The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
So, wait, one of five isn’t on Twitter, and that proves your point? Lol
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
I watched (or rewatched I suppose) Hislop on 'Fake News' last night. My issue with twitter is not so much fake news, just concentrated shrieking. You have polarised opinions, followed by people who are very much of the same opinion and echo everything round in spades.
You need only look at Covid for the example. On all sides there are 'experts' who post stuff and have their sycophantic crowd lap it all up. From iSAGE Cristina Pagel, Deepti Gurdassani etc. Their followers treat them like crusading heroes. I'm sure it is the same for the covid deniers (David Paton seems to be one, or at least anti vaccination/restrictions). One striking feature of this is often the experts are not actually directly expert in the field.
Pagel's feed is a dark place indeed. There are people on there who claim never to have left the house in 600+ days. I assumed they were spoofs. But with Twitter, one never knows.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
This is like getting paid in gold coins. What a pain in the arse. (Unless you actual want the BTC of course.)
BTC currently 46,593 bid.
Oh how we laughed at those who bought at 16,000...
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
If you're really interested in subjects (as opposed to just following them on Twitter), you can still find links or references via Twitter. It's not an infallible or exhaustive source, but it's an incredibly useful (and free) one.
If the Tories don't get a grip on the Cost of Living Crisis they will lose the next GE
They can't. It is beyond the reach of any government. 'Stuff' is more expensive - because there is a war on, because we have spent the last two years paying people not to work, because of demographics, because the cheapness of 'stuff' was always illusory. This is true of every country in the world. The stuff which government can do over the top of all this is pretty marginal.
As I posted earlier, 5 live business this morning made very difficult listening and the problems with war in Europe and the commodity shortages seem insurmountable without a very real loss of living standards for most everyone
Governments will become very unpopular very quickly as the scale of the crisis is beyond them, though I can see a time when rationing comes back and a national campaign for communities to gather together to help those in real need, and not just food banks but clothing and provision of heat and warmth
I really do not fear Starmer and labour winning in 24 as they will face the same problems with little or no money and taxation already at high levels
The party identity of the UK government in the face of the approaching storm will be roughly as important, in influencing events, as the gender of the next monarch
Not necessarily, expanding fracking and shale and nuclear power, using more Saudi oil, even opening a few more coal mines as was proposed in Cumbria etc not just using renewables would all make a big difference to reducing the cost of living.
Labour however would oppose most of the above. Labour are also more likely to impose more restrictions if another new Covid variant emerged, with the economic damage that could do too. The Tories would likely only do so now if a new variant proved vaccine immune
No it wouldn't. Energy prices are globally priced. They are commodities. It will have a miniscule impact on global prices. It would have an impact on the UK economy to produce stuff locally, but it won't reduces the cost of living.
The more energy we produce ourselves to supply our consumers the more that will lower their energy costs.
While globally the more countries use fracking and shale and alternative renewable energy supplies etc and don't rely on Russian oil and gas while the Russian war with Ukraine is going on the more that will reduce global energy prices too.
No it won't. See @Sandpit post. Our local energy providers will supply energy locally and abroad at the global commodity prices so it will have no impact on the cost of living. If produced locally it with tax revenue and employment, but it has zero impact on the price of energy.
Of course you could force local energy suppliers to supply fuel locally at a lower price but that is communism so I doubt you are keen on that.
Our increased production in theory may reduce global prices but in practice the impact is too small to matter.
Yes it will. Why are energy prices rising? First because of a surge in demand after the end of Covid lockdowns and a lack of supply to meet them. Second, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sanctions on imports of Russian gas and oil.
So obviously the more we can increase our energy supplies for UK consumers and the more the rest of the world can expand its energy production to reduce reliance on Russian energy, the lower energy prices will be.
So expanding energy production, including expanding fracking and shale, will reduce global commodity and energy prices. That will in turn cut the coat of living
You are doing your usual moving the goal posts again. Clearly if the rest of the world increased production it will impact prices but that is not what you said is it. You were referring to the UK.
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
No because in both cases the information we know how to find is a tiny subset of all available information, and twitter is an incredible tool for finding relevant information. (If used correctly that is, if you use it wrong it's an incredible tool for creating an elaborate mental model consisting of complete bullshit.)
Everybody knows that all the truth, and only the truth, is found on YouTube
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Coz I don’t even know where or what Kisumu is
Indeed!
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
So we are all "sort of racist" because humans are more interested in humans more like them, or nearer to them
Brilliant insight. Thanks. It's stuff like this that makes me come back to PB
It was a theory that you dismissed out of hand and laughed at when applied to trade with, immigration from, and indeed membership of the EU.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
So, wait, one of five isn’t on Twitter, and that proves your point? Lol
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
I watched (or rewatched I suppose) Hislop on 'Fake News' last night. My issue with twitter is not so much fake news, just concentrated shrieking. You have polarised opinions, followed by people who are very much of the same opinion and echo everything round in spades.
You need only look at Covid for the example. On all sides there are 'experts' who post stuff and have their sycophantic crowd lap it all up. From iSAGE Cristina Pagel, Deepti Gurdassani etc. Their followers treat them like crusading heroes. I'm sure it is the same for the covid deniers (David Paton seems to be one, or at least anti vaccination/restrictions). One striking feature of this is often the experts are not actually directly expert in the field.
As I said it's great for live events (eg the various terrorist attacks in London) where someone will post on Twitter if not live feeds then close to that.
For everything else it is part of the whole body of knowledge, which has to be carefully sifted through and 2x checked from other sources.
There is clearly a more rapid info stream from Twitter during rapidly changing events for sure. The mainstream do need to check things before releasing info. It can lead to misinformation though.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
That bundgaard paper is right up there with "The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485." Is that really the most important paper not on twitter you can come up with?
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
This is one of PB's weirdest arguments. People with some kind of hatred of Twitter, to the extent they are convinced it MUST BE useless. It's a bit like Brexit, people hate it so much anything to do with "Britain" becomes loathsome
Why do arguments get polarised like this, nowadays? Probably social media. eg, er, Twitter
The truth is Twitter is toxic, polarising and full of bullshit and hatred, in some ways I wish it could be disinvented, alongside all other social media. Just look at the Trans-Terf wars (enacted partly if not mainly on Twitter). UGH
But is social media good at disseminating information? Yes, humanity has never had anything to compare, not remotely, and the very best social medium for newsier info is Twitter (certainly in the west).
That's it. End of argument. We can now discuss Scottish local elections
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
So, wait, one of five isn’t on Twitter, and that proves your point? Lol
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
I watched (or rewatched I suppose) Hislop on 'Fake News' last night. My issue with twitter is not so much fake news, just concentrated shrieking. You have polarised opinions, followed by people who are very much of the same opinion and echo everything round in spades.
You need only look at Covid for the example. On all sides there are 'experts' who post stuff and have their sycophantic crowd lap it all up. From iSAGE Cristina Pagel, Deepti Gurdassani etc. Their followers treat them like crusading heroes. I'm sure it is the same for the covid deniers (David Paton seems to be one, or at least anti vaccination/restrictions). One striking feature of this is often the experts are not actually directly expert in the field.
As I said it's great for live events (eg the various terrorist attacks in London) where someone will post on Twitter if not live feeds then close to that.
For everything else it is part of the whole body of knowledge, which has to be carefully sifted through and 2x checked from other sources.
There is clearly a more rapid info stream from Twitter during rapidly changing events for sure. The mainstream do need to check things before releasing info. It can lead to misinformation though.
Much of the live 'info's rolling stories turns out to be utter garbage. You see it on PB during developing events (@Leon). Avoid it. It is worse than nothing.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
So, wait, one of five isn’t on Twitter, and that proves your point? Lol
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
I watched (or rewatched I suppose) Hislop on 'Fake News' last night. My issue with twitter is not so much fake news, just concentrated shrieking. You have polarised opinions, followed by people who are very much of the same opinion and echo everything round in spades.
You need only look at Covid for the example. On all sides there are 'experts' who post stuff and have their sycophantic crowd lap it all up. From iSAGE Cristina Pagel, Deepti Gurdassani etc. Their followers treat them like crusading heroes. I'm sure it is the same for the covid deniers (David Paton seems to be one, or at least anti vaccination/restrictions). One striking feature of this is often the experts are not actually directly expert in the field.
As I said it's great for live events (eg the various terrorist attacks in London) where someone will post on Twitter if not live feeds then close to that.
For everything else it is part of the whole body of knowledge, which has to be carefully sifted through and 2x checked from other sources.
There is clearly a more rapid info stream from Twitter during rapidly changing events for sure. The mainstream do need to check things before releasing info. It can lead to misinformation though.
Yes absolutely. I remember being away and watching on TV many years ago some (PIRA) action in London on both Sky and BBC. Sky had the live feeds, smoke rising, etc while you'd never know anything had happened from the BBC. Then on the hour the BBC had a very polished, informative piece about it.
There is a place for both but my go-to place for info/footage when there is an incident is twitter.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use. (Snip)
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
Is anyone arguing for unrestricted development ? At the moment there's an effective moratorium - and the most stupid restriction (a stupidly low maximum size) prevents efficient use of non controversial sites.
Local consent should be a planning principle - but that should not mean, as now, allowing a single objector to block a development.
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Coz I don’t even know where or what Kisumu is
Indeed!
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
So we are all "sort of racist" because humans are more interested in humans more like them, or nearer to them
Brilliant insight. Thanks. It's stuff like this that makes me come back to PB
It was a theory that you dismissed out of hand and laughed at when applied to trade with, immigration from, and indeed membership of the EU.
I absolutely did not. Retract
I wanted us to stay in the Single Market via some kind of EFTA arrangement, at least for a while (a decade) - I said this repeatedly, I was a "soft Leaver" - and I always said I had no problem with Freedom of Movement. Indeed I deeply regret the loss of it, and I remarked during the campaign that the Leave campaign was being disingenuous on this issue
However the public was only offered one lever to pull, with which to slow down immigration, and it was marked "Brexit", so they pulled it
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
That bundgaard paper is right up there with "The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485." Is that really the most important paper not on twitter you can come up with?
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
This is one of PB's weirdest arguments. People with some kind of hatred of Twitter, to the extent they are convinced it MUST BE useless. It's a bit like Brexit, people hate it so much anything to do with "Britain" becomes loathsome
Why do arguments get polarised like this, nowadays? Probably social media. eg, er, Twitter
The truth is Twitter is toxic, polarising and full of bullshit and hatred, in some ways I wish it could be disinvented, alongside all other social media. Just look at the Trans-Terf wars (enacted partly if not mainly on Twitter). UGH
But is social media good at disseminating information? Yes, humanity has never had anything to compare, not remotely, and the very best social medium for newsier info is Twitter (certainly in the west).
That's it. End of argument. We can now discuss Scottish local elections
No one is saying it's useless, just that it is a subset of the information out there. It does not form the basis for the entirety of our opinions.
Plus I am delighted that PB-ers are the ones (uniquely? Perhaps) who can distinguish between the gems and the dross on twitter. Thank goodness for that.
Selling Channel4 serns both driven by politics and hardly a priority, but I also cannot help but feel the commentariat and pundit furore seems overblown
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Coz I don’t even know where or what Kisumu is
Indeed!
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
So we are all "sort of racist" because humans are more interested in humans more like them, or nearer to them
Brilliant insight. Thanks. It's stuff like this that makes me come back to PB
Uh, no. When I said "it's not racism", how did you understand that to mean the opposite?
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Coz I don’t even know where or what Kisumu is
Indeed!
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
So we are all "sort of racist" because humans are more interested in humans more like them, or nearer to them
Brilliant insight. Thanks. It's stuff like this that makes me come back to PB
Uh, no. When I said "it's not racism", how did you understand that to mean the opposite?
Probably when you said this:
"And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin."
ie "sort of racism", as I expressed it
You're not on form today, are you?
I'm not the one misreading simple English, sweetie
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
One crucial absentee is Ralph Baric. The only other major western scientist doing GOF with Wuhan. He did have an account, I believe, but it’s disappeared
And of course all the Chinese in China. Where is Shi Zhengli, the bat woman?
Otherwise they are all there. Here they are, arguing this week
So, hold on, do I understand that you're getting your information on who is important in this debate but not on Twitter.. from Twitter?
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
...
The most important early paper on the origins of Covid was in Nature. It was written by
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
So, wait, one of five isn’t on Twitter, and that proves your point? Lol
Moreover, K G Andersen is by far the most important as he was the one in the first email chain with Daszak, Fauci et al. The other two on Twitter that “aren’t tweeting” are probably not tweeting BECAUSE Twitter is where all the debate happens. Heads down territory
Who wrote the recent market-origins preprint that made the NYT front page and changed the narrative for a few days?
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
I watched (or rewatched I suppose) Hislop on 'Fake News' last night. My issue with twitter is not so much fake news, just concentrated shrieking. You have polarised opinions, followed by people who are very much of the same opinion and echo everything round in spades.
You need only look at Covid for the example. On all sides there are 'experts' who post stuff and have their sycophantic crowd lap it all up. From iSAGE Cristina Pagel, Deepti Gurdassani etc. Their followers treat them like crusading heroes. I'm sure it is the same for the covid deniers (David Paton seems to be one, or at least anti vaccination/restrictions). One striking feature of this is often the experts are not actually directly expert in the field.
As I said it's great for live events (eg the various terrorist attacks in London) where someone will post on Twitter if not live feeds then close to that.
For everything else it is part of the whole body of knowledge, which has to be carefully sifted through and 2x checked from other sources.
There is clearly a more rapid info stream from Twitter during rapidly changing events for sure. The mainstream do need to check things before releasing info. It can lead to misinformation though.
Much of the live 'info's rolling stories turns out to be utter garbage. You see it on PB during developing events (@Leon). Avoid it. It is worse than nothing.
Not when following or during, say, a terrorist incident you see footage of ARVs turning up and SCO19 shooting citizens on the street it's not.
Maybe attitudes will start to change as nearly 20,000 body bags come back to Russia, or maybe Putin can gloss over that too.
The majority of KIAs will be from backwards shitholes in places like Dagestan and Ingushetia with dirt roads and a donkey for mayor. It won't matter a fucking jot.
That donkey is a great mayor, leave him out of it.
But I can well believe recruiting from the poor areas helps cover any outrage.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
This is like getting paid in gold coins. What a pain in the arse. (Unless you actual want the BTC of course.)
BTC currently 46,593 bid.
Oh how we laughed at those who bought at 16,000...
Since it was pointed out that, actually, its not a great place to hide assets from prying governments, Bitcoin has somewhat lost its lustre for me.
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
That bundgaard paper is right up there with "The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485." Is that really the most important paper not on twitter you can come up with?
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965). I picked it because it happened to be the second highest scoring result, but you could just have put "Danish mask study" into Google before embarassing yourself.
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
Yes, those are all the people who contributed to the paper who are on Twitter. But they're not all the people who contributed to the paper, as you would know if you had gone through to the paper instead of sitting on Twitter:
Pekar, Jonathan E.; Magee, Andrew; Parker, Edyth; Moshiri, Niema; Izhikevich, Katherine; Havens, Jennifer L.; Gangavarapu, Karthik; Malpica Serrano, Lorena M.; Crits-Christoph, Alexander; Matteson, Nathaniel L.; Zeller, Mark; Levy, Joshua I.; Wang, Jade C.; Hughes, Scott; Lee, Jungmin; Park, Heedo; Park, Man-Seong; Ching Zi Yan, Katherine; Tzer Pin Lin, Raymond; Mat Isa, Mohd Noor; Muhammad Noor, Yusuf; Vasylyeva, Tetyana I.; Garry, Robert F.; Holmes, Edward C.; Rambaut, Andrew; Suchard, Marc A.; Andersen, Kristian G.; Worobey, Michael; Wertheim, Joel O.
And these are just the ones that are on Twitter, despite some of them never having tweeted (e.g. Edward C. Holmes, as I pointed out earlier). However, the more important point is that it would have taken a second to click through to the paper and notice that there were far more authors listed than in the tweet. So you did read the paper, right? Because it would sort of make a mockery of the Twitter aficionado argument that you have "direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe" if nobody ever looks at anything other than their tweets.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
I take it there's no major expansion.
That is indeed bad news.
i. It's the quickest form of energy generation, onshore wind can be put up in 6 months to a year iirc. ii. It's the cheapest at ~ 4p/kwh production, even with backup diesel it only goes to 5p or so. iii. It's green, not that I could really give a shit at this point - but it helps in the good old court of public opinion and all that. iv. No existential danger unlike nuclear. v. We've made loads of turbines so it's a very known tech.
No expansion at all it seems. Tory NIMBYS on the prowl.
That's not the retail price. Most French consumers are on Tarif Bleu which the government regulates and forces EdF to eat the cost. That's why electricity prices on Tarif Bleu only went up 4% this year.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
This is like getting paid in gold coins. What a pain in the arse. (Unless you actual want the BTC of course.)
BTC currently 46,593 bid.
Oh how we laughed at those who bought at 16,000...
Since it was pointed out that, actually, its not a great place to hide assets from prying governments, Bitcoin has somewhat lost its lustre for me.
Lol! How sad to believe that any government was actually interested in you enough to look.
For some reason I found this picture even more upsetting than the terrible photos of dead bodies:
A Ukrainian woman mourns the death of her husband who was killed in Bucha
It is always harrowing to bring it down the individual. That is a great and valid example of the way that Ukraine is also winning the social media war.
Not many Nikon D850s in Fallujah, by way of contrast.
Fair point.
I just found it very moving - thinking how would I feel in a similar situation?
I think someone somewhere called the war the "middle class war" which was also a key motivating factor for public opinion.
Polls show that Africans, Latin Americans and south Asians don’t really give a fuck about the Ukraine war. Hence their neutrality. “It’s just a bunch of white Europeans bombing each other, far away in Europe”
In which case, why should Europeans give a fuck about wars in Africa Asia or South America? “It’s just a bunch of Asians killing each other”
This is human nature. Ukraine is happening to people like us. Near us. We care more. It’s not racism it’s reality
Do you think there would be more interest in this country in a story about flooding in Adelaide, or flooding in Kisumu? And why?
Coz I don’t even know where or what Kisumu is
Indeed!
The point here is that distance isn't everything. Familiarity makes things subjectively more important. My bet is that more people in African, LatAm, or India would be interested in a Spain-invades-Portugal story than are are interested in Russia-invades-Ukraine, even if distances are similar. There are stronger historical (imperial) ties with both Iberian countries, so more interest.
It's the "like us" part that is important to people, not so much the "near us". And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin.
So we are all "sort of racist" because humans are more interested in humans more like them, or nearer to them
Brilliant insight. Thanks. It's stuff like this that makes me come back to PB
It was a theory that you dismissed out of hand and laughed at when applied to trade with, immigration from, and indeed membership of the EU.
I absolutely did not. Retract
I wanted us to stay in the Single Market via some kind of EFTA arrangement, at least for a while (a decade) - I said this repeatedly, I was a "soft Leaver" - and I always said I had no problem with Freedom of Movement. Indeed I deeply regret the loss of it, and I remarked during the campaign that the Leave campaign was being disingenuous on this issue
However the public was only offered one lever to pull, with which to slow down immigration, and it was marked "Brexit", so they pulled it
It is a fairly safe bet to ascribe to you just about every opinion about Brexit that it was possible to hold in the run up to and aftermath of the vote.
And the ridicule that for example the gravity theory of trade attracted on here was quite widespread.
On Channel 4, unless I'm mistaken Dorries made the announcement that it is to be privatised straight after Parliament stood down for the Easter recess.
The Speaker will not be happy. And nor should anybody who thinks, like me, that a major announcement about the future (or lack of future) of a public service broadcaster should be made to the House of Commons in the first instance.
I think the outrage in those situations is very formulaic. It happens over and over and nothing changes. People know that's not how it's done anymore but we pay lip service to it.
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
No because in both cases the information we know how to find is a tiny subset of all available information, and twitter is an incredible tool for finding relevant information. (If used correctly that is, if you use it wrong it's an incredible tool for creating an elaborate mental model consisting of complete bullshit.)
This is supposed to be an endorsement of twitter?
The point is that the definitive (if there is one) commentary on any given subject is overwhelmingly likely not to be found on Twitter. It is likely to be found in various articles, papers, newspapers, other accounts. If some of those are referenced on Twitter then you are back where you started vs Gary Google. Arguably worse because as everyone including you acknowledge it's easy to get yourself into a self-affirming death spiral on twitter.
I'm not making any claim about whether Twitter is good for society or something, I'm saying it's an incredible tool for getting good information if used correctly. One of the things it can help with is finding which are the appropriate papers to read and getting some context to understand what they mean, which you wouldn't get from just googling. It's possible that it's collectively making the world dumber because most people use it wrong, I have no idea either way. If you don't know how to use it correctly and want to, see my explanation upthread.
Selling Channel4 serns both driven by politics and hardly a priority, but I also cannot help but feel the commentariat and pundit furore seems overblown
We need to see if Boris flogs it off to one of his political allies. If so then we're in the realms of an Orbánite takeover of the media.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
Also worth noting that the opposition to lockdown which was threatened last December came about almost entirely due to a twitter conversation. So much stuff which wouldn't see the light of day does so because of twitter. The platform is awful, and frustrating, and there is a non-stop cacophony of people shouting at each other. But it is also a better way of everyone talking to everyone than has ever existed.
I think we were probably better off before Twitter was invented. It has a lot of positives, but the negatives outweigh them. It's had a damaging effect on the sense of solidarity that holds societies together, especially in the United States.
No, that is Facebook. Twitter's effects are minuscule in comparison - and it doesn't make by design the same kind of hermetic opinion silos.
Jimmy @JimmySecUK The head of the DNR, Denis Pushilin, awarding a medal to Lieutenant Colonel Timur Kurilkin for "destroying 250 Nazis" - which is ironic, considering Kurilkin has two neo-Nazi patches clearly visible on his uniform.
Jimmy @JimmySecUK The head of the DNR, Denis Pushilin, awarding a medal to Lieutenant Colonel Timur Kurilkin for "destroying 250 Nazis" - which is ironic, considering Kurilkin has two neo-Nazi patches clearly visible on his uniform.
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
That bundgaard paper is right up there with "The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485." Is that really the most important paper not on twitter you can come up with?
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965). I picked it because it happened to be the second highest scoring result, but you could just have put "Danish mask study" into Google before embarassing yourself.
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
Yes, those are all the people who contributed to the paper who are on Twitter. But they're not all the people who contributed to the paper, as you would know if you had gone through to the paper instead of sitting on Twitter:
Pekar, Jonathan E.; Magee, Andrew; Parker, Edyth; Moshiri, Niema; Izhikevich, Katherine; Havens, Jennifer L.; Gangavarapu, Karthik; Malpica Serrano, Lorena M.; Crits-Christoph, Alexander; Matteson, Nathaniel L.; Zeller, Mark; Levy, Joshua I.; Wang, Jade C.; Hughes, Scott; Lee, Jungmin; Park, Heedo; Park, Man-Seong; Ching Zi Yan, Katherine; Tzer Pin Lin, Raymond; Mat Isa, Mohd Noor; Muhammad Noor, Yusuf; Vasylyeva, Tetyana I.; Garry, Robert F.; Holmes, Edward C.; Rambaut, Andrew; Suchard, Marc A.; Andersen, Kristian G.; Worobey, Michael; Wertheim, Joel O.
You did read the paper, right? Because it would sort of make a mockery of the points about having "direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe" if nobody ever looks at anything other than their tweets.
You actually did that. You went through them all. lol, you sad fuck
So 32 people cited, 19 ARE on Twitter, 13 not, and most of those not on Twitter are non-westerners (esp Chinese)?
QED. Twitter is invaluable, as I said, but biased to western sources of information, as I said
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h When Russia comes to ask to be let back into the world economy & world society, it will not be enough that it withdraw from (or has been driven from) Ukraine. It needs to be reduced as a threat to the world. It needs to cut down its nuclear arsenal to ~300 warheads, for a start.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h If Russia will not agree to reduce its military for itself, we will need to reduce its military for it, by denying it the economic means to sustain that military. One way or another, its threat is going to be reduced following these events - permanently.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
When are you going to convert the Bitcoin?
Dunno. Nobody knows less about money and finance shit than me. I had to get the kid from the village that I pay to detail cars to set up the wallet for me.
He's already stolen your bitcoin and invested it in monkeys.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
I take it there's no major expansion.
That is indeed bad news.
i. It's the quickest form of energy generation, onshore wind can be put up in 6 months to a year iirc. ii. It's the cheapest at ~ 4p/kwh production, even with backup diesel it only goes to 5p or so. iii. It's green, not that I could really give a shit at this point - but it helps in the good old court of public opinion and all that. iv. No existential danger unlike nuclear. v. We've made loads of turbines so it's a very known tech.
No expansion at all it seems. Tory NIMBYS on the prowl.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
I take it there's no major expansion.
That is indeed bad news.
i. It's the quickest form of energy generation, onshore wind can be put up in 6 months to a year iirc. ii. It's the cheapest at ~ 4p/kwh production, even with backup diesel it only goes to 5p or so. iii. It's green, not that I could really give a shit at this point - but it helps in the good old court of public opinion and all that. iv. No existential danger unlike nuclear. v. We've made loads of turbines so it's a very known tech.
No expansion at all it seems. Tory NIMBYS on the prowl.
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
No because in both cases the information we know how to find is a tiny subset of all available information, and twitter is an incredible tool for finding relevant information. (If used correctly that is, if you use it wrong it's an incredible tool for creating an elaborate mental model consisting of complete bullshit.)
This is supposed to be an endorsement of twitter?
The point is that the definitive (if there is one) commentary on any given subject is overwhelmingly likely not to be found on Twitter. It is likely to be found in various articles, papers, newspapers, other accounts. If some of those are referenced on Twitter then you are back where you started vs Gary Google. Arguably worse because as everyone including you acknowledge it's easy to get yourself into a self-affirming death spiral on twitter.
I'm not making any claim about whether Twitter is good for society or something, I'm saying it's an incredible tool for getting good information if used correctly. One of the things it can help with is finding which are the appropriate papers to read and getting some context to understand what they mean, which you wouldn't get from just googling. It's possible that it's collectively making the world dumber because most people use it wrong, I have no idea either way. If you don't know how to use it correctly and want to, see my explanation upthread.
My conclusion from this thread is that many PB-ers are indeed using Twitter wrong
You have to employ the search engine, and then you have to sift and filter, and follow the more promising threads quite deeply - but skeptically
At the same time, your general stream has to be carefully curated: make sure you don't follow too many people. I have found around 400 is an ideal number, enough to keep the feed interesting, but not overwhelming, and you absolutely need a mix of all opinions; often you will get perceptive remarks from people way out left or right or Falun Gong or whatever. Expand and contract your roster of people-to-follow as the news changes
And definitely ask direct questions of anyone you like, they will often reply, however lofty or distant they seem
Do all that and it is is highly useful, despite the endless bile and lies
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
The government is broke. If selling Channel 4 would make us all £1bn, then sell it
How on earth would it change, if sold? It will still be just another tv channel with advertising. I don’t know a single programme which I watch “because it’s on Channel 4”. And I never ask myself “ooh, what’s on Channel 4?” - because I don’t use TV like that any more. I pick and choose from online, streaming etc
And there’s the rub. The idea of “channels” is dying. Which means that soon C4 will be almost worthless - just a brand and some buildings. Worth ten million
Sell it now when we can make real money
Channel 4 is several channels including all4, more4 and E4. Channel 4 seem better than the beeb at realising linear channels are on the way out too.
I cannot see any reason why it should be state owned.
As a broadcaster it’s okay. It’s hardly a bastion of high quality tv. It has some good stuff and plenty of pap on it. Like any other broadcaster. I’ve not heard one good objection to it being privatised.
In the long term it is too small, too niche, and hard to see who it will appear to in future.
I suspect the Tory objections are partly party politics.
If the Tory objections are partly party politics, then you have to say Channel 4 only have themselves to blame. You can predict with 100% accuracy which way they will come down on a story - and their gotcha! interviews mean nobody wants to go on their news output.
A somewhat more nuanced approach occasionally might have paid better dividends.
Of course, they might survive with a blatant left-wing slant in a commercial sphere. Might.
The thing is, Channel 4 News doesn't only have a periodic left-wing slant, but also, very often and in many different types of contexts, too, a clear upmarket and in-depth, analytical slant, compared to virtually every other current news programme on British TV ( this wasn't the case 25 years ago). That also costs money ; Newsnight is a shadow of its former self since the huge cuts to its budget, for instance, and this money will probably be the first to go under privatisation.
The Channel 4 News and Current Affairs budget is huge - £660 million, largely as a figleaf to to fulfil the public service remit it no longer does elsewhere, since the 1990's Broadcasting Act stopped it being helped by ITV's advertising funding stream to be more ambitious.
CH4 works fine. It's an asset to the broadcasting landscape, a public good, costs the taxpayer nothing. There's no problem to fix other than the one they're actually trying to fix - they don't like its politics. The 'cultural vandalism' charge stacks up imo.
Yes, making Nadine Dorries Minister for Culture is no more sensible than making Boris Minister for Fidelity, for example.
Genuine question - what is culture? Is it art, theatre, plays, opera? Or is it TV, cinema, books (but which books? Airport trash such as the Ice Twins, or serious guff like Bring Up The Bodies?) Are all cultures equal? Does someone watching Saturday Night Takeaway get the same pleasure as someone watching La Boheme? Do you need to be high culture to appreciate it?
Between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's, nearly all these things were regularly on TV at various times. In our modern times, Nadine is the minister for reduced culture.
In what way?
At the end of the 1980's there was backlash against "highbrow culture" from figures such as Murdoch, who had the ear of Thatcher. Part of the restructuring of broadcasting wasn't only market-fundamentalism, but also a sort of anti-elitism that didn't turn out too well, often replacing with commercial banalities. When all the delicate balance of commercial and non-commercial factors that made British TV was unpicked, all the huge variety that was on TV during this time - from the "lowest" to the "highest" art - was lost.
My point was really that the modern Conservative party has long since lost touch with understanding of issues like this. Channel 4 was a commercial-public enterprise, with just as strong an influence from businessmen as highbrow patrons of culture like Jeremy Isaacs.
Thats not really Nadine though is it? Incidentally, do you have access to Sky Arts? Some excellent stuff on there. Also - the BBC did the excellent Hollow Crown Shakespeare adaptations not that long ago. Even naughtily casting a woman of colour in a key role, the swines. Just to wind up the gammons.
I guess for me broadcasting has been atomised. You want nature programmes, there's a channel for that. You want sport, theres about thirty, and in fact thats become atomised too. In the 70's and 80's there were 3 (three) TV channels in the UK. It was not the golden age we recall - the hits are recalled fondly, and still shown, but the dross is lost in the mists of time.
I wouldn't really agree there, I have to say ; I remember a very specific schedule from 1990 was posted up on one of the discussions on this we've had recently on PB, and there was quite a lot of multi-generational agreement on the loss of variety and depth.
There is always a danger of cherry picking though. You'd need to look at some rainy Tuesday nights and get a broader sample to be fair.
This is the schedule for Tuesday 5th April 1994 (ie today for whichever year in the early 90's today was also a Tuesday). https://tvrdb.com/listings/1994-04-05
Presented without comment other than to say that 'Throw Momma from the Train' is apparently a Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal film that I was previously entirely unaware of.
Interesting choice of schedule, as it already shows some of the changes that were in train from the 1990 version posted up here a few months ago.
The infamous Carlton has already junked any sign of Thames's weekday current affairs, I can see - no longer required to under the public service remit for bidding ; but its also striking that, even though the BBC2 schedule is a lot less interesting than the previous one, two years into Birt's tenure there's still room for 40 Minutes in prime time, and what looks like another documentary or two. Often to be replaced by lifestyle strands, as the decade went on.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
Also worth noting that the opposition to lockdown which was threatened last December came about almost entirely due to a twitter conversation. So much stuff which wouldn't see the light of day does so because of twitter. The platform is awful, and frustrating, and there is a non-stop cacophony of people shouting at each other. But it is also a better way of everyone talking to everyone than has ever existed.
I think we were probably better off before Twitter was invented. It has a lot of positives, but the negatives outweigh them. It's had a damaging effect on the sense of solidarity that holds societies together, especially in the United States.
No, that is Facebook. Twitter's effects are minuscule in comparison - and it doesn't make by design the same kind of hermetic opinion silos.
I'd say they are poisonous in different ways. Facebook makes political arguments horribly personal. But Twitter has a special way of quickly escalating discussions into vitriol - anonymous abuse and the like
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h When Russia comes to ask to be let back into the world economy & world society, it will not be enough that it withdraw from (or has been driven from) Ukraine. It needs to be reduced as a threat to the world. It needs to cut down its nuclear arsenal to ~300 warheads, for a start.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h If Russia will not agree to reduce its military for itself, we will need to reduce its military for it, by denying it the economic means to sustain that military. One way or another, its threat is going to be reduced following these events - permanently.
Problem being, if Putin is going to lose them, he might think "May as well use them then...."
I do have a concern that by retreating out of so much of Ukraine, Russia now has less to lose by using nukes. They have such a spiteful mindset, they might just turn Kyiv into trinitite because they can.
The thing about Twitter is that it can be incredibly informative, but you're in control of your own stream, so if you're not working hard at making it informative, you can turn it into a tool to misinform yourself.
Used right, you have direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe without a media filter which would try to cram everything into some preexisting news template, and if you're wondering about something you can just ask them, and you'll often get a useful answer. It's just an incredible thing to be able to do: There's something in the news on a planet of 8 billion people, there are say 100 people in the world who know a lot about it, and anyone, with no particular power or connections, can just... talk to them.
I find Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. There are 8 billion people in the world, but only 397 million people on Twitter, and only 206 million use it daily. So if there are 100 people in the world who know a lot about a topic, Twitter will maybe let you find out what five of them think - provided that they have posted about that topic, of course; I'd be surprised if more than two of those five would respond to unsolicited DMs or being tagged on a topic. And, of course, Twitter's algorithms are more likely to serve you tweets from the 10% of users who make 92% of the tweets, than the five users who know anything about the topic.
Pretty much any English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff is on Twitter, so although you may not have the 100 best-informed people, you'll have way more than the 5 you'd get from a random sample of the earth's population. It probably doesn't work if you want to know about the opinions of sub-saharan subsistence farmers, although you might find someone who polled them.
As I said, I find the Twitter users' faith in the power of the platform bizarre. I am an English-speaker whose job it is to know about stuff; I work in a department with ten other English-speakers whose job it is to know about stuff. One of them, and not the best informed among us, uses Twitter. The idea that only sub-saharan subsistence farmers don't Tweet just goes to show what a bubble hardcore Twitter users live in - but just look how absolute your faith is that your bubble is providing you with access to everybody in the world who knows something about a topic!
OK then let’s drill down. And let’s take the “Covid origins” story as an example. Because I know it well, not because it is uniquely tweety
Who co-ran the Wuhan lab, and was WHO’s only American on the team that went to Wuhan?
Peter Daszak. Here he is on Twitter. And he will talk to you, unless you get too knowledgeable, then he might block you
The early letter to the Lancet - organised by Daszak - was crucial in suppressing debate about a lab leak, as a racist conspiracy theory. The lancet is edited by
Chan is absolutely crucial to this debate. She tweets all the time
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
Also worth noting that the opposition to lockdown which was threatened last December came about almost entirely due to a twitter conversation. So much stuff which wouldn't see the light of day does so because of twitter. The platform is awful, and frustrating, and there is a non-stop cacophony of people shouting at each other. But it is also a better way of everyone talking to everyone than has ever existed.
I think we were probably better off before Twitter was invented. It has a lot of positives, but the negatives outweigh them. It's had a damaging effect on the sense of solidarity that holds societies together, especially in the United States.
No, that is Facebook. Twitter's effects are minuscule in comparison - and it doesn't make by design the same kind of hermetic opinion silos.
I'd say they are poisonous in different ways. Facebook makes political arguments horribly personal. But Twitter has a special way of quickly escalating discussions into vitriol - anonymous abuse and the like
The big problem with twitter is trying to "correct" incorrect information is like nailing shit to the wall. Even when somebody is acting in good faith, makes a mistake and tries to correct it, the correction tweet doesn't gain the same level of engagement so doesn't get thrust into peoples feeds like the original one that goes viral
For bad faith actors this is perfect e.g. Fake Dr Eoin Clarke did this regularly. Post loads of horseshit, eventually somebody would say this is actionably false you need to issue correction, which he eventually did, but too late and nobody saw it.
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
That bundgaard paper is right up there with "The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485." Is that really the most important paper not on twitter you can come up with?
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965). I picked it because it happened to be the second highest scoring result, but you could just have put "Danish mask study" into Google before embarassing yourself.
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
Yes, those are all the people who contributed to the paper who are on Twitter. But they're not all the people who contributed to the paper, as you would know if you had gone through to the paper instead of sitting on Twitter:
Pekar, Jonathan E.; Magee, Andrew; Parker, Edyth; Moshiri, Niema; Izhikevich, Katherine; Havens, Jennifer L.; Gangavarapu, Karthik; Malpica Serrano, Lorena M.; Crits-Christoph, Alexander; Matteson, Nathaniel L.; Zeller, Mark; Levy, Joshua I.; Wang, Jade C.; Hughes, Scott; Lee, Jungmin; Park, Heedo; Park, Man-Seong; Ching Zi Yan, Katherine; Tzer Pin Lin, Raymond; Mat Isa, Mohd Noor; Muhammad Noor, Yusuf; Vasylyeva, Tetyana I.; Garry, Robert F.; Holmes, Edward C.; Rambaut, Andrew; Suchard, Marc A.; Andersen, Kristian G.; Worobey, Michael; Wertheim, Joel O.
You did read the paper, right? Because it would sort of make a mockery of the points about having "direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe" if nobody ever looks at anything other than their tweets.
You actually did that. You went through them all. lol, you sad fuck
The slapdash approach may work for travel journalism: in the field I work in, we expect a little bit of thoroughness in source handling.
Jimmy @JimmySecUK The head of the DNR, Denis Pushilin, awarding a medal to Lieutenant Colonel Timur Kurilkin for "destroying 250 Nazis" - which is ironic, considering Kurilkin has two neo-Nazi patches clearly visible on his uniform.
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
That bundgaard paper is right up there with "The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485." Is that really the most important paper not on twitter you can come up with?
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965). I picked it because it happened to be the second highest scoring result, but you could just have put "Danish mask study" into Google before embarassing yourself.
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
Yes, those are all the people who contributed to the paper who are on Twitter. But they're not all the people who contributed to the paper, as you would know if you had gone through to the paper instead of sitting on Twitter:
Pekar, Jonathan E.; Magee, Andrew; Parker, Edyth; Moshiri, Niema; Izhikevich, Katherine; Havens, Jennifer L.; Gangavarapu, Karthik; Malpica Serrano, Lorena M.; Crits-Christoph, Alexander; Matteson, Nathaniel L.; Zeller, Mark; Levy, Joshua I.; Wang, Jade C.; Hughes, Scott; Lee, Jungmin; Park, Heedo; Park, Man-Seong; Ching Zi Yan, Katherine; Tzer Pin Lin, Raymond; Mat Isa, Mohd Noor; Muhammad Noor, Yusuf; Vasylyeva, Tetyana I.; Garry, Robert F.; Holmes, Edward C.; Rambaut, Andrew; Suchard, Marc A.; Andersen, Kristian G.; Worobey, Michael; Wertheim, Joel O.
You did read the paper, right? Because it would sort of make a mockery of the points about having "direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe" if nobody ever looks at anything other than their tweets.
You actually did that. You went through them all. lol, you sad fuck
The slapdash approach may work for travel journalism: in the field I work in, we expect a little bit of thoroughness in source handling.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
When are you going to convert the Bitcoin?
Dunno. Nobody knows less about money and finance shit than me. I had to get the kid from the village that I pay to detail cars to set up the wallet for me.
He's already stolen your bitcoin and invested it in monkeys.
On and on and on. About 80% of the main players are on Twitter
How do you get your information about who the "main players" are who are NOT on Twitter?
Because it’s fucking obvious. People get mentioned but they don’t have Twitter accounts or they don’t use them
It's so fucking obvious, you never bothered to go through to Nature and see who had actually written the paper. And that's why I talk about Twitter users having absolute faith in their bubble: you never even considered that a discussion on Twitter is already skewed towards mentioning people who are on Twitter.
That bundgaard paper is right up there with "The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485." Is that really the most important paper not on twitter you can come up with?
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965). I picked it because it happened to be the second highest scoring result, but you could just have put "Danish mask study" into Google before embarassing yourself.
And wtf does it matter whether all 5 co authors of a paper on twitter, when just one of them is enough to find the paper? You have to use twitter selectively and intelligently. It's like wikipedia; you don't believe a word it says without corroboration, but you go there for a pointer to the sources.
And, ah, fuck it: all these people. All on Twitter
Yes, those are all the people who contributed to the paper who are on Twitter. But they're not all the people who contributed to the paper, as you would know if you had gone through to the paper instead of sitting on Twitter:
Pekar, Jonathan E.; Magee, Andrew; Parker, Edyth; Moshiri, Niema; Izhikevich, Katherine; Havens, Jennifer L.; Gangavarapu, Karthik; Malpica Serrano, Lorena M.; Crits-Christoph, Alexander; Matteson, Nathaniel L.; Zeller, Mark; Levy, Joshua I.; Wang, Jade C.; Hughes, Scott; Lee, Jungmin; Park, Heedo; Park, Man-Seong; Ching Zi Yan, Katherine; Tzer Pin Lin, Raymond; Mat Isa, Mohd Noor; Muhammad Noor, Yusuf; Vasylyeva, Tetyana I.; Garry, Robert F.; Holmes, Edward C.; Rambaut, Andrew; Suchard, Marc A.; Andersen, Kristian G.; Worobey, Michael; Wertheim, Joel O.
You did read the paper, right? Because it would sort of make a mockery of the points about having "direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe" if nobody ever looks at anything other than their tweets.
You actually did that. You went through them all. lol, you sad fuck
The slapdash approach may work for travel journalism: in the field I work in, we expect a little bit of thoroughness in source handling.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
I take it there's no major expansion.
That is indeed bad news.
i. It's the quickest form of energy generation, onshore wind can be put up in 6 months to a year iirc. ii. It's the cheapest at ~ 4p/kwh production, even with backup diesel it only goes to 5p or so. iii. It's green, not that I could really give a shit at this point - but it helps in the good old court of public opinion and all that. iv. No existential danger unlike nuclear. v. We've made loads of turbines so it's a very known tech.
No expansion at all it seems. Tory NIMBYS on the prowl.
Need all local elections on the same 4 year cycle then thr yearly nimby impact might lessen.
Anybody that votes LibDem is banned from using the term "NIMBY" because, you know, the fucking hypocrisy....
Once upon a happy time, a LibDem on here boasted to me that mid-Wales would be very, very grateful to have its hills and mountains covered with wind-farms.
It was a LibDem who lived a long, long way away from mid-Wales, somewhere near Bedford as I recollect .
At the time, there were LibDem MPs for Ceredigion, Brecon & Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire.
And so it came to pass that the hills outside Welshpool sprouted wind-farms. They did not generate much local employment, and the profits were made by companies over the hills and far away. There was no local gain or advantage in hosting the windfarms.
And so the Tories took Brecon & Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire, and Plaid Cymru took Ceredigion at Westminster. And so the LibDems lost their mid-Wales Senedd seats.
And so the conclusion was, I spose, a happy one. Many more wind-farms than LibDems in mid-Wales.
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965).
Does the nature of the paper in the no 3 slot not give you the tiniest hint that Altemetric, whatever it is, is maybe not measuring anything useful? Try assessing things on the basis of what they actually are rather than where they appear on a fucking spreadsheet.
Pagel's feed is a dark place indeed. There are people on there who claim never to have left the house in 600+ days. I assumed they were spoofs. But with Twitter, one never knows.
I have a colleague who says exactly that (except she says two years). She has a medical condition which makes her much more likely than most of us to die if she catches Covid, and she feels she can have a pleasant life at home, and that it beats the hell out of being dead. She is exceptionally productive with really high-quality work, and seems quite happy too.
It's one extreme of the personal choices that we're all making, and I don't think we can really judge each others' decisions, any more than the other extreme of someone going clubbing every night and accepting that they'll catch Covid at frequent intervals. We grow so attached to the way we live that it's hard to imagine living quite differently, but people do. Somehow the passion has gone out of the argument, now that it's basically being left up to us.
So I’m just over a quarter of the way into my trek to Figueres (9 miles in, 23 to go) and stopped for my first break. It feels a tad early to have my first beer of the day, but it’s the only drink I’ve got with me and the riverside seemed a nice place to sit down for a few minutes. I’ve been looking out for wildlife, but so far just seen a couple of burros.
Liked the picture of the donkeys. We've been watching Stanley Tucci's TV series on Italian food on BBCiplayer. On his trip to Scicily (to be shown this Sunday), he samples in a local restaurant a steak tartare made from donkey meat. Although Stanley says it is delicious and sweet, I don't fancy it much myself.
Pagel's feed is a dark place indeed. There are people on there who claim never to have left the house in 600+ days. I assumed they were spoofs. But with Twitter, one never knows.
I have a colleague who says exactly that (except she says two years). She has a medical condition which makes her much more likely than most of us to die if she catches Covid, and she feels she can have a pleasant life at home, and that it beats the hell out of being dead. She is exceptionally productive with really high-quality work, and seems quite happy too.
It's one extreme of the personal choices that we're all making, and I don't think we can really judge each others' decisions, any more than the other extreme of someone going clubbing every night and accepting that they'll catch Covid at frequent intervals. We grow so attached to the way we live that it's hard to imagine living quite differently, but people do. Somehow the passion has gone out of the argument, now that it's basically being left up to us.
The problem is most peoples perception of how much risk they are actually in is totally warped, especially with not only vaccines, but anti-virals and much improved covid treatments.
Some people are clearly still scaring themselves to death and are never going to leave the house without worrying they are only a slip-up away from death, when it isn't true.
So I’m just over a quarter of the way into my trek to Figueres (9 miles in, 23 to go) and stopped for my first break. It feels a tad early to have my first beer of the day, but it’s the only drink I’ve got with me and the riverside seemed a nice place to sit down for a few minutes. I’ve been looking out for wildlife, but so far just seen a couple of burros.
Liked the picture of the donkeys. We've been watching Stanley Tucci's TV series on Italian food on BBCiplayer. On his trip to Scicily (to be shown this Sunday), he samples in a local restaurant a steak tartare made from donkey meat. Although Stanley says it is delicious and sweet, I don't fancy it much myself.
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
No because in both cases the information we know how to find is a tiny subset of all available information, and twitter is an incredible tool for finding relevant information. (If used correctly that is, if you use it wrong it's an incredible tool for creating an elaborate mental model consisting of complete bullshit.)
This is supposed to be an endorsement of twitter?
The point is that the definitive (if there is one) commentary on any given subject is overwhelmingly likely not to be found on Twitter. It is likely to be found in various articles, papers, newspapers, other accounts. If some of those are referenced on Twitter then you are back where you started vs Gary Google. Arguably worse because as everyone including you acknowledge it's easy to get yourself into a self-affirming death spiral on twitter.
I'm not making any claim about whether Twitter is good for society or something, I'm saying it's an incredible tool for getting good information if used correctly. One of the things it can help with is finding which are the appropriate papers to read and getting some context to understand what they mean, which you wouldn't get from just googling. It's possible that it's collectively making the world dumber because most people use it wrong, I have no idea either way. If you don't know how to use it correctly and want to, see my explanation upthread.
My conclusion from this thread is that many PB-ers are indeed using Twitter wrong
You have to employ the search engine, and then you have to sift and filter, and follow the more promising threads quite deeply - but skeptically
At the same time, your general stream has to be carefully curated: make sure you don't follow too many people. I have found around 400 is an ideal number, enough to keep the feed interesting, but not overwhelming, and you absolutely need a mix of all opinions; often you will get perceptive remarks from people way out left or right or Falun Gong or whatever. Expand and contract your roster of people-to-follow as the news changes
And definitely ask direct questions of anyone you like, they will often reply, however lofty or distant they seem
Do all that and it is is highly useful, despite the endless bile and lies
I guess I just don't have the time or inclination to 'use twitter correctly'. I get my news from the radio and TV and shockingly from PB. Thats enough for me. I don't trust randoms on twitter, especially those in echo chambers. I like it here because there is challenge. Usually, if you post something wrong or stoopid, you get jumped on. You don't get blocked. You can see other peoples opinions, even if you think they are wrong. Twitter is not like that. Too much abuse and then blocking, Too many get blocked for challenging.
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965).
Does the nature of the paper in the no 3 slot not give you the tiniest hint that Altemetric, whatever it is, is maybe not measuring anything useful? Try assessing things on the basis of what they actually are rather than where they appear on a fucking spreadsheet.
danish masks=LOL
It's not actually hard to discover what Altmetric actually is and why it was relevant to the conversation. There's probably even a tweet about it.
An alternative is to read ALL the papers yourself and make a subjective judgement on their relative importance. Good luck if you want to try that.
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
I take it there's no major expansion.
That is indeed bad news.
i. It's the quickest form of energy generation, onshore wind can be put up in 6 months to a year iirc. ii. It's the cheapest at ~ 4p/kwh production, even with backup diesel it only goes to 5p or so. iii. It's green, not that I could really give a shit at this point - but it helps in the good old court of public opinion and all that. iv. No existential danger unlike nuclear. v. We've made loads of turbines so it's a very known tech.
No expansion at all it seems. Tory NIMBYS on the prowl.
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
Last time round the head-to-head TV debate hurt her because Macron came across as more on top of his brief, but he'll have a much harder job now he has a record to defend.
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
The turnout for the first round has traditionally been much much lower than the runoff and that makes this sort of speculation even harder.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
When are you going to convert the Bitcoin?
Dunno. Nobody knows less about money and finance shit than me. I had to get the kid from the village that I pay to detail cars to set up the wallet for me.
He's already stolen your bitcoin and invested it in monkeys.
Monkeys? Not the ones in the zoo?
A simplistic question, but I don't know the answer. If, as above, someone pays you in Bitcoin, is there any reason why the payer should not turn it first into the money that is universally recognised rather than the seller? And if they don't or won't why should a naive person like me trust the transaction?
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
No because in both cases the information we know how to find is a tiny subset of all available information, and twitter is an incredible tool for finding relevant information. (If used correctly that is, if you use it wrong it's an incredible tool for creating an elaborate mental model consisting of complete bullshit.)
This is supposed to be an endorsement of twitter?
The point is that the definitive (if there is one) commentary on any given subject is overwhelmingly likely not to be found on Twitter. It is likely to be found in various articles, papers, newspapers, other accounts. If some of those are referenced on Twitter then you are back where you started vs Gary Google. Arguably worse because as everyone including you acknowledge it's easy to get yourself into a self-affirming death spiral on twitter.
I'm not making any claim about whether Twitter is good for society or something, I'm saying it's an incredible tool for getting good information if used correctly. One of the things it can help with is finding which are the appropriate papers to read and getting some context to understand what they mean, which you wouldn't get from just googling. It's possible that it's collectively making the world dumber because most people use it wrong, I have no idea either way. If you don't know how to use it correctly and want to, see my explanation upthread.
My conclusion from this thread is that many PB-ers are indeed using Twitter wrong
You have to employ the search engine, and then you have to sift and filter, and follow the more promising threads quite deeply - but skeptically
At the same time, your general stream has to be carefully curated: make sure you don't follow too many people. I have found around 400 is an ideal number, enough to keep the feed interesting, but not overwhelming, and you absolutely need a mix of all opinions; often you will get perceptive remarks from people way out left or right or Falun Gong or whatever. Expand and contract your roster of people-to-follow as the news changes
And definitely ask direct questions of anyone you like, they will often reply, however lofty or distant they seem
Do all that and it is is highly useful, despite the endless bile and lies
I guess I just don't have the time or inclination to 'use twitter correctly'. I get my news from the radio and TV and shockingly from PB. Thats enough for me. I don't trust randoms on twitter, especially those in echo chambers. I like it here because there is challenge. Usually, if you post something wrong or stoopid, you get jumped on. You don't get blocked. You can see other peoples opinions, even if you think they are wrong. Twitter is not like that. Too much abuse and then blocking, Too many get blocked for challenging.
Liked but wanted to say I liked. In particular PB part. And in fairness to @Leon I find out stuff because he and others use twitter.
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965).
Does the nature of the paper in the no 3 slot not give you the tiniest hint that Altemetric, whatever it is, is maybe not measuring anything useful? Try assessing things on the basis of what they actually are rather than where they appear on a fucking spreadsheet.
danish masks=LOL
It's not actually hard to discover what Altmetric actually is and why it was relevant to the conversation. There's probably even a tweet about it.
An alternative is to read ALL the papers yourself and make a subjective judgement on their relative importance. Good luck if you want to try that.
Yeah, we live in an age of information overload. one has to be selective, and researching altmetric didn't seem worth the time.
I have now invested 3 minutes I won't get back googling it and confirming that it is a wanky and pretentious wannabe grown-up version of "trending on twitter." Which I already knew from the fact that it ranks a tedious political op ed about how awful Trump is "third in the medical and health sciences category."
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
The turnout for the first round has traditionally been much much lower than the runoff and that makes this sort of speculation even harder.
Is this true? Looks the other way around for 2017 to me.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
When are you going to convert the Bitcoin?
Dunno. Nobody knows less about money and finance shit than me. I had to get the kid from the village that I pay to detail cars to set up the wallet for me.
He's already stolen your bitcoin and invested it in monkeys.
Monkeys? Not the ones in the zoo?
A simplistic question, but I don't know the answer. If, as above, someone pays you in Bitcoin, is there any reason why the payer should not turn it first into the money that is universally recognised rather than the seller? And if they don't or won't why should a naive person like me trust the transaction?
Well, that's two - no, three, given DA's original comment - admitting our ignorance on PB, all within the space of an hour. Must be a records. (And I'd still like to know re the primates; googling monkey is too unpredictable).
It got an Altmetric score of 32931, and was the second-highest paper in 2020 in the medical and health sciences category (second only to "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which scored 36338; third was the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine calling for Trump to lose the election, which only got 24965).
Does the nature of the paper in the no 3 slot not give you the tiniest hint that Altemetric, whatever it is, is maybe not measuring anything useful? Try assessing things on the basis of what they actually are rather than where they appear on a fucking spreadsheet.
danish masks=LOL
It's not actually hard to discover what Altmetric actually is and why it was relevant to the conversation. There's probably even a tweet about it.
An alternative is to read ALL the papers yourself and make a subjective judgement on their relative importance. Good luck if you want to try that.
Yeah, we live in an age of information overload. one has to be selective, and researching altmetric didn't seem worth the time.
I have now invested 3 minutes I won't get back googling it and confirming that it is a wanky and pretentious wannabe grown-up version of "trending on twitter." Which I already knew from the fact that it ranks a tedious political op ed about how awful Trump is "third in the medical and health sciences category."
Given his influence on US health policy, is that so surprising?
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
Always worth remembering that Le Pen and RN have generally under-performed their polling in actual elections.
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore, particularly in the North Sea, is much better in ALL respects.
Why privatise Channel 4? Just seems like ideological dogma to me
Privatising the BBC/Channel 4 is one of the few issues that I’ve completely changed my mind over, over the last few years.
I used to be completely against privatisation, now I don’t see what the problem is. I’m in favour of a smart state, flexible about moving things in and out of private/public ownership.
Generally - If there’s a market, genuine competition and space for innovation, it should be private.
Essential service &/or a natural monopoly? Public.
I’d bring water, energy and trains into public ownership - and privatise the BBC/Channel 4.
Not convinced about public ownership - the problem is that high capex unsexy activities such as investing in the electricity grid will always lose out to schools’n’hospitals if they are run by government.
But there should be a creative alternative model to finance the investment - perhaps owned by a mutual or public sector pension funds for example.
High capex unsexy activities don’t do great when reliant on private investment. Look at how water and energy companies have let infrastructure degrade.
That's not the retail price. Most French consumers are on Tarif Bleu which the government regulates and forces EdF to eat the cost. That's why electricity prices on Tarif Bleu only went up 4% this year.
On this occasion there was an "Orange Alert", and official calls for reduced usage.
And half of their nuclear power capacity was off, which resembles Germany's gas problem:
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
Edit: @Leon blathering on, quasi-religiously, about twitter.
You think all you need to know can be found on or via Twitter; others disagree, thinking that there is a vast resource out there not on Twitter. Your view of the totality of world knowledge is therefore a subset of theirs. Logically, they must know more than you about any given subject.
No because in both cases the information we know how to find is a tiny subset of all available information, and twitter is an incredible tool for finding relevant information. (If used correctly that is, if you use it wrong it's an incredible tool for creating an elaborate mental model consisting of complete bullshit.)
This is supposed to be an endorsement of twitter?
The point is that the definitive (if there is one) commentary on any given subject is overwhelmingly likely not to be found on Twitter. It is likely to be found in various articles, papers, newspapers, other accounts. If some of those are referenced on Twitter then you are back where you started vs Gary Google. Arguably worse because as everyone including you acknowledge it's easy to get yourself into a self-affirming death spiral on twitter.
I'm not making any claim about whether Twitter is good for society or something, I'm saying it's an incredible tool for getting good information if used correctly. One of the things it can help with is finding which are the appropriate papers to read and getting some context to understand what they mean, which you wouldn't get from just googling. It's possible that it's collectively making the world dumber because most people use it wrong, I have no idea either way. If you don't know how to use it correctly and want to, see my explanation upthread.
My conclusion from this thread is that many PB-ers are indeed using Twitter wrong
You have to employ the search engine, and then you have to sift and filter, and follow the more promising threads quite deeply - but skeptically
At the same time, your general stream has to be carefully curated: make sure you don't follow too many people. I have found around 400 is an ideal number, enough to keep the feed interesting, but not overwhelming, and you absolutely need a mix of all opinions; often you will get perceptive remarks from people way out left or right or Falun Gong or whatever. Expand and contract your roster of people-to-follow as the news changes
And definitely ask direct questions of anyone you like, they will often reply, however lofty or distant they seem
Do all that and it is is highly useful, despite the endless bile and lies
I guess I just don't have the time or inclination to 'use twitter correctly'. I get my news from the radio and TV and shockingly from PB. Thats enough for me. I don't trust randoms on twitter, especially those in echo chambers. I like it here because there is challenge. Usually, if you post something wrong or stoopid, you get jumped on. You don't get blocked. You can see other peoples opinions, even if you think they are wrong. Twitter is not like that. Too much abuse and then blocking, Too many get blocked for challenging.
Liked but wanted to say I liked. In particular PB part. And in fairness to @Leon I find out stuff because he and others use twitter.
That sounds like the right way to use Twitter.
The only tweets I see are the ones linked to on PB.
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
Pécresse has already shed most of the voters she’s going to re the more hard right of her original base . This means the current polling is mainly made up of more centre right voters , a clear majority will vote for Macron against Le Pen .
Mélenchons current voters are split evenly between Macron and Le Pen , the 2nd round abstentions though if that falls are more likely to favour Macron going on past precedence .
Le Pens key base are historically less likely to vote and she’s underperformed her polling in elections since 2017.
For Macron his strongest voter group are the over 65s and these are much more likely to vote and older people are much less forgiving of Le Pens past .
The key thing to look at is what the hard right are collectively polling and that’s not changed much over the last few weeks , around 33% to 35 % including some minor candidates .
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
It is a ridiculous definition anyway, because every intentional murder intends to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group "in part".
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
I wonder whether the low SNP figure in the Survation Scottish subsample (yes, I know, I’ll probably be banned!) is showing the first signs of dissatisfaction among SNP voters? The ferry crisis has got through to Scots voters in the same way that partygate has got through to UK voters generally. The figure for Others seems to be high as well. SNP voters thinking about switching to Labour or Alba? The May elections will be interesting!
There have been quite a few 6% scores for the SNP in recent polls - including the one just posted below. But subsamples and rounding ... about as useful for measuring as an elastic tapemeasure.
The disasters are piling up though Carnyx, they really are a useless bunch, everything tehy touch turns to dust. The baby box is the only thing they have introduced since 2014 and the disasters too many to list here.
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
He is in the sense he thinks there is no such people and is trying to enforce that, but this move wont get traction.
Some guy just came and bought my 2CV for EIGHTEEN FUCKING GRAND and paid in Bitcoin. I feel like I'm living in J.G. Ballard novel. These must be the end times.
Perhaps they believed it to be the only Ente in existence which has done 160mph on the M4 ?
Don't know if he attends, but this might be up Dura Ace's street:
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
You can get a 2CV up to about 110mph with a BMW R1200 engine swap but any faster than that and body panels start to come off.
Oh no. However will we survive without the government owning a platform for disseminating endless house porn that drives up property prices, Big Brother and Kardashian rip offs and multi decade old movies! 🙀
Leon is spot on. Flog it now to some wally for a billion quid while there are still wallies daft enough to pay for it.
Given the tactics are pretty obvious, they lie down and some glue themselves to the road, you would have thought the plod would have formulated some sort of tactics to ensure their prompt removal and do so such they can't just get up and walk back to where they were.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore, particularly in the North Sea, is much better in ALL respects.
The one at Invergarry is a disaster. Destroys the view from Creag Meagaidh and Kintail.
I just can't not look at them. The movement or something. The only thing worse is industrial -scale forestry and completely unnecessary hydro (like Glen Etive) which produces less than a single off-shore turbine.
James O'Brien very amusingly playing over and over the clip of Mad Nad being skewered at the Select Committee about Ch4 funding.
Good good. I really hope this hare-brained plan is seen off.
Once more people know about how Channel 4 might really be brought back to its best, then we might really be getting somewhere.
Just as the only reason I can currently think of for voting for Boris is that James O'Brien doesn't want me to, so I am beginning to support privatising C4. Is he the most annoying man in the world or are there other candidates in public life. (PBers don't count).
Pagel's feed is a dark place indeed. There are people on there who claim never to have left the house in 600+ days. I assumed they were spoofs. But with Twitter, one never knows.
I have a colleague who says exactly that (except she says two years). She has a medical condition which makes her much more likely than most of us to die if she catches Covid, and she feels she can have a pleasant life at home, and that it beats the hell out of being dead. She is exceptionally productive with really high-quality work, and seems quite happy too.
It's one extreme of the personal choices that we're all making, and I don't think we can really judge each others' decisions, any more than the other extreme of someone going clubbing every night and accepting that they'll catch Covid at frequent intervals. We grow so attached to the way we live that it's hard to imagine living quite differently, but people do. Somehow the passion has gone out of the argument, now that it's basically being left up to us.
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
It is a ridiculous definition anyway, because every intentional murder intends to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group "in part".
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
It may be ridiculous, but as we signed up to it anyway we have to live with it and try to give it effect
Yesterdays op ed in RIA Novosti calls for the killing of all Ukrainians who have taken up arms, plus the whole of the political elite. if that is government policy it seems to me a big enough part of the people to satisfy the definition
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"[For the purpose of this Treaty] "genocide" means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group..."
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
We have it from his own mouth that there is no such thing as a Ukrainian people or Ukrainian state - and he has invaded their country and is killing, and forcibly deporting thousands to impose that view. I'd say that's a pretty strong prima facie case.
Good morning. The news about onshore wind is profoundly depressing. It seems we will wean ourselves off foreign fossil fuels by doing, erm, pretty much the same as we have always done.
We need a mix. Onshore wind is more easily maintained but the powered generation capacity is lower than offshore. We should build the tidal lagoons in South Wales and think about the Solway firth to have a time offset for tidal capacity. We should rapidly develop the micro nuclear capability and build the long term nuclear waste storage repository. Quite a few of these schemes would flow money into the north and help local economies and jobs there. Also look at offshore wind to power seawater cracking to make hydrogen. There’s lots we should do and start now.
Onshore wind is way quicker and cheaper to build, though. The drastic political limitations on it in the UK are the efforts if Tory nimbies.
Over two thirds of those polled on the issue support its expansion. A figure which might well now be even higher since energy prices rocketed.
There is no such thing as rapid deployment of nuclear, and its costs are uncertain - but certainly not cheap.
There are big long-term environmental issues with some onshore wind. They are best in upland areas, and large tracks are constructed across vast tracts of land to get the massive turbines up there. They're quite a scar, and massively more substantial than the tracks grouse shooters use.
We have a wind farm a few miles from us; and I have no problem with it as it is built on an old airfield site; essentially brownfield land. I do have issues with the farms on some of our precious upland landscapes, and especially on peat moorland.
I readily confess to being a nimby… from our home we have uninterrupted views of the Forest of Bowland fells, the Yorkshire peaks, the Howgills and the Lakeland hills… @Cyclefree is just out of sight…. If we strain our eyes we can just see the wind farm by the M6 in Cumbra, the thought that the environments of the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty should be damaged, marginally to supplement offshore just seems wrong….
Indeed. This is a particular problem in Scotland and to some extent Mid-Wales, where whole landscapes are being ruined by the march of the turbines. And as pointed out, not just the wider landscape, but the peat on which many are sited. Once these are drained for the roads or the surface layer is broken through to site the massive concrete pedestals there's no way back.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore is much better in ALL respects.
I know what you mean but
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
My understanding was the tracks were a problem because of the huge weight of the turbines they need to support. Much more problematic than your standard estate landy track. They are also enormous (Monadhliath etc)
The really ugly track is the one above Achnasheen, and that's just a small one!
Cycling (particularly electric) on the Cairngorm plateau is going to be the next big controversy though.
Comments
Oh how we laughed at those who bought at 16,000...
It's not an infallible or exhaustive source, but it's an incredibly useful (and free) one.
Why do arguments get polarised like this, nowadays? Probably social media. eg, er, Twitter
The truth is Twitter is toxic, polarising and full of bullshit and hatred, in some ways I wish it could be disinvented, alongside all other social media. Just look at the Trans-Terf wars (enacted partly if not mainly on Twitter). UGH
But is social media good at disseminating information? Yes, humanity has never had anything to compare, not remotely, and the very best social medium for newsier info is Twitter (certainly in the west).
That's it. End of argument. We can now discuss Scottish local elections
There is a place for both but my go-to place for info/footage when there is an incident is twitter.
French Electricity Prices have gone wild:
That peak hour is €3 per kWh.
The reason seems to be mass maintenance on ancient nuclear power stations.
And a lot of central heating in France is direct electric.
Potential impact in Election?
https://twitter.com/Sustainable2050/status/1510549520626692102
At the moment there's an effective moratorium - and the most stupid restriction (a stupidly low maximum size) prevents efficient use of non controversial sites.
Local consent should be a planning principle - but that should not mean, as now, allowing a single objector to block a development.
I wanted us to stay in the Single Market via some kind of EFTA arrangement, at least for a while (a decade) - I said this repeatedly, I was a "soft Leaver" - and I always said I had no problem with Freedom of Movement. Indeed I deeply regret the loss of it, and I remarked during the campaign that the Leave campaign was being disingenuous on this issue
However the public was only offered one lever to pull, with which to slow down immigration, and it was marked "Brexit", so they pulled it
Plus I am delighted that PB-ers are the ones (uniquely? Perhaps) who can distinguish between the gems and the dross on twitter. Thank goodness for that.
"And it's not racism, no, but it's a cousin."
ie "sort of racism", as I expressed it
You're not on form today, are you?
But I can well believe recruiting from the poor areas helps cover any outrage.
Pekar, Jonathan E.; Magee, Andrew; Parker, Edyth; Moshiri, Niema; Izhikevich, Katherine; Havens, Jennifer L.; Gangavarapu, Karthik; Malpica Serrano, Lorena M.; Crits-Christoph, Alexander; Matteson, Nathaniel L.; Zeller, Mark; Levy, Joshua I.; Wang, Jade C.; Hughes, Scott; Lee, Jungmin; Park, Heedo; Park, Man-Seong; Ching Zi Yan, Katherine; Tzer Pin Lin, Raymond; Mat Isa, Mohd Noor; Muhammad Noor, Yusuf; Vasylyeva, Tetyana I.; Garry, Robert F.; Holmes, Edward C.; Rambaut, Andrew; Suchard, Marc A.; Andersen, Kristian G.; Worobey, Michael; Wertheim, Joel O.
And these are just the ones that are on Twitter, despite some of them never having tweeted (e.g. Edward C. Holmes, as I pointed out earlier). However, the more important point is that it would have taken a second to click through to the paper and notice that there were far more authors listed than in the tweet. So you did read the paper, right? Because it would sort of make a mockery of the Twitter aficionado argument that you have "direct access to domain experts about any topic in the known universe" if nobody ever looks at anything other than their tweets.
And the ridicule that for example the gravity theory of trade attracted on here was quite widespread.
Twitter's effects are minuscule in comparison - and it doesn't make by design the same kind of hermetic opinion silos.
Jimmy
@JimmySecUK
The head of the DNR, Denis Pushilin, awarding a medal to Lieutenant Colonel Timur Kurilkin for "destroying 250 Nazis" - which is ironic, considering Kurilkin has two neo-Nazi patches clearly visible on his uniform.
https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1511001899184627712
So 32 people cited, 19 ARE on Twitter, 13 not, and most of those not on Twitter are non-westerners (esp Chinese)?
QED. Twitter is invaluable, as I said, but biased to western sources of information, as I said
NOW we can move on
@andrew_lilico
·
1h
When Russia comes to ask to be let back into the world economy & world society, it will not be enough that it withdraw from (or has been driven from) Ukraine. It needs to be reduced as a threat to the world. It needs to cut down its nuclear arsenal to ~300 warheads, for a start.
Andrew Lilico
@andrew_lilico
·
1h
If Russia will not agree to reduce its military for itself, we will need to reduce its military for it, by denying it the economic means to sustain that military. One way or another, its threat is going to be reduced following these events - permanently.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1511282151584583682
You have to employ the search engine, and then you have to sift and filter, and follow the more promising threads quite deeply - but skeptically
At the same time, your general stream has to be carefully curated: make sure you don't follow too many people. I have found around 400 is an ideal number, enough to keep the feed interesting, but not overwhelming, and you absolutely need a mix of all opinions; often you will get perceptive remarks from people way out left or right or Falun Gong or whatever. Expand and contract your roster of people-to-follow as the news changes
And definitely ask direct questions of anyone you like, they will often reply, however lofty or distant they seem
Do all that and it is is highly useful, despite the endless bile and lies
It is now taboo to write about social differences
BY PHILIP HENSHER"
https://unherd.com/2022/04/novelists-are-afraid-of-class/
https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1511283058384814081?s=20&t=tctcsWSi6x4ukzwEgGYEWQ
The infamous Carlton has already junked any sign of Thames's weekday current affairs, I can see - no longer required to under the public service remit for bidding ; but its also striking that, even though the BBC2 schedule is a lot less interesting than the previous one, two years into Birt's tenure there's still room for 40 Minutes in prime time, and what looks like another documentary or two. Often to be replaced by lifestyle strands, as the decade went on.
I do have a concern that by retreating out of so much of Ukraine, Russia now has less to lose by using nukes. They have such a spiteful mindset, they might just turn Kyiv into trinitite because they can.
For bad faith actors this is perfect e.g. Fake Dr Eoin Clarke did this regularly. Post loads of horseshit, eventually somebody would say this is actionably false you need to issue correction, which he eventually did, but too late and nobody saw it.
@EuropeElects
·
4m
France, OpinionWay-Kéa Partners poll:
Macron (EC-RE): 27% (-1)
Le Pen (RN-ID): 23% (+1)
Mélenchon (LFI-LEFT): 15% (+1)
Pécresse (LR-EPP): 9%
Zemmour (REC-NI): 9%
…
+/- vs. 1-4 April
Fieldwork: 2-5 April 2022
Sample size: 1,777
https://twitter.com/i/events/1511262013879730178
The only recipient.
But you are simply wrong on Twitter. It is invaluable and peerless, as a source of newsy information: if used correctly
It was a LibDem who lived a long, long way away from mid-Wales, somewhere near Bedford as I recollect
At the time, there were LibDem MPs for Ceredigion, Brecon & Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire.
And so it came to pass that the hills outside Welshpool sprouted wind-farms. They did not generate much local employment, and the profits were made by companies over the hills and far away. There was no local gain or advantage in hosting the windfarms.
And so the Tories took Brecon & Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire, and Plaid Cymru took Ceredigion at Westminster. And so the LibDems lost their mid-Wales Senedd seats.
And so the conclusion was, I spose, a happy one. Many more wind-farms than LibDems in mid-Wales.
danish masks=LOL
It's one extreme of the personal choices that we're all making, and I don't think we can really judge each others' decisions, any more than the other extreme of someone going clubbing every night and accepting that they'll catch Covid at frequent intervals. We grow so attached to the way we live that it's hard to imagine living quite differently, but people do. Somehow the passion has gone out of the argument, now that it's basically being left up to us.
Some people are clearly still scaring themselves to death and are never going to leave the house without worrying they are only a slip-up away from death, when it isn't true.
An alternative is to read ALL the papers yourself and make a subjective judgement on their relative importance. Good luck if you want to try that.
Le Pen will presumably get all of Zemmour. Taking her to 32%. Maybe half of Pecresse? 37%?
Macron will get the other half of Pecresse, taking him to 33%
It's all about the Melenchon supporters. He is hard left so on one reading they virtually all go to Macron and Macron wins quite easily (but not a landslide). However he may be attracting people who just want to protest and will vote for anything anti-Establishment, possibly Le Pen. In which case she gets some of his voters and she wins, narrowly
On Oddschecker Le Pen is now down to 5/1 from 14/1 a week back
I have now invested 3 minutes I won't get back googling it and confirming that it is a wanky and pretentious wannabe grown-up version of "trending on twitter." Which I already knew from the fact that it ranks a tedious political op ed about how awful Trump is "third in the medical and health sciences category."
Genocide convention
Article I
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in
time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to
punish.
Which probably entails an obligation to send troops in
"The 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force will be one of the highlights of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022, the 69th edition of EAA's annual fly-in convention coming July 25-31 at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh."
A friend went to it a few years ago, and somebody had fitted a jet engine into an American school bus. It went down the runway at 400 mph.... Stuff like that.
Once more people know about how Channel 4 might really be brought back to its best, then we might really be getting somewhere.
Most of the UK's best carbon sinks are not forests, they are bogs.
The majority of the politicians making the decisions on turbines are urbanites and don't really care about such things, but some of us do.
There's nothing more depressing than visiting what used to be a remote peak or corrie to find an array of turbines in front of you.
I know we have almost no 'wild' land in the UK but we should be improving what we have, not making it worse.
Offshore, particularly in the North Sea, is much better in ALL respects.
And half of their nuclear power capacity was off, which resembles Germany's gas problem:
https://twitter.com/fmomboisse/status/1510883898498113538
Putin is not intent on destroying the Ukrainian people.
The only tweets I see are the ones linked to on PB.
Mélenchons current voters are split evenly between Macron and Le Pen , the 2nd round abstentions though if that falls are more likely to favour Macron going on past precedence .
Le Pens key base are historically less likely to vote and she’s underperformed her polling in elections since 2017.
For Macron his strongest voter group are the over 65s and these are much more likely to vote and older people are much less forgiving of Le Pens past .
The key thing to look at is what the hard right are collectively polling and that’s not changed much over the last few weeks , around 33% to 35 % including some minor candidates .
Such a seismically important crime deserves much better.
1. it's a tiny fraction of the acreage
2. Once we have got fusion cracked the turbines will go and the platforms will weather to invisibility
3. Tracks provided they don't have heavy traffic on them are a comparatively mild eyesore, a boon to walkers and cyclists and actually protective of the peat by preventing people spreading out over it
Of the kind that the BBC and Channel 4 provide...
Leon is spot on. Flog it now to some wally for a billion quid while there are still wallies daft enough to pay for it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10687479/Just-Stop-Oil-glue-road-outside-oil-terminal-Warwickshire.html
Given the tactics are pretty obvious, they lie down and some glue themselves to the road, you would have thought the plod would have formulated some sort of tactics to ensure their prompt removal and do so such they can't just get up and walk back to where they were.
I just can't not look at them. The movement or something. The only thing worse is industrial -scale forestry and completely unnecessary hydro (like Glen Etive) which produces less than a single off-shore turbine.
Yesterdays op ed in RIA Novosti calls for the killing of all Ukrainians who have taken up arms, plus the whole of the political elite. if that is government policy it seems to me a big enough part of the people to satisfy the definition
I'd say that's a pretty strong prima facie case.
The really ugly track is the one above Achnasheen, and that's just a small one!
Cycling (particularly electric) on the Cairngorm plateau is going to be the next big controversy though.