Office. The Raspberry Pi I'm sure has worked wonders in getting a new generation of kids into computer programming.
Given the wide and cheap availability of Raspberry Pi, I didn't understand the BBC Micro:Bit project. It felt again a bit like trying to get involved in something that didn't need to. I know they got corporate partners, but I didn't see why they needed to build rival hardware, rather than just put together educational material for a Pi.
No idea if its still an active project.
It’s still going, although IIRC supply is being hit by current chip shortages.
They occupy very different niches. The Micro:Bit is much closer to the original BBC Micro. It just works when you turn it on. You upload a program to it, which you can write anywhere including in a web browser, by just copying a file to the drive it creates when you plug in the USB port. It works (or doesn’t). Re-write your program, rinse & repeat. It offers a bunch of simple ways to interact with the environment & visual output is the simplest possible thing that works - a bunch of LEDs. Impossible to break. They’re great.
The Pi on the other hand, is a full blown computer in the modern sense. You can run Windows on it if you want. Most people run Linux of course because that’s what the Pi Foundation supports. So you have all the power and control of a modern operating system, but along with that comes all the complexity & the myriad ways in which things can go wrong. There’s a lot more “ceremony” required to get code to run on the Pi & that complexity has a cost. In return you get something that’s a lot more capable of course.
German position that it will not supply defensive weapons to Ukraine is 'unchanged', foreign minister @ABaerbock said at the press conference with the Ukrainian FM @DmytroKuleba in Kyiv. 'Our restrictive position to weapons supply is well-known and is rooted in history', she said
It's not really very well rooted in history is it? Being spineless against rising dictatorships ended quite badly in the 30s.
They're quite fond of selling to dictatorships:
Which History??? Between 2018 and 2020, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) purchased around 4.7 billion euros worth of German military equipment, about one quarter of the total sold.
German engines in Russian drones Experts have been examining weapons used in eastern Ukraine for three years. They found engines made in Germany in Russian drones that had also flown to EU countries.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
No.
They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all the world using fluid ounces, cups, quarts and gallons.
Living in America, I've adjusted. But it may take a bit of getting used to for you.
My daughter, who is quite into baking, showed me a recipe containing cups and asked which size cup she should use. When I explained the US has specifically sized "cups" for it she began lecturing me on what a stupid system it was. I'm still not quite sure why it was my fault. When a 12yo realises the measurement system is stupid then quite why the whole of the US can't realise this is a mystery.
For baking it's a nightmare as everything needs to be fairly precise. I've essentially given up using US imperial recipes and I've not found it an issue. There's plenty of recipes from the UK and across Europe for the same dishes, often a lot better unless it's something like bbq meat or a US speciality.
The idea that a specific measurement system is stupid is rather odd. They are all arbitrary.
While that may be true, the metric system makes sense, 1 gram is 1 ml of water at room temperature, essentially. Imperial weights and measures should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
That first line is simply gibberish to me, some US sites have got metric conversion buttons and I'd rather not write a script to do it.
A cup is 0.237 liters
Which is fine, yet how does one weigh 0.237L of bread flour? I wonder if they've got a free trial, I'd just like to see if I can toggle the recipes to metric. I won't use it otherwise.
What? Weight vs vol is not the same issue as different vol systems
Which was my point.
But you wanted an online converter, which is impossible because different flours have different densities so you can't just do the math, unless you have a socking great lookup table by flour type and I bet US flour types differ from UK ones a lot more than their measurements of volume.
Perhaps I am being dense (ha!) and at least we have diverged from TV funding models.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
The comments section on the recipes resembles PB at times, and you sometimes realize the username of the person criticizing elements of the recipe is themselves a well known chef.
Though the best comments are always the ones that go something like this - "I didn't use chicken but goat, and substituted beets for potatoes and vinegar for wine. I also boiled rather than broiled the meat. This recipe sucks."
I once read a lengthy online review of an excellent fish restaurant by someone who hated fish, and thought it disgraceful that the venue in question didn't offer meat options. He gave it one star and pledged never to visit it again!
I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
I linked this report yesterday and Bercow seems to have leaked the report and is appealing
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
Possibly as true today as it was then: although the Internet had transformed things further.
There is a significant aspect to my career that owes a lot to this programme in the 1980s. I grew up with Acorn computers (BBC B, initially) and learnt to program on them with my final Acorn a "Risc PC" before Acorn sadly went out of business. Although I am not a pure programmer now, there have been aspects in all my job roles where a solid technical foundation and being able to get one's hands dirty with coding have been extremely useful. I am sure there are many, many people like myself.
I know lots of people who had exactly that sort of experience. Then again, I worked for Acorn.
It would not surprise me if the BBC's computer literacy program in the 1980s, with the government's help, had generated billions of revenue for the UK over the past four decades.
A small number of Acorn shares generated my new conservatory...
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
Yes. A few months ago I decided to master Singapore chicken laksa, a quite complex but amazing dish if done properly
I browsed BBC food, but all their recipes were way too simplistic. I looked at a couple of famous tv chefs - just didn’t seem right. Quirky yet misguided
Then I found this. A woman in Australia who has basically dedicated her life to creating THE recipe for Singapore chicken laksa. Free on the internet along with explanatory videos
I followed the recipe and Wow, it is superb. Exactly what you’d get in a brilliant laksa restaurant in Singapore (I added dashi)
Incredible specialisation. Fantastically well done. No one can compete with that - in terms of laksa. Tho I wonder how the writer makes any money?!
Again, is on YouTube, 70 million views. Sells e-books. Also contributor to Good Food Australia and quite big social media following.
Its the new model. Be a specialist, be bloody good at it, and there is money to be made.
Aha! That totally makes sense
She deserves it. Her laksa is THE BIZ
I think I am going to have to try it.
You have to like those S E Asian hot spicy slightly sweet umami-filled coconutty curries. But if you do Laksa is maybe the peak. The most complex. A work of art
WTF did S E Asians eat before the Portuguese brought them chilis from the New World?
This has always perplexed me
I love that sort of food so I've bookmarked your link and will give it a go. Presumably all the ingredients are easily available from the big Asian supermarket in Chinatown?
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
No.
They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all the world using fluid ounces, cups, quarts and gallons.
Living in America, I've adjusted. But it may take a bit of getting used to for you.
I won't bother in that case. A few US websites are already making the change with metric toggles, I guess when 80% of the world uses the metric system it makes sense.
Listening to Sonia Khan. a special adviser to two recent Conservative Chancellors, it sounds like the staff at 10 Downing Street were permanently drunk or hungover. Absolutely disgraceful, and explains a lot about the disasters of the Cameron and May regimes.
They typically started drinking at lunchtime.
If I worked directly for Boris Johnson, I would be permanently either drink or hungover. That would be a necessary survival mechanism.
This polling shows quite clearly that the Tories are heading for big losses to Labour in London in May but the results may not be so bad in the locals elsewhere. Starmer is still very much a North London Labour leader with his strongest appeal in the capital.
If Labour want a leader who can really appeal in the North and Midlands (and not just because he is not Boris), they still probably need Burnham
No, presenting it like this is giving you a false sense of security
London +42 South +39 North +43 Midlands +45 Scotland +64
Starmer is only getting that because Boris is currently unpopular, he is still only popular in London.
If Boris becomes popular again or Sunak replaces him and the Tories get a bounce then the North and Midlands will likely shift back in the Tory direction again.
Burnham has positive appeal north of Watford, Starmer doesn't.
See also the 2021 locals where Starmer Labour won London but lost ground in the North and Midlands to the Tories and also fell behind the Scottish Conservatives again at Holyrood. Labour's hold in Wales was more Drakeford than Starmer. Tory losses in the South were more to the LDs and Greens than Labour.
I suspect once Johnson has been dispatched, UK politics will become less presidential.
Starmer mirrors Welsh Labour in many ways.
Labour are seen as moderately useless, but by no means as bad as the Welsh Conservatives, who are, mainly through their personnel, an absolute laughing stock. One would have expected Johnson's spring sheen to have rubbed off on them. It didn't.
UK politics seems to go in waves, preferring the Presidential (Thatcher), then the Cabinet government (Major), Presidential (Blair), confused (Brown), cabinet (Cameron), confused (May), Presidential (Johnson).
I think we're due a cabinet style leader.
Thinking about it, this means Starmer's chances are good against Johnson, but poor if the Conservative Party has dumped him for a more consensual leader.
Yep. Those who would prefer not to see a Labour government need to hope Johnson is ditched asap. Those that would prefer a Labour win will need to hope Johnson stays in place. Johnson is now the Tory Corbyn.
I'm afraid I want to eat my cake and have it. Really want the Tories gone, really REALLY want to see Johnson driven out by scandal.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
That first line is simply gibberish to me, some US sites have got metric conversion buttons and I'd rather not write a script to do it.
A cup is 0.237 liters
Which is fine, yet how does one weigh 0.237L of bread flour? I wonder if they've got a free trial, I'd just like to see if I can toggle the recipes to metric. I won't use it otherwise.
What? Weight vs vol is not the same issue as different vol systems
Which was my point.
But you wanted an online converter, which is impossible because different flours have different densities so you can't just do the math, unless you have a socking great lookup table by flour type and I bet US flour types differ from UK ones a lot more than their measurements of volume.
Perhaps I am being dense (ha!) and at least we have diverged from TV funding models.
That's how they do it, they use a script with a lookup table that converts it all. Flour in general is classed by protein content and how fine it is so if there's a recipe that needs something specific like 00 or Manitoba the look up table will reference the values for those types of flour rather than all purpose/plain.
German position that it will not supply defensive weapons to Ukraine is 'unchanged', foreign minister @ABaerbock said at the press conference with the Ukrainian FM @DmytroKuleba in Kyiv. 'Our restrictive position to weapons supply is well-known and is rooted in history', she said
It's not really very well rooted in history is it? Being spineless against rising dictatorships ended quite badly in the 30s.
It is very simple.
During the second world war, quite a few Ukranians fought against Russia and by/with/from/to/for/at or near Germany. Up to and including joining SS divisions.
A number of Ukrainian patriotic organisations are interesting links to same.
So, to Germany
1) Ukrainian nationalism has a toxic aspect that can be used to justify no help. 2) Never, ever have a conflict again with Russia, unless they invade Europe, is a hard wired German position. 3) Ukraine isn't in Europe, as far as a chunk of German politics is concerned.
So it is quite easy for a German politician to create a principled stance of strict neutrality in such a conflict. Long before gas prices come into the picture.
Independently on what @ABaerbock [German Foreign Appeaser Minister] wanted to say in Kyiv (I personally believe she supports Ukraine and stays under huge pressure from Moscow-owned SPD), her misfortunate message will be seen in Moscow as encouragement for further aggression, and in Kyiv as German hypocrisy. Sad....
Therefore, it is a huge step back after a very good move with visiting Kyiv before Moscow. Very unfortunate
Nadine Dorries is doing Boris no favours at the despatch box
She is really having a car crash from the Speaker's rebuke to the leak over the weekend, and Peter Bottomley's embarrassing take down of her in response to her statement
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
That first line is simply gibberish to me, some US sites have got metric conversion buttons and I'd rather not write a script to do it.
A cup is 0.237 liters
Which is fine, yet how does one weigh 0.237L of bread flour? I wonder if they've got a free trial, I'd just like to see if I can toggle the recipes to metric. I won't use it otherwise.
Possibly as true today as it was then: although the Internet had transformed things further.
There is a significant aspect to my career that owes a lot to this programme in the 1980s. I grew up with Acorn computers (BBC B, initially) and learnt to program on them with my final Acorn a "Risc PC" before Acorn sadly went out of business. Although I am not a pure programmer now, there have been aspects in all my job roles where a solid technical foundation and being able to get one's hands dirty with coding have been extremely useful. I am sure there are many, many people like myself.
We had a BBC B in the house when I was a child and I went through university using a second hand Risc PC. When I finally sold the Acorn on about ten years ago I picked up a Raspberry Pi that can run Acorn's RISC OS operating system. The fact that there is still hardware on sale that can run Acorn's software is a result of the spectacular success of Acorn's ARM processor, a version of which now powers every smartphone and is at the heart of the new generation of Apple computers. Without the Computer Literacy Project ARM would never have been created. Possibly the best example of the UK government picking a winner and having it pay off!
I still have 3 old Acorn computers in my loft (BBC B, A3000 and Risc PC). I never have time to do anything with them but at some point I'd love to get them out to see if they still work. None of them have been switched on for more than 20 years). Not sure if there is much of a second hand market for them! I certainly would be very reluctant to send them off for recycling.
Donate them to the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park. Last time I was there, they had a whole classroom lab of old BBCs they had kept running.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
That first line is simply gibberish to me, some US sites have got metric conversion buttons and I'd rather not write a script to do it.
A cup is 0.237 liters
Which is fine, yet how does one weigh 0.237L of bread flour? I wonder if they've got a free trial, I'd just like to see if I can toggle the recipes to metric. I won't use it otherwise.
That's just a set of £25 scales, calibrated to 1g, with a zero button.
You just add each thing to the container in turn. WIth a 2kg set of scales, I can do that with the cokking container from my bread machine.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
No.
They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all the world using fluid ounces, cups, quarts and gallons.
Living in America, I've adjusted. But it may take a bit of getting used to for you.
My daughter, who is quite into baking, showed me a recipe containing cups and asked which size cup she should use. When I explained the US has specifically sized "cups" for it she began lecturing me on what a stupid system it was. I'm still not quite sure why it was my fault. When a 12yo realises the measurement system is stupid then quite why the whole of the US can't realise this is a mystery.
For baking it's a nightmare as everything needs to be fairly precise. I've essentially given up using US imperial recipes and I've not found it an issue. There's plenty of recipes from the UK and across Europe for the same dishes, often a lot better unless it's something like bbq meat or a US speciality.
The idea that a specific measurement system is stupid is rather odd. They are all arbitrary.
While that may be true, the metric system makes sense, 1 gram is 1 ml of water at room temperature, essentially. Imperial weights and measures should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Metric is scientific (mostly), but Imperial is human-friendly.
Who knows how much a gram is? But an ounce is roughly a handful - and similarly for many Imperial measurements.
I advocate metric for science and Imperial for everyday.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
That first line is simply gibberish to me, some US sites have got metric conversion buttons and I'd rather not write a script to do it.
A cup is 0.237 liters
Which is fine, yet how does one weigh 0.237L of bread flour? I wonder if they've got a free trial, I'd just like to see if I can toggle the recipes to metric. I won't use it otherwise.
What? Weight vs vol is not the same issue as different vol systems
Which was my point.
But you wanted an online converter, which is impossible because different flours have different densities so you can't just do the math, unless you have a socking great lookup table by flour type and I bet US flour types differ from UK ones a lot more than their measurements of volume.
Perhaps I am being dense (ha!) and at least we have diverged from TV funding models.
That's how they do it, they use a script with a lookup table that converts it all. Flour in general is classed by protein content and how fine it is so if there's a recipe that needs something specific like 00 or Manitoba the look up table will reference the values for those types of flour rather than all purpose/plain.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
That first line is simply gibberish to me, some US sites have got metric conversion buttons and I'd rather not write a script to do it.
A cup is 0.237 liters
Which is fine, yet how does one weigh 0.237L of bread flour? I wonder if they've got a free trial, I'd just like to see if I can toggle the recipes to metric. I won't use it otherwise.
What? Weight vs vol is not the same issue as different vol systems
Which was my point.
But you wanted an online converter, which is impossible because different flours have different densities so you can't just do the math, unless you have a socking great lookup table by flour type and I bet US flour types differ from UK ones a lot more than their measurements of volume.
Perhaps I am being dense (ha!) and at least we have diverged from TV funding models.
That's how they do it, they use a script with a lookup table that converts it all. Flour in general is classed by protein content and how fine it is so if there's a recipe that needs something specific like 00 or Manitoba the look up table will reference the values for those types of flour rather than all purpose/plain.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
Yes. A few months ago I decided to master Singapore chicken laksa, a quite complex but amazing dish if done properly
I browsed BBC food, but all their recipes were way too simplistic. I looked at a couple of famous tv chefs - just didn’t seem right. Quirky yet misguided
Then I found this. A woman in Australia who has basically dedicated her life to creating THE recipe for Singapore chicken laksa. Free on the internet along with explanatory videos
I followed the recipe and Wow, it is superb. Exactly what you’d get in a brilliant laksa restaurant in Singapore (I added dashi)
Incredible specialisation. Fantastically well done. No one can compete with that - in terms of laksa. Tho I wonder how the writer makes any money?!
Again, is on YouTube, 70 million views. Sells e-books. Also contributor to Good Food Australia and quite big social media following.
Its the new model. Be a specialist, be bloody good at it, and there is money to be made.
Aha! That totally makes sense
She deserves it. Her laksa is THE BIZ
I think I am going to have to try it.
You have to like those S E Asian hot spicy slightly sweet umami-filled coconutty curries. But if you do Laksa is maybe the peak. The most complex. A work of art
WTF did S E Asians eat before the Portuguese brought them chilis from the New World?
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
No.
They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all the world using fluid ounces, cups, quarts and gallons.
Living in America, I've adjusted. But it may take a bit of getting used to for you.
My daughter, who is quite into baking, showed me a recipe containing cups and asked which size cup she should use. When I explained the US has specifically sized "cups" for it she began lecturing me on what a stupid system it was. I'm still not quite sure why it was my fault. When a 12yo realises the measurement system is stupid then quite why the whole of the US can't realise this is a mystery.
For baking it's a nightmare as everything needs to be fairly precise. I've essentially given up using US imperial recipes and I've not found it an issue. There's plenty of recipes from the UK and across Europe for the same dishes, often a lot better unless it's something like bbq meat or a US speciality.
The idea that a specific measurement system is stupid is rather odd. They are all arbitrary.
While that may be true, the metric system makes sense, 1 gram is 1 ml of water at room temperature, essentially. Imperial weights and measures should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Metric is scientific (mostly), but Imperial is human-friendly.
Who knows how much a gram is? But an ounce is roughly a handful - and similarly for many Imperial measurements.
I advocate metric for science and Imperial for everyday.
An ounce is a handful? Feathers? Iron? Handful of what?
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
No.
They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all the world using fluid ounces, cups, quarts and gallons.
Living in America, I've adjusted. But it may take a bit of getting used to for you.
My daughter, who is quite into baking, showed me a recipe containing cups and asked which size cup she should use. When I explained the US has specifically sized "cups" for it she began lecturing me on what a stupid system it was. I'm still not quite sure why it was my fault. When a 12yo realises the measurement system is stupid then quite why the whole of the US can't realise this is a mystery.
For baking it's a nightmare as everything needs to be fairly precise. I've essentially given up using US imperial recipes and I've not found it an issue. There's plenty of recipes from the UK and across Europe for the same dishes, often a lot better unless it's something like bbq meat or a US speciality.
The idea that a specific measurement system is stupid is rather odd. They are all arbitrary.
While that may be true, the metric system makes sense, 1 gram is 1 ml of water at room temperature, essentially. Imperial weights and measures should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Metric is scientific (mostly), but Imperial is human-friendly.
Who knows how much a gram is? But an ounce is roughly a handful - and similarly for many Imperial measurements.
I advocate metric for science and Imperial for everyday.
Just shift everything to metric (except pints, I'm not losing 68ml of my beer) and people will just get used to it. A handful becomes 125g, rather than whatever an ounce is.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
That first line is simply gibberish to me, some US sites have got metric conversion buttons and I'd rather not write a script to do it.
A cup is 0.237 liters
Which is fine, yet how does one weigh 0.237L of bread flour? I wonder if they've got a free trial, I'd just like to see if I can toggle the recipes to metric. I won't use it otherwise.
Get a set of cup measures.
That's extra washing up, I can set my big mixing bowl from my kenwood on my digital scales and just add something in, tare it and then add the next thing and so on then set it to mix for as long as it needs.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
No.
They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all the world using fluid ounces, cups, quarts and gallons.
Living in America, I've adjusted. But it may take a bit of getting used to for you.
My daughter, who is quite into baking, showed me a recipe containing cups and asked which size cup she should use. When I explained the US has specifically sized "cups" for it she began lecturing me on what a stupid system it was. I'm still not quite sure why it was my fault. When a 12yo realises the measurement system is stupid then quite why the whole of the US can't realise this is a mystery.
For baking it's a nightmare as everything needs to be fairly precise. I've essentially given up using US imperial recipes and I've not found it an issue. There's plenty of recipes from the UK and across Europe for the same dishes, often a lot better unless it's something like bbq meat or a US speciality.
The idea that a specific measurement system is stupid is rather odd. They are all arbitrary.
While that may be true, the metric system makes sense, 1 gram is 1 ml of water at room temperature, essentially. Imperial weights and measures should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Metric is scientific (mostly), but Imperial is human-friendly.
Who knows how much a gram is? But an ounce is roughly a handful - and similarly for many Imperial measurements.
I advocate metric for science and Imperial for everyday.
An ounce is a handful? Feathers? Iron? Handful of what?
We had government sponsored mnemonics at the time of Brentry
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
Yes. A few months ago I decided to master Singapore chicken laksa, a quite complex but amazing dish if done properly
I browsed BBC food, but all their recipes were way too simplistic. I looked at a couple of famous tv chefs - just didn’t seem right. Quirky yet misguided
Then I found this. A woman in Australia who has basically dedicated her life to creating THE recipe for Singapore chicken laksa. Free on the internet along with explanatory videos
I followed the recipe and Wow, it is superb. Exactly what you’d get in a brilliant laksa restaurant in Singapore (I added dashi)
Incredible specialisation. Fantastically well done. No one can compete with that - in terms of laksa. Tho I wonder how the writer makes any money?!
Again, is on YouTube, 70 million views. Sells e-books. Also contributor to Good Food Australia and quite big social media following.
Its the new model. Be a specialist, be bloody good at it, and there is money to be made.
Aha! That totally makes sense
She deserves it. Her laksa is THE BIZ
I think I am going to have to try it.
You have to like those S E Asian hot spicy slightly sweet umami-filled coconutty curries. But if you do Laksa is maybe the peak. The most complex. A work of art
WTF did S E Asians eat before the Portuguese brought them chilis from the New World?
This has always perplexed me
I love that sort of food so I've bookmarked your link and will give it a go. Presumably all the ingredients are easily available from the big Asian supermarket in Chinatown?
For sure. In fact I can get nearly all of them from a good M&S. Go for their high quality chicken thighs
The Laksa paste is pretty crucial, however, and that's not so easy to find. Waitrose do a version but it is poor
And don't forget the Deep Fried Tofu Puffs (they come in big bags but they freeze very well - you don't need many)
I wouldn't bother with the shallots, I bought some but they don't add much (unlike everything else!)
Enjoy. Half the fun is making it, it's just about challenging and complex enough to be a real test (expect it to take nearer 2 hours rather than 1 on your first go, before you get used to it), but boy it is worth it
German position that it will not supply defensive weapons to Ukraine is 'unchanged', foreign minister @ABaerbock said at the press conference with the Ukrainian FM @DmytroKuleba in Kyiv. 'Our restrictive position to weapons supply is well-known and is rooted in history', she said
It's not really very well rooted in history is it? Being spineless against rising dictatorships ended quite badly in the 30s.
It is very simple.
During the second world war, quite a few Ukranians fought against Russia and by/with/from/to/for/at or near Germany. Up to and including joining SS divisions.
A number of Ukrainian patriotic organisations are interesting links to same.
So, to Germany
1) Ukrainian nationalism has a toxic aspect that can be used to justify no help. 2) Never, ever have a conflict again with Russia, unless they invade Europe, is a hard wired German position. 3) Ukraine isn't in Europe, as far as a chunk of German politics is concerned.
So it is quite easy for a German politician to create a principled stance of strict neutrality in such a conflict. Long before gas prices come into the picture.
It is selling out an emerging democracy asking for help from the West to an expansionist dictator. After the blood and treasure foreign nations had to spend for Germany previously, it is shameful. Germany is a selfish, immoral country.
I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
I linked this report yesterday and Bercow seems to have leaked the report and is appealing
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
During the Commonwealth? IIRC one ran away for a couple of decades, and another one was impeached.
Possibly as true today as it was then: although the Internet had transformed things further.
There is a significant aspect to my career that owes a lot to this programme in the 1980s. I grew up with Acorn computers (BBC B, initially) and learnt to program on them with my final Acorn a "Risc PC" before Acorn sadly went out of business. Although I am not a pure programmer now, there have been aspects in all my job roles where a solid technical foundation and being able to get one's hands dirty with coding have been extremely useful. I am sure there are many, many people like myself.
We had a BBC B in the house when I was a child and I went through university using a second hand Risc PC. When I finally sold the Acorn on about ten years ago I picked up a Raspberry Pi that can run Acorn's RISC OS operating system. The fact that there is still hardware on sale that can run Acorn's software is a result of the spectacular success of Acorn's ARM processor, a version of which now powers every smartphone and is at the heart of the new generation of Apple computers. Without the Computer Literacy Project ARM would never have been created. Possibly the best example of the UK government picking a winner and having it pay off!
I still have 3 old Acorn computers in my loft (BBC B, A3000 and Risc PC). I never have time to do anything with them but at some point I'd love to get them out to see if they still work. None of them have been switched on for more than 20 years). Not sure if there is much of a second hand market for them! I certainly would be very reluctant to send them off for recycling.
Donate them to the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park. Last time I was there, they had a whole classroom lab of old BBCs they had kept running.
Will they want my Imperial model 50? I'm struggling to load the latest version of Windows on it...
Is there a reason the guy behind wordle hasn't monetarised it?
It's absolutely bonkers how popular it is. Everyone is doing it across 4 WhatsApp groups, approx 40 people
I wondered if it was too close to some other game and worried about getting legal claims if he tried to turn it into a commercial product, but then i read he has been going after copycats demanding they take down their apps.
I know the story is supposed to be he made it for his family, but surprised not pay $1 a month and get extra wordles or even an ad or two.
I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
I linked this report yesterday and Bercow seems to have leaked the report and is appealing
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
I don't have any insight into whether he was a bully or not but he became quite insufferable during his tenure, almost a grotesque. Not surprised that he seems to have fallen to earth. I think his autobiography was called "Unspeakable". Ironic.
This polling shows quite clearly that the Tories are heading for big losses to Labour in London in May but the results may not be so bad in the locals elsewhere. Starmer is still very much a North London Labour leader with his strongest appeal in the capital.
If Labour want a leader who can really appeal in the North and Midlands (and not just because he is not Boris), they still probably need Burnham
No, presenting it like this is giving you a false sense of security
London +42 South +39 North +43 Midlands +45 Scotland +64
Starmer is only getting that because Boris is currently unpopular, he is still only popular in London.
If Boris becomes popular again or Sunak replaces him and the Tories get a bound then the North and Midlands will likely shift back in the Tory direction again.
You've put your finger on the essential point. Boris's net approval ratings are bad only because he is unpopular. If he gets popular again he will get more popular.
As always, I'm astonished you don't charge people for the service you provide here.
Not necessarily. They are discussing relative approval. An improvement in the Tories’ performance alone does not necessarily mean they get more popular relative to Labour.
Not necessarily, no, but in this particular case yes. Boris's position changes from the penthouse suite on floor 150 to the basement, SKS is incapable of moving from the 7th floor.
Which may not be a problem now, would be if Boris has a Lazarus like recovery or Sunak becomes Tory leader and moves back into the penthouse suite
You know the former is never going to happen and the latter is very unlikely. The best the Tories can hope for at the next GE is damage limitation
At the moment Starmer is measuring the No 10 curtains, much like Kinnock was in 1990 when Labour had a big lead over Thatcher's Tories. However the Tories had replaced their leader by Christmas and Major narrowly beat Kinnock against the odds in 1992.
It was then only Blair who finally led Labour back into power in 1997. Starmer must be concerned he is Kinnock 2 and maybe Sunak is Major 2 to Boris' Thatcher and Burnham is actually Labour's Blair even if it looks good for now for him against Boris
Glad to see you are beginning to see the potential of getting rid of Boris "albatross" Johnson so that Sunak (or someone else) can pull off a 1992. I would be happy with that.
But I thought HYUFD had been saying that Boris was safe? Is that not your view now @HYUFD ? I said earlier than my view of Boris being deposed this quarter was something between 25% and 50%. But I'd be interested in your view - you know the interior workings of the Conservative Party better than I do.
My view is that Boris should be given until the May local elections to turn it round.
If he does not and the Tories see heavy losses in the local elections then is the time for a VONC, not now
I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
I linked this report yesterday and Bercow seems to have leaked the report and is appealing
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
During the Commonwealth? IIRC one ran away for a couple of decades, and another one was impeached.
German position that it will not supply defensive weapons to Ukraine is 'unchanged', foreign minister @ABaerbock said at the press conference with the Ukrainian FM @DmytroKuleba in Kyiv. 'Our restrictive position to weapons supply is well-known and is rooted in history', she said
It's not really very well rooted in history is it? Being spineless against rising dictatorships ended quite badly in the 30s.
It is very simple.
During the second world war, quite a few Ukranians fought against Russia and by/with/from/to/for/at or near Germany. Up to and including joining SS divisions.
A number of Ukrainian patriotic organisations are interesting links to same.
So, to Germany
1) Ukrainian nationalism has a toxic aspect that can be used to justify no help. 2) Never, ever have a conflict again with Russia, unless they invade Europe, is a hard wired German position. 3) Ukraine isn't in Europe, as far as a chunk of German politics is concerned.
So it is quite easy for a German politician to create a principled stance of strict neutrality in such a conflict. Long before gas prices come into the picture.
It is selling out an emerging democracy asking for help from the West to an expansionist dictator. After the blood and treasure foreign nations had to spend for Germany previously, it is shameful. Germany is a selfish, immoral country.
The German position is harsher than that. Because supplies have been through NATO channels, it effectively has a veto on other countries suppplying.
German position that it will not supply defensive weapons to Ukraine is 'unchanged', foreign minister @ABaerbock said at the press conference with the Ukrainian FM @DmytroKuleba in Kyiv. 'Our restrictive position to weapons supply is well-known and is rooted in history', she said
It's not really very well rooted in history is it? Being spineless against rising dictatorships ended quite badly in the 30s.
It is very simple.
During the second world war, quite a few Ukranians fought against Russia and by/with/from/to/for/at or near Germany. Up to and including joining SS divisions.
A number of Ukrainian patriotic organisations are interesting links to same.
So, to Germany
1) Ukrainian nationalism has a toxic aspect that can be used to justify no help. 2) Never, ever have a conflict again with Russia, unless they invade Europe, is a hard wired German position. 3) Ukraine isn't in Europe, as far as a chunk of German politics is concerned.
So it is quite easy for a German politician to create a principled stance of strict neutrality in such a conflict. Long before gas prices come into the picture.
It is selling out an emerging democracy asking for help from the West to an expansionist dictator. After the blood and treasure foreign nations had to spend for Germany previously, it is shameful. Germany is a selfish, immoral country.
The twisted bar-steward in me has a solution. Sell the German interests out, to Russia.
“I am a bit suspicious of mobile apps that demand your attention and send you push notifications to get more of your attention,” Wardle said. “I like the idea of doing the opposite of that – what about a game that deliberately doesn’t want much of your attention?” “Wordle is very simple and you can play it in three minutes, and that is all you get,” Wardle continues. “There are also no ads and I am not doing anything with your data, and that is also quite deliberate. I don’t understand why something can’t just be fun.”
Is there a reason the guy behind wordle hasn't monetarised it?
Heard him interviewed and he sounded a nice 'remainery' type whose motivation in developing it was intellectual and philanthropic rather than fame & fortune. But let's see what happens. It must be tempting.
Is there a reason the guy behind wordle hasn't monetarised it?
It's absolutely bonkers how popular it is. Everyone is doing it across 4 WhatsApp groups, approx 40 people
Seems surprising he hasn't stuck an advert on it at least. Mind you, it can be very hard making money from advertising. I created an App for casual football groups (mainly to make managing my own group much easier) and it has adverts on it. Allows players to opt in/out of a game, picks teams based on previous performances and creates a league table of players.
With about 500 active players using it the adverts bring in about £5/month. Doesn't even cover the cost of the Apple developer licence unfortunately. Mind you, I don't have time to actively market it. Something interesting for the little spare time that I have.
German position that it will not supply defensive weapons to Ukraine is 'unchanged', foreign minister @ABaerbock said at the press conference with the Ukrainian FM @DmytroKuleba in Kyiv. 'Our restrictive position to weapons supply is well-known and is rooted in history', she said
It's not really very well rooted in history is it? Being spineless against rising dictatorships ended quite badly in the 30s.
It is very simple.
During the second world war, quite a few Ukranians fought against Russia and by/with/from/to/for/at or near Germany. Up to and including joining SS divisions.
A number of Ukrainian patriotic organisations are interesting links to same.
So, to Germany
1) Ukrainian nationalism has a toxic aspect that can be used to justify no help. 2) Never, ever have a conflict again with Russia, unless they invade Europe, is a hard wired German position. 3) Ukraine isn't in Europe, as far as a chunk of German politics is concerned.
So it is quite easy for a German politician to create a principled stance of strict neutrality in such a conflict. Long before gas prices come into the picture.
It is selling out an emerging democracy asking for help from the West to an expansionist dictator. After the blood and treasure foreign nations had to spend for Germany previously, it is shameful. Germany is a selfish, immoral country.
The German position is harsher than that. Because supplies have been through NATO channels, it effectively has a veto on other countries suppplying.
Possibly as true today as it was then: although the Internet had transformed things further.
There is a significant aspect to my career that owes a lot to this programme in the 1980s. I grew up with Acorn computers (BBC B, initially) and learnt to program on them with my final Acorn a "Risc PC" before Acorn sadly went out of business. Although I am not a pure programmer now, there have been aspects in all my job roles where a solid technical foundation and being able to get one's hands dirty with coding have been extremely useful. I am sure there are many, many people like myself.
We had a BBC B in the house when I was a child and I went through university using a second hand Risc PC. When I finally sold the Acorn on about ten years ago I picked up a Raspberry Pi that can run Acorn's RISC OS operating system. The fact that there is still hardware on sale that can run Acorn's software is a result of the spectacular success of Acorn's ARM processor, a version of which now powers every smartphone and is at the heart of the new generation of Apple computers. Without the Computer Literacy Project ARM would never have been created. Possibly the best example of the UK government picking a winner and having it pay off!
I still have 3 old Acorn computers in my loft (BBC B, A3000 and Risc PC). I never have time to do anything with them but at some point I'd love to get them out to see if they still work. None of them have been switched on for more than 20 years). Not sure if there is much of a second hand market for them! I certainly would be very reluctant to send them off for recycling.
Donate them to the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park. Last time I was there, they had a whole classroom lab of old BBCs they had kept running.
Will they want my Imperial model 50? I'm struggling to load the latest version of Windows on it...
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
a cup is 8 fl oz. So half a US pint, or 0.4 an imperial pint.
PS The quality of the recipes is uniformly high. I don't watch the videos, but just follow the recipes (the first time, adapt to my own taste thereafter). Not all are do-agains, but a very high percentage are.
That first line is simply gibberish to me, some US sites have got metric conversion buttons and I'd rather not write a script to do it.
A cup is 0.237 liters
Which is fine, yet how does one weigh 0.237L of bread flour? I wonder if they've got a free trial, I'd just like to see if I can toggle the recipes to metric. I won't use it otherwise.
Get a set of cup measures.
That's extra washing up, I can set my big mixing bowl from my kenwood on my digital scales and just add something in, tare it and then add the next thing and so on then set it to mix for as long as it needs.
Or learn to estimate quantities.
If a golfer can get a golf ball within 2% from 250m, you can estimate a tablespoon of flour to within +/- 5%.
“I am a bit suspicious of mobile apps that demand your attention and send you push notifications to get more of your attention,” Wardle said. “I like the idea of doing the opposite of that – what about a game that deliberately doesn’t want much of your attention?” “Wordle is very simple and you can play it in three minutes, and that is all you get,” Wardle continues. “There are also no ads and I am not doing anything with your data, and that is also quite deliberate. I don’t understand why something can’t just be fun.”
Good article by Stephen Bush in the NS on the licence fee. Doesn't seem convinced that the licence fee will end up being scrapped by the Tories in the end.
"Indeed, the British government’s attempts over the past decade to free itself of its financial obligations to the BBC World Service, which the Foreign Office already funds, is probably the instructive parallel here. Many of the proposed cuts in Foreign Office spending on the BBC World Service did not materialise or have been reversed. A more likely future for the BBC under Conservative governments is the one that has been in use over the past decade: real-terms cuts, but with a genuine re-imagining of how the broadcaster operates always a safe distance away."
I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
I linked this report yesterday and Bercow seems to have leaked the report and is appealing
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
During the Commonwealth? IIRC one ran away for a couple of decades, and another one was impeached.
Restoration, too.
I quite like the idea of a kangaroo court. Presumably the judge & jury are kangaroos. Who else? The prosecution? defence barristers? Or are they drop bears?
This polling shows quite clearly that the Tories are heading for big losses to Labour in London in May but the results may not be so bad in the locals elsewhere. Starmer is still very much a North London Labour leader with his strongest appeal in the capital.
If Labour want a leader who can really appeal in the North and Midlands (and not just because he is not Boris), they still probably need Burnham
No, presenting it like this is giving you a false sense of security
London +42 South +39 North +43 Midlands +45 Scotland +64
Starmer is only getting that because Boris is currently unpopular, he is still only popular in London.
If Boris becomes popular again or Sunak replaces him and the Tories get a bound then the North and Midlands will likely shift back in the Tory direction again.
You've put your finger on the essential point. Boris's net approval ratings are bad only because he is unpopular. If he gets popular again he will get more popular.
As always, I'm astonished you don't charge people for the service you provide here.
Not necessarily. They are discussing relative approval. An improvement in the Tories’ performance alone does not necessarily mean they get more popular relative to Labour.
Not necessarily, no, but in this particular case yes. Boris's position changes from the penthouse suite on floor 150 to the basement, SKS is incapable of moving from the 7th floor.
Which may not be a problem now, would be if Boris has a Lazarus like recovery or Sunak becomes Tory leader and moves back into the penthouse suite
You know the former is never going to happen and the latter is very unlikely. The best the Tories can hope for at the next GE is damage limitation
At the moment Starmer is measuring the No 10 curtains, much like Kinnock was in 1990 when Labour had a big lead over Thatcher's Tories. However the Tories had replaced their leader by Christmas and Major narrowly beat Kinnock against the odds in 1992.
It was then only Blair who finally led Labour back into power in 1997. Starmer must be concerned he is Kinnock 2 and maybe Sunak is Major 2 to Boris' Thatcher and Burnham is actually Labour's Blair even if it looks good for now for him against Boris
Glad to see you are beginning to see the potential of getting rid of Boris "albatross" Johnson so that Sunak (or someone else) can pull off a 1992. I would be happy with that.
But I thought HYUFD had been saying that Boris was safe? Is that not your view now @HYUFD ? I said earlier than my view of Boris being deposed this quarter was something between 25% and 50%. But I'd be interested in your view - you know the interior workings of the Conservative Party better than I do.
My view is that Boris should be given until the May local elections to turn it round.
If he does not and the Tories see heavy losses in the local elections then is the time for a VONC, not now
Good to see your progress and hopefully next week it will be now
Libdem down three… but…. There’s not even enough of us to party on that industrial scale.
ANOTHER ROUGUE POLL it’s a whole batch of rough polls klaxon noise from me. 🤬
Cra crap crap crap crap crap crap crap
I think the pollings crap.
I can explain it. The uniqueness of the situation their polling process can’t handle.
Libdems double digits right not sinking now ignore rougue polls! I know better than they do. Libdems take Tory votes in reality, in ways Labour can’t. Therefore these polls not realistic
Mollie Malone @Mollie_Malone1 · 10m Steve Baker tells the broadcast pool “my constituents are about 60:1 against the Prime Minister”
Just heard him and he said they are furious
He and his colleagues need to act without delay
Boris is toxic
Yes the current situation is insane
I think OGH was mulling the value of a con lead in polls in January bet within the past couple of weeks. Lab lead of greater than 13% looks odds on now.
Every day from now till Grayday will be worse for con. Sunak should preempt Gray and resign now.
“I am a bit suspicious of mobile apps that demand your attention and send you push notifications to get more of your attention,” Wardle said. “I like the idea of doing the opposite of that – what about a game that deliberately doesn’t want much of your attention?” “Wordle is very simple and you can play it in three minutes, and that is all you get,” Wardle continues. “There are also no ads and I am not doing anything with your data, and that is also quite deliberate. I don’t understand why something can’t just be fun.”
Quick google seems like he worked at reddit for ages so imagine has plenty options for their IPO and now works for MSCHF who are a very interesting lot.
Still I would have stuck $1 a month on it for an extra wordle a day....but that's just me.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
BBC Good Food is trying to make their app a subscription based model. I think they are in big trouble.
NYTimes manages it. But then again, it's about 100x better than the BBC version.
Are you sure about NYTimes involvement. I can't see any mention to that anywhere. Its owned by Immediate Media which in turn is owned by a Germany media group.
I noted you said "managed", but I can't see any reference to that.
I think Robert means that NYT manages to have a successful food subscription channel. They do. I subscribe
Yeah, that's the model of the future, videos from professional chefs, monetised recipes, monetised videos and (low) subscription fees. I've been tempted by the £25 annual option, is it worth it? Seems a snip at that price for professional level cooking videos and recipes.
Also key question -
Do they have an imperial to metric converter for measurements? I have no clue what cups are or do.
No.
They seem utterly oblivious to the fact that not all the world using fluid ounces, cups, quarts and gallons.
Living in America, I've adjusted. But it may take a bit of getting used to for you.
My daughter, who is quite into baking, showed me a recipe containing cups and asked which size cup she should use. When I explained the US has specifically sized "cups" for it she began lecturing me on what a stupid system it was. I'm still not quite sure why it was my fault. When a 12yo realises the measurement system is stupid then quite why the whole of the US can't realise this is a mystery.
For baking it's a nightmare as everything needs to be fairly precise. I've essentially given up using US imperial recipes and I've not found it an issue. There's plenty of recipes from the UK and across Europe for the same dishes, often a lot better unless it's something like bbq meat or a US speciality.
The idea that a specific measurement system is stupid is rather odd. They are all arbitrary.
While that may be true, the metric system makes sense, 1 gram is 1 ml of water at room temperature, essentially. Imperial weights and measures should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Metric is scientific (mostly), but Imperial is human-friendly.
Who knows how much a gram is? But an ounce is roughly a handful - and similarly for many Imperial measurements.
I advocate metric for science and Imperial for everyday.
An ounce is a handful? Feathers? Iron? Handful of what?
German position that it will not supply defensive weapons to Ukraine is 'unchanged', foreign minister @ABaerbock said at the press conference with the Ukrainian FM @DmytroKuleba in Kyiv. 'Our restrictive position to weapons supply is well-known and is rooted in history', she said
It's not really very well rooted in history is it? Being spineless against rising dictatorships ended quite badly in the 30s.
It is very simple.
During the second world war, quite a few Ukranians fought against Russia and by/with/from/to/for/at or near Germany. Up to and including joining SS divisions.
A number of Ukrainian patriotic organisations are interesting links to same.
So, to Germany
1) Ukrainian nationalism has a toxic aspect that can be used to justify no help. 2) Never, ever have a conflict again with Russia, unless they invade Europe, is a hard wired German position. 3) Ukraine isn't in Europe, as far as a chunk of German politics is concerned.
So it is quite easy for a German politician to create a principled stance of strict neutrality in such a conflict. Long before gas prices come into the picture.
It is selling out an emerging democracy asking for help from the West to an expansionist dictator. After the blood and treasure foreign nations had to spend for Germany previously, it is shameful. Germany is a selfish, immoral country.
The German position is harsher than that. Because supplies have been through NATO channels, it effectively has a veto on other countries suppplying.
Possibly as true today as it was then: although the Internet had transformed things further.
There is a significant aspect to my career that owes a lot to this programme in the 1980s. I grew up with Acorn computers (BBC B, initially) and learnt to program on them with my final Acorn a "Risc PC" before Acorn sadly went out of business. Although I am not a pure programmer now, there have been aspects in all my job roles where a solid technical foundation and being able to get one's hands dirty with coding have been extremely useful. I am sure there are many, many people like myself.
We had a BBC B in the house when I was a child and I went through university using a second hand Risc PC. When I finally sold the Acorn on about ten years ago I picked up a Raspberry Pi that can run Acorn's RISC OS operating system. The fact that there is still hardware on sale that can run Acorn's software is a result of the spectacular success of Acorn's ARM processor, a version of which now powers every smartphone and is at the heart of the new generation of Apple computers. Without the Computer Literacy Project ARM would never have been created. Possibly the best example of the UK government picking a winner and having it pay off!
I still have 3 old Acorn computers in my loft (BBC B, A3000 and Risc PC). I never have time to do anything with them but at some point I'd love to get them out to see if they still work. None of them have been switched on for more than 20 years). Not sure if there is much of a second hand market for them! I certainly would be very reluctant to send them off for recycling.
Donate them to the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park. Last time I was there, they had a whole classroom lab of old BBCs they had kept running.
Will they want my Imperial model 50? I'm struggling to load the latest version of Windows on it...
Wonderful - so many memories
The first printer I had was a Brother electronic typewriter that could be driven via a Centronics parallel port.
Libdem down three… but…. There’s not even enough of us to party on that industrial scale.
ANOTHER ROUGUE POLL it’s a whole batch of rough polls klaxon noise from me. 🤬
Cra crap crap crap crap crap crap crap
I think the pollings crap.
I can explain it. The uniqueness of the situation their polling process can’t handle.
Libdems double digits right not sinking now ignore rougue polls! I know better than they do. Libdems take Tory votes in reality, in ways Labour can’t. Therefore these polls not realistic
☹️
Not outstanding for LD is it? Perhaps my whole SKS on the 6th floor world picture was mistaken and he has edged up to the 6/7 mezzanine level.
Listening to Sonia Khan. a special adviser to two recent Conservative Chancellors, it sounds like the staff at 10 Downing Street were permanently drunk or hungover. Absolutely disgraceful, and explains a lot about the disasters of the Cameron and May regimes.
They typically started drinking at lunchtime.
She had a piece in the Graun on Saturday, IIRC.
Sonia Khan was on the World at One today. She said that people unwilling to participate in the alcohol abuse culture at 10 Downing Street were ostracised or their career suffered.
That is horrific from an employment law point of view. Straightforward bullying.
Libdem down three… but…. There’s not even enough of us to party on that industrial scale.
ANOTHER ROUGUE POLL it’s a whole batch of rough polls klaxon noise from me. 🤬
Cra crap crap crap crap crap crap crap
I think the pollings crap.
I can explain it. The uniqueness of the situation their polling process can’t handle.
Libdems double digits right not sinking now ignore rougue polls! I know better than they do. Libdems take Tory votes in reality, in ways Labour can’t. Therefore these polls not realistic
☹️
The list of Famous Rules, continued.....
Rule 4: A rogue poll is any poll where you don't like the result.
This polling shows quite clearly that the Tories are heading for big losses to Labour in London in May but the results may not be so bad in the locals elsewhere. Starmer is still very much a North London Labour leader with his strongest appeal in the capital.
If Labour want a leader who can really appeal in the North and Midlands (and not just because he is not Boris), they still probably need Burnham
No, presenting it like this is giving you a false sense of security
London +42 South +39 North +43 Midlands +45 Scotland +64
Starmer is only getting that because Boris is currently unpopular, he is still only popular in London.
If Boris becomes popular again or Sunak replaces him and the Tories get a bounce then the North and Midlands will likely shift back in the Tory direction again.
Burnham has positive appeal north of Watford, Starmer doesn't.
See also the 2021 locals where Starmer Labour won London but lost ground in the North and Midlands to the Tories and also fell behind the Scottish Conservatives again at Holyrood. Labour's hold in Wales was more Drakeford than Starmer. Tory losses in the South were more to the LDs and Greens than Labour.
I suspect once Johnson has been dispatched, UK politics will become less presidential.
Starmer mirrors Welsh Labour in many ways.
Labour are seen as moderately useless, but by no means as bad as the Welsh Conservatives, who are, mainly through their personnel, an absolute laughing stock. One would have expected Johnson's spring sheen to have rubbed off on them. It didn't.
UK politics seems to go in waves, preferring the Presidential (Thatcher), then the Cabinet government (Major), Presidential (Blair), confused (Brown), cabinet (Cameron), confused (May), Presidential (Johnson).
I think we're due a cabinet style leader.
Thinking about it, this means Starmer's chances are good against Johnson, but poor if the Conservative Party has dumped him for a more consensual leader.
Yep. Those who would prefer not to see a Labour government need to hope Johnson is ditched asap. Those that would prefer a Labour win will need to hope Johnson stays in place. Johnson is now the Tory Corbyn.
I'm afraid I want to eat my cake and have it. Really want the Tories gone, really REALLY want to see Johnson driven out by scandal.
In which case for maximum lols for you, you need Johnson replaced by someone at least as equally terrible as Johnson. As I am moderately right of centre I hope he is replaced by someone credible
Mollie Malone @Mollie_Malone1 · 10m Steve Baker tells the broadcast pool “my constituents are about 60:1 against the Prime Minister”
Just heard him and he said they are furious
He and his colleagues need to act without delay
Boris is toxic
Yes the current situation is insane
I think OGH was mulling the value of a con lead in polls in January bet within the past couple of weeks. Lab lead of greater than 13% looks odds on now.
Every day from now till Grayday will be worse for con. Sunak should preempt Gray and resign now.
It may take a serious cabinet resignation to galvanise the letters
Mollie Malone @Mollie_Malone1 · 10m Steve Baker tells the broadcast pool “my constituents are about 60:1 against the Prime Minister”
Just heard him and he said they are furious
He and his colleagues need to act without delay
Boris is toxic
They absolutely need to act now, so that it at least looks as if they are not just acting out of fear of the polling numbers. Need to acknowledge what happened was wrong, and therefore he's out. The longer this takes, the worse the outcome.
BBC Food/Goodfood is an interesting one - I think they're both not long for this world. They're both being destroyed by YouTubers who have monetised their channels with adverts and click through revenue. I was watching a video for making some kind of Japanese beef, it had a few ads that I just lived with and it also had affiliate links to all of the equipment used in the video in the description where the recipe ingredients are typed out. I had a look and the chef probably makes somewhere in the region of $20-30k per month in advertising plus whatever he gets from click through. That's just one moderately successful chef specialising in Japanese dishes. He does them really well though and shows the exact method of how to make it well. Static web pages will never do that very well.
I don't see how BBC Food can compete with these people on any kind of scale, there's no way they can buy up the channels, they could hire chefs and monetise the videos but to get all kinds of cuisines they'd need an army of them and the channel just becomes cluttered or they need a network and there's no guarantee that they would be able to get their subscribers to cross subscribe.
In an age where my phone has got an almost 7" screen and there's chefs on YouTube offering advertising funded masterclasses why would I bother with a BBC Food written recipe from a chef who doesn't even specialise in the cuisine?
Yes. A few months ago I decided to master Singapore chicken laksa, a quite complex but amazing dish if done properly
I browsed BBC food, but all their recipes were way too simplistic. I looked at a couple of famous tv chefs - just didn’t seem right. Quirky yet misguided
Then I found this. A woman in Australia who has basically dedicated her life to creating THE recipe for Singapore chicken laksa. Free on the internet along with explanatory videos
I followed the recipe and Wow, it is superb. Exactly what you’d get in a brilliant laksa restaurant in Singapore (I added dashi)
Incredible specialisation. Fantastically well done. No one can compete with that - in terms of laksa. Tho I wonder how the writer makes any money?!
Again, is on YouTube, 70 million views. Sells e-books. Also contributor to Good Food Australia and quite big social media following.
Its the new model. Be a specialist, be bloody good at it, and there is money to be made.
Aha! That totally makes sense
She deserves it. Her laksa is THE BIZ
I think I am going to have to try it.
You have to like those S E Asian hot spicy slightly sweet umami-filled coconutty curries. But if you do Laksa is maybe the peak. The most complex. A work of art
WTF did S E Asians eat before the Portuguese brought them chilis from the New World?
Basically. There were plenty of other spices. Indonesia. Spice Islands.
Ah! Interesting. I'm not sure pepper quite replaces chili but that makes sense
Also, tomatoes and potatoes, which likewise come from the Americas. What did they without them? Tomatoes are especially important in Asian cuisine (and European for that matter)
In short, imperialism may have been really bad for some conquered countries, but it was fucking great for global cuisine
I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
I linked this report yesterday and Bercow seems to have leaked the report and is appealing
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
During the Commonwealth? IIRC one ran away for a couple of decades, and another one was impeached.
Restoration, too.
I quite like the idea of a kangaroo court. Presumably the judge & jury are kangaroos. Who else? The prosecution? defence barristers? Or are they drop bears?
The Government’s net competency rating is -37% in this week’s poll, decreasing 11 points to the lowest net competency rating we have recorded since we began tracking this question in August 2020. Altogether, 17% find the Government competent (down 5%), 54% find the Government incompetent (up 6%), and 22% find the Government neither competent nor incompetent (down 2%)......
At -31%, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating has fallen 12 points to the lowest rating we have recorded for him. This week’s poll finds 56% disapproving (up 6%) of his overall job performance, against 25% approving (down 6%)....
42% think Keir Starmer (up 5%) and 29% think Boris Johnson (down 7%) would be the better Prime Minister for the UK at this moment, marking Starmer’s largest lead over Johnson in this regard since we began tracking this question in June 2020.
I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
I linked this report yesterday and Bercow seems to have leaked the report and is appealing
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
During the Commonwealth? IIRC one ran away for a couple of decades, and another one was impeached.
Restoration, too.
I quite like the idea of a kangaroo court. Presumably the judge & jury are kangaroos. Who else? The prosecution? defence barristers? Or are they drop bears?
Like this?
I think we need drop bears.
The security should be handled by salt water crocodiles. The wigs should be replaced with box jellyfish.....
I missed it, but have we done Big John admitting the enquiry found that he was guilty of some of the allegations? Though he maintains that the investigator was a kangaroo:
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
I linked this report yesterday and Bercow seems to have leaked the report and is appealing
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
During the Commonwealth? IIRC one ran away for a couple of decades, and another one was impeached.
Restoration, too.
I quite like the idea of a kangaroo court. Presumably the judge & jury are kangaroos. Who else? The prosecution? defence barristers? Or are they drop bears?
A criminal court tries criminals, and a family court tries families. So I've always assumed a kangaroo court tries kangaroos.
This polling shows quite clearly that the Tories are heading for big losses to Labour in London in May but the results may not be so bad in the locals elsewhere. Starmer is still very much a North London Labour leader with his strongest appeal in the capital.
If Labour want a leader who can really appeal in the North and Midlands (and not just because he is not Boris), they still probably need Burnham
No, presenting it like this is giving you a false sense of security
London +42 South +39 North +43 Midlands +45 Scotland +64
Starmer is only getting that because Boris is currently unpopular, he is still only popular in London.
If Boris becomes popular again or Sunak replaces him and the Tories get a bound then the North and Midlands will likely shift back in the Tory direction again.
You've put your finger on the essential point. Boris's net approval ratings are bad only because he is unpopular. If he gets popular again he will get more popular.
As always, I'm astonished you don't charge people for the service you provide here.
Not necessarily. They are discussing relative approval. An improvement in the Tories’ performance alone does not necessarily mean they get more popular relative to Labour.
Not necessarily, no, but in this particular case yes. Boris's position changes from the penthouse suite on floor 150 to the basement, SKS is incapable of moving from the 7th floor.
Which may not be a problem now, would be if Boris has a Lazarus like recovery or Sunak becomes Tory leader and moves back into the penthouse suite
You know the former is never going to happen and the latter is very unlikely. The best the Tories can hope for at the next GE is damage limitation
At the moment Starmer is measuring the No 10 curtains, much like Kinnock was in 1990 when Labour had a big lead over Thatcher's Tories. However the Tories had replaced their leader by Christmas and Major narrowly beat Kinnock against the odds in 1992.
It was then only Blair who finally led Labour back into power in 1997. Starmer must be concerned he is Kinnock 2 and maybe Sunak is Major 2 to Boris' Thatcher and Burnham is actually Labour's Blair even if it looks good for now for him against Boris
Glad to see you are beginning to see the potential of getting rid of Boris "albatross" Johnson so that Sunak (or someone else) can pull off a 1992. I would be happy with that.
But I thought HYUFD had been saying that Boris was safe? Is that not your view now @HYUFD ? I said earlier than my view of Boris being deposed this quarter was something between 25% and 50%. But I'd be interested in your view - you know the interior workings of the Conservative Party better than I do.
My view is that Boris should be given until the May local elections to turn it round.
If he does not and the Tories see heavy losses in the local elections then is the time for a VONC, not now
He should do the decent thing and resign. Oh, hang on...do the decent thing? Silly me.
Mollie Malone @Mollie_Malone1 · 10m Steve Baker tells the broadcast pool “my constituents are about 60:1 against the Prime Minister”
Just heard him and he said they are furious
He and his colleagues need to act without delay
Boris is toxic
They will wait til the locals in May, surely.
I doubt many in Westminster will care about hard working local councillors.
It's so unnecessary too. Actual policy matters had created a realignment that favoured the Tories with the closest you can get to a permanent majority. And blown over some naff garden parties.
Comments
Whyyyyyyyyyyy?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/16/john-bercow-speaker-commons-parliamentary-inquiry-kathryn-stone
A parliamentary inquiry will conclude that John Bercow, the former Speaker, bullied three House of Commons members of staff, he has revealed, denouncing it as as “kangaroo court”.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, has found Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of 35 brought by Robert Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, he told the Sunday Times.
The former Speaker, who stood down in 2019, said he is appealing against Stone’s ruling, with a final decision expected by the end of the month.
WTF did S E Asians eat before the Portuguese brought them chilis from the New World?
This has always perplexed me
My progression has been 6, 4, 4, 3
They occupy very different niches. The Micro:Bit is much closer to the original BBC Micro. It just works when you turn it on. You upload a program to it, which you can write anywhere including in a web browser, by just copying a file to the drive it creates when you plug in the USB port. It works (or doesn’t). Re-write your program, rinse & repeat. It offers a bunch of simple ways to interact with the environment & visual output is the simplest possible thing that works - a bunch of LEDs. Impossible to break. They’re great.
The Pi on the other hand, is a full blown computer in the modern sense. You can run Windows on it if you want. Most people run Linux of course because that’s what the Pi Foundation supports. So you have all the power and control of a modern operating system, but along with that comes all the complexity & the myriad ways in which things can go wrong. There’s a lot more “ceremony” required to get code to run on the Pi & that complexity has a cost. In return you get something that’s a lot more capable of course.
Both are great devices.
Which History???
Between 2018 and 2020, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) purchased around 4.7 billion euros worth of German military equipment, about one quarter of the total sold.
https://twitter.com/IlvesToomas/status/1483052797289455619?s=20
Meanwhile:
https://mil.in.ua/en/news/germany-is-blocking-the-supply-of-weapons-to-ukraine-by-nato/
and
German engines in Russian drones
Experts have been examining weapons used in eastern Ukraine for three years. They found engines made in Germany in Russian drones that had also flown to EU countries.
https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/russland-dronen-bauteile-deutschland-101.html
Perhaps I am being dense (ha!) and at least we have diverged from TV funding models.
Should Kathryn Stone confirm her findings post his appeal he faces a lifetime ban from Parliament and the House of Lords
I assume he will be unique in this respect as I do not know of any speaker receiving this sanction
During the second world war, quite a few Ukranians fought against Russia and by/with/from/to/for/at or near Germany. Up to and including joining SS divisions.
A number of Ukrainian patriotic organisations are interesting links to same.
So, to Germany
1) Ukrainian nationalism has a toxic aspect that can be used to justify no help.
2) Never, ever have a conflict again with Russia, unless they invade Europe, is a hard wired German position.
3) Ukraine isn't in Europe, as far as a chunk of German politics is concerned.
So it is quite easy for a German politician to create a principled stance of strict neutrality in such a conflict. Long before gas prices come into the picture.
Therefore, it is a huge step back after a very good move with visiting Kyiv before Moscow. Very unfortunate
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1483109718658895877?s=20
She is really having a car crash from the Speaker's rebuke to the leak over the weekend, and Peter Bottomley's embarrassing take down of her in response to her statement
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1483121953166835714?t=_7vFDlRpIOD1ZaxkbMaZ7Q&s=19
You just add each thing to the container in turn. WIth a 2kg set of scales, I can do that with the cokking container from my bread machine.
Or 9 tablespoons full. Ish.
Who knows how much a gram is? But an ounce is roughly a handful - and similarly for many Imperial measurements.
I advocate metric for science and Imperial for everyday.
https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/65202/what-was-indian-food-like-before-the-arrival-of-the-chili-pepper-from-the-americ#:~:text=cumin, coriander, black pepper,,present in India before chilli.
Basically. There were plenty of other spices. Indonesia. Spice Islands.
Feathers? Iron?
Handful of what?
A litre of water's
A pint and three quarters
2 and a 1/4 lb of ham
Weighs about a kilogram
etc
Westminster Voting Intention (17 Jan):
Labour 43% (+4)
Conservative 30% (-5)
Liberal Democrat 9% (-3)
Green 7% (+2)
Scottish National Party 4% (–)
Reform UK 4% (–)
Other 3% (+2)
Changes +/- 10 Jan
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1483121953166835714?s=20
The Laksa paste is pretty crucial, however, and that's not so easy to find. Waitrose do a version but it is poor
This is good:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Malay-Taste-Laksa-Curry-Paste/dp/B07CVN9DG4/ref=sr_1_7?crid=2AU77I4Z623C4&keywords=laksa+paste&qid=1642439040&sprefix=laksa+paste,aps,55&sr=8-7
And the chili paste is also highly important, and not so easy to find, try this (it's brilliant in loads of dishes):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lucullus-Sambal-Oelek-200-Pack/dp/B00T4717L6/ref=sr_1_27?crid=2WS0AIZFHZ1FP&keywords=chili+paste&qid=1642439098&sprefix=chili+paste,aps,56&sr=8-27
And don't forget the Deep Fried Tofu Puffs (they come in big bags but they freeze very well - you don't need many)
I wouldn't bother with the shallots, I bought some but they don't add much (unlike everything else!)
Enjoy. Half the fun is making it, it's just about challenging and complex enough to be a real test (expect it to take nearer 2 hours rather than 1 on your first go, before you get used to it), but boy it is worth it
However only gives Labour a majority of 2 on the new boundaries
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=30&LAB=43&LIB=9&Reform=4&Green=7&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=18.3&SCOTLAB=20.2&SCOTLIB=6.6&SCOTReform=0.9&SCOTGreen=3&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=48&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019nbbase
@Mollie_Malone1
·
10m
Steve Baker tells the broadcast pool “my constituents are about 60:1 against the Prime Minister”
https://twitter.com/Mollie_Malone1/status/1483121749143302145
How hard would doing that have been?
I know the story is supposed to be he made it for his family, but surprised not pay $1 a month and get extra wordles or even an ad or two.
If he does not and the Tories see heavy losses in the local elections then is the time for a VONC, not now
He and his colleagues need to act without delay
Boris is toxic
With about 500 active players using it the adverts bring in about £5/month. Doesn't even cover the cost of the Apple developer licence unfortunately. Mind you, I don't have time to actively market it. Something interesting for the little spare time that I have.
If a golfer can get a golf ball within 2% from 250m, you can estimate a tablespoon of flour to within +/- 5%.
I doubt many in Westminster will care about hard working local councillors.
Good article by Stephen Bush in the NS on the licence fee. Doesn't seem convinced that the licence fee will end up being scrapped by the Tories in the end.
"Indeed, the British government’s attempts over the past decade to free itself of its financial obligations to the BBC World Service, which the Foreign Office already funds, is probably the instructive parallel here. Many of the proposed cuts in Foreign Office spending on the BBC World Service did not materialise or have been reversed. A more likely future for the BBC under Conservative governments is the one that has been in use over the past decade: real-terms cuts, but with a genuine re-imagining of how the broadcaster operates always a safe distance away."
ANOTHER ROUGUE POLL it’s a whole batch of rough polls klaxon noise from me. 🤬
Cra crap crap crap crap crap crap crap
I think the pollings crap.
I can explain it. The uniqueness of the situation their polling process can’t handle.
Libdems double digits right not sinking now ignore rougue polls! I know better than they do. Libdems take Tory votes in reality, in ways Labour can’t. Therefore these polls not realistic
☹️
I think OGH was mulling the value of a con lead in polls in January bet within the past couple of weeks. Lab lead of greater than 13% looks odds on now.
Every day from now till Grayday will be worse for con. Sunak should preempt Gray and resign now.
Still I would have stuck $1 a month on it for an extra wordle a day....but that's just me.
For most normal fluids 1l = 1kg is near enough.
We all know that !
That is horrific from an employment law point of view. Straightforward bullying.
Rule 4: A rogue poll is any poll where you don't like the result.
If May's local elections were all out elections across most of England like next year or in 2019 it might have been a different story
Also, tomatoes and potatoes, which likewise come from the Americas. What did they without them? Tomatoes are especially important in Asian cuisine (and European for that matter)
In short, imperialism may have been really bad for some conquered countries, but it was fucking great for global cuisine
At -31%, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net approval rating has fallen 12 points to the lowest rating we have recorded for him. This week’s poll finds 56% disapproving (up 6%) of his overall job performance, against 25% approving (down 6%)....
42% think Keir Starmer (up 5%) and 29% think Boris Johnson (down 7%) would be the better Prime Minister for the UK at this moment, marking Starmer’s largest lead over Johnson in this regard since we began tracking this question in June 2020.
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-gb-voting-intention-17-january-2022/
The security should be handled by salt water crocodiles. The wigs should be replaced with box jellyfish.....
I don't know what a civil court does.