Done my bit for your 250-1 shot. Sadly, going to be a losing bet because ...God knows why. Truss is an order of magnitude poorer on every metric.
We don't need God's help here. Unfortunately your party has an inbuilt majority who hear only what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. And they want to hear what Truss is telling them, regardless of the fact it bears no resemblance to reality.
It's interesting that AFAIK none of the self-declared PB Tory members on here except Barty (is he even a member?) are voting for Truss.
Much as I deeply disagree with PB Tories on most topics I totally respect that they represent the small and ever-diminishing 'sane wing' of the Tory party.
I think Mortimer has voted for her.
I have.
That Corp tax rise has to go. That NI rise has to go.
I don't want someone that Roger thinks of like Tony Blair as a Tory leader....
Truss will be a plodder, but effective imo. She will surprise a lot on the upside.
Reading the comments here she can hardly surprise on the downside.
She is energetic, so the random policy generator will be turbo-charged.
It is possible that she may be in luck though. Both German and US inflation figures were better this month. A turn or just a pause? Time will tell.
I see too that Germany has announced €10billion in tax cuts to help families. Higher personal allowances, increased children's allowances and raising of thresholds to curb fiscal drag. Lizzy take note.
Yes increase in personal allowance and 40% threshold by CPI say 10% = 👍
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
I rather like w3w. When I lost my wallet last week the finder sent me a w3w location of the spot to meet him to effect its return. But that was the first time I've ever used it and the old fashioned vague description would probably have worked just as well. I'm not entirely sure what vital niche it fills. It's an admirably creative solution to a problem I personally have never had. But I suppose lots of things fall into that category. Things don't have to be useful to me personally in order to be useful.
My sister - an avid camper - says she uses it all the time when camping. I had no idea, but I can now see why
Every single UK emergency service: every ambulance, fire and police service, is asking people to download it. Check Twitter
Imagine you are in a field and you see a fire starting (say, during this heatwave). You can go on Google maps and put a pin down and share that (awkwardly) or you can use W3W and share it in seconds with complete, memorable precision. The fire is staring in ///dildo.whatever.ouch
It's much more intuitive
Ditto wildlife crimes, or wandering mad grandparents, or lost pets, or bigfoot seen here, etc etc etc
I don't think first responders would be asking people to use this service, unless they genuinely believed it made things easier, quicker and safer
I have absolutely no idea what is going on with the polling; it doesn't seem to be reflected in what I'm hearing from the association members in my patch. I'm inclined to trust YouGov over my anecdotal reckonings, but I'm very confused. It doesn't feel like a Johnson 2019 style landslide at all.
Are we seriously suggesting the Conservative Party, having effectively defenestrated their last three leaders would oust a fourth before said leader had even faced the electorate?
Is there any modern precedent for a Prime Minister to be installed without a General Election and to be ousted without having contested a General Election as Prime Minister? I can't think of one since 1918 - might have been one earlier of course.
Neville Chamberlain, though he resigned rather than was ousted
Like Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher, then.
Every Tory leader since Baldwin has been ousted, or resigned for health reasons just before they would have been removed anyway. And Baldwin was in such danger of being overthrown at one point the Times set up a leader in proof announcing his resignation.
And two of his three immediate predecessors suffered the same fate.
Since Salisbury retired in 1902 leaders of the Conservative Party have usually not ended well, no matter who or what they were.
David Cameron (pbuh) wasn't ousted nor resigned for health reasons.
IIRC he is the only Prime Minister to resign when leading in the polls.
True, except insofar as having lost a referendum he would have been in short order.
Incidentally the sturgeon moon is nearly to the full, and mighty impressive it is too. Must be near its perigee to be that large.
Yes, when it came up over the sea this evening I thought it was full moon already, but that seems to be Friday
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
This is more like "if you don't get it right over the course of nine years don't bother", though... Gmail, iPhone and AWS all demonstrated that they could move from "cool idea with promise" to "clearly profitable winning product and business model" in that timeframe.
You’ve not followed biotech development, then. At least 10 years is usually needed to get a drug from discovery to approval. It’s only them that you find out whether you can make a profit with it.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
No, really, it will. You find a big autumn crop of Liberty Caps. You want to tell your friends exactly WHAT corner of that obscure damp meadow near Hay Bluff has a fab harvest of psilocybin semilanceata
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
Big bugbear for me this - the idea that scientists and ‘people in tech’ are not creative. Utter rubbish. Where do you think the tech comes from? It doesn’t just happen. Really smart people have ideas and then make stuff happen.
Creativity isn’t just writing trash airport fiction, however lucrative that can be.
OK, I'll rephrase. They are not known for their "imaginative emotional intelligence"
Three words is a genius way of describing every single 3 sq m place on earth. Three words!!
Has L'Académie française had anything to say about it? Or Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg? It's an effective way to plant the anglosphere's muddy footprint on every 3m square in the world but it's easy to imagine why lesser folk might take offence.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
Big bugbear for me this - the idea that scientists and ‘people in tech’ are not creative. Utter rubbish. Where do you think the tech comes from? It doesn’t just happen. Really smart people have ideas and then make stuff happen.
Creativity isn’t just writing trash airport fiction, however lucrative that can be.
OK, I'll rephrase. They are not known for their "imaginative emotional intelligence"
Three words is a genius way of describing every single 3 sq m place on earth. Three words!!
Has L'Académie française had anything to say about it? Or Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg? It's an effective way to plant the anglosphere's muddy footprint on every 3m square in the world but it's easy to imagine why lesser folk might take offence.
They have made it available in 57 languages. Every 3sq m corner has a different French, Italian, Arabic, Punjabi. Chinese, Swahili name. Etc etc. Probably Welsh, too
However I see your point, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. If W3W becomes the global standard then every 3sq m will have two names - the local name and the default English name
W3W surely ripe for an acquisition. Apple would like it
I'd have guessed at Amazon or Google. They could integrate it into their cloud services API. The maximum value is probably not in the billions, I'd guess as high as a billion because it's a value add rather than a revolutionary new product.
As for your previous comment, I had the original iPhone and was an alpha and beta tester for Gmail. The iPhone was part revolutionary part complete shit, an internet and media device which had EDGE and so many software glitches. Yet it was a completely new way of doing something and the potential was clear. A UK company that invented the iPhone (Palm) didn't see the same potential and investors didn't either. It went bankrupt. On Gmail, the first iteration was far, far worse than the Outlook desktop app it intended to replace and worse than Hotmail which it intended to compete with in the online space. It took multiple iterations and development time to Gmail close to working and then all of the bolt on apps like docs to make the internet only email experience worthwhile.
Anyway, my point is that American companies and investors recognise potential far better than we do and that's why we have few to no tech champions. Even a company like ARM which is hugely successful as an IP licencing company is far, far behind AMD and Nvidia as a fabless microprocessor company.
No, really, it will. You find a big autumn crop of Liberty Caps. You want to tell your friends exactly WHAT corner of that obscure damp meadow near Hay Bluff has a fab harvest of psilocybin semilanceata
Well, now you know how to do it. Precisely
I once scored quite excellent mushrooms in a squat in Maida Vale. Enquiring about the bloke's familiar accent, it turns out he picked them from a cemetery not 200 yards from my parents' home in Wigan and had brought them down specifically to sell. I had lived there till I was 18 completely oblivious to the fact it was a prime location.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
Big bugbear for me this - the idea that scientists and ‘people in tech’ are not creative. Utter rubbish. Where do you think the tech comes from? It doesn’t just happen. Really smart people have ideas and then make stuff happen.
Creativity isn’t just writing trash airport fiction, however lucrative that can be.
OK, I'll rephrase. They are not known for their "imaginative emotional intelligence"
Three words is a genius way of describing every single 3 sq m place on earth. Three words!!
Has L'Académie française had anything to say about it? Or Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg? It's an effective way to plant the anglosphere's muddy footprint on every 3m square in the world but it's easy to imagine why lesser folk might take offence.
They have made it available in 57 languages. Every 3sq m corner has a different French, Italian, Arabic, Punjabi. Chinese, Swahili name. Etc etc. Probably Welsh, too
However I see your point, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. If W3W becomes the global standard then every 3sq m will have two names - the local name and the default English name
Thus the hegemony of English will extend. Oh well
That's remarkable. I wonder if other languages have enough words. English is exceptional because it has hoovered up a few other languages en passant and rightly deserves its hegemony.
Yeah, weird. There were loads of helicopters going across from Inverness, and police were taking the Achnasheen road as you can hit some serious speeds on that one.
The police thought it was Cumbria 2 and hit every red button.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
Big bugbear for me this - the idea that scientists and ‘people in tech’ are not creative. Utter rubbish. Where do you think the tech comes from? It doesn’t just happen. Really smart people have ideas and then make stuff happen.
Creativity isn’t just writing trash airport fiction, however lucrative that can be.
OK, I'll rephrase. They are not known for their "imaginative emotional intelligence"
Three words is a genius way of describing every single 3 sq m place on earth. Three words!!
Has L'Académie française had anything to say about it? Or Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg? It's an effective way to plant the anglosphere's muddy footprint on every 3m square in the world but it's easy to imagine why lesser folk might take offence.
They have made it available in 57 languages. Every 3sq m corner has a different French, Italian, Arabic, Punjabi. Chinese, Swahili name. Etc etc. Probably Welsh, too
However I see your point, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. If W3W becomes the global standard then every 3sq m will have two names - the local name and the default English name
Thus the hegemony of English will extend. Oh well
That's remarkable. I wonder if other languages have enough words. English is exceptional because it has hoovered up a few other languages en passant and rightly deserves its hegemony.
Yes, I don't know how they've done it, English has a bigger vocab than any other language by a distance, and they still nearly maxed out. They've got 57 trillion geo-terms and apparently there are 62 trillion three word phrase combos in English (which aren't racist, or sexist, or porno, etc)
Perhaps they used a lot of plurals with smaller, lesser languages?
Anyway I suspect English will be the default for many
You’ve not followed biotech development, then. At least 10 years is usually needed to get a drug from discovery to approval. It’s only them that you find out whether you can make a profit with it.
That's why biotech is a more painful field to invest in. Anyway, as far as I'm aware w3w are not raising investment on the basis of "we have a 10 to 15 year master plan that we hope will will lead us to profitability but you'll need to keep believing because of these good reasons why it'll take 10 years", so the analogy doesn't really hold.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
W3W has not had any problem raising money: they've got to Series C with $65m raised (even before crowdfunding).
Are we seriously suggesting the Conservative Party, having effectively defenestrated their last three leaders would oust a fourth before said leader had even faced the electorate?
Is there any modern precedent for a Prime Minister to be installed without a General Election and to be ousted without having contested a General Election as Prime Minister? I can't think of one since 1918 - might have been one earlier of course.
Neville Chamberlain, though he resigned rather than was ousted
Like Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher, then.
Every Tory leader since Baldwin has been ousted, or resigned for health reasons just before they would have been removed anyway. And Baldwin was in such danger of being overthrown at one point the Times set up a leader in proof announcing his resignation.
And two of his three immediate predecessors suffered the same fate.
Since Salisbury retired in 1902 leaders of the Conservative Party have usually not ended well, no matter who or what they were.
All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture*, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
This goes far beyond what we’ve seen in previous leadership races, and begs questions about what the point is at this stage?
It feels less like a leadership race and more like a civil war.
Someone's forgotten about Gove stabbing Boris in the back last time but one, followed by Leadsom inelegantly making a thing out of May being childless and being forced out.
This is all absolute rubbish - there is no way to have a leadership election without some blood being spilt, and it's all been reasonably policy-based attacks; almost nothing personal (and most of the personal stuff has come from Dorries).
Anyway, my point is that American companies and investors recognise potential far better than we do and that's why we have few to no tech champions. Even a company like ARM which is hugely successful as an IP licencing company is far, far behind AMD and Nvidia as a fabless microprocessor company.
Arm succeeded because of its business model (the tech is good but not world-dominatingly so without the businese model), but it's also the business model that means it's a small company at the centre of a web of partner companies rather than doing everything itself. If it had tried doing everything itself it would very likely have failed like almost every other microprocessor company (and there are a lot of also-rans in the field). Take MIPS as a US example.
(Coincidentally it's the business model where w3w is a bit shaky, and I think their problems are there rather than in not getting enough investment.)
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
AWS was definitely not useless when it launched. When it launched it was basically just EC2, which was nicely-implemented way to rent CPU power via an API. This was a niche rather than the general-purpose platform it eventually turned into, but it was definitely a useful product.
This goes far beyond what we’ve seen in previous leadership races, and begs questions about what the point is at this stage?
It feels less like a leadership race and more like a civil war.
Someone's forgotten about Gove stabbing Boris in the back last time but one, followed by Leadsom inelegantly making a thing out of May being childless and being forced out.
This is all absolute rubbish - there is no way to have a leadership election without some blood being spilt, and it's all been reasonably policy-based attacks; almost nothing personal (and most of the personal stuff has come from Dorries).
Gove’s front-stab on Boris was sui generis. Because Boris.
Leadsom’s grandmotherly claims were made sotto voce and caused such an uproar she was forced to self-eject.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
I rather like w3w. When I lost my wallet last week the finder sent me a w3w location of the spot to meet him to effect its return. But that was the first time I've ever used it and the old fashioned vague description would probably have worked just as well. I'm not entirely sure what vital niche it fills. It's an admirably creative solution to a problem I personally have never had. But I suppose lots of things fall into that category. Things don't have to be useful to me personally in order to be useful.
There are various codes and identifiers in our lives and some of these are well-designed and some are not.
Postal codes are well-designed. They encode a lot of information efficiently, and their structure makes them easier to remember, and they enable efficient sorting of mail.
An HMRC UTR number may have some beneficial attributes I'm not aware of. A check-digit, perhaps. But a 10-digit number is not easy for most people to remember, and for that reason I would say it's poorly-designed, until convinced otherwise.
Clearly there are lots of coordinate systems or descriptions that one can use to identify specific locations, but the use of words, rather than numbers, make the identifiers much easier to remember, and should have other benefits in terms of error-checking.
It does seem like the person they stole the idea from had a better idea in using slightly more simpler and more distinct words than using three words from a much larger set. A shame they weren't able to hire a decent patent attorney, rather than relying on advice from randoms on the web to defend their invention.
Truss: "It seems to me the money is going in [to the NHS] but we are not seeing the impact of the money on the front line.."
She is going to be an electoral disaster.
Every rightwing columnist fervently believes this mantra.
No ordinary voter out in the marginal seats believes a word of it. They just know grandma had to lie in piss sodden pants for 24 hours and uncle fred is on a 18 month waiting list.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
W3W has not had any problem raising money: they've got to Series C with $65m raised (even before crowdfunding).
Yeah, I'd guess that the issue for w3w has been poor iteration of the core product rather than raising money just because the idea and IP is extremely valuable in an era where everyone uses their phones to guide them to wherever it is they're going and having a simple, easy to understand and global system for it is a bloody great idea.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
Big bugbear for me this - the idea that scientists and ‘people in tech’ are not creative. Utter rubbish. Where do you think the tech comes from? It doesn’t just happen. Really smart people have ideas and then make stuff happen.
Creativity isn’t just writing trash airport fiction, however lucrative that can be.
OK, I'll rephrase. They are not known for their "imaginative emotional intelligence"
Three words is a genius way of describing every single 3 sq m place on earth. Three words!!
Has L'Académie française had anything to say about it? Or Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg? It's an effective way to plant the anglosphere's muddy footprint on every 3m square in the world but it's easy to imagine why lesser folk might take offence.
They have made it available in 57 languages. Every 3sq m corner has a different French, Italian, Arabic, Punjabi. Chinese, Swahili name. Etc etc. Probably Welsh, too
However I see your point, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. If W3W becomes the global standard then every 3sq m will have two names - the local name and the default English name
Thus the hegemony of English will extend. Oh well
That's remarkable. I wonder if other languages have enough words. English is exceptional because it has hoovered up a few other languages en passant and rightly deserves its hegemony.
Yes, I don't know how they've done it, English has a bigger vocab than any other language by a distance, and they still nearly maxed out. They've got 57 trillion geo-terms and apparently there are 62 trillion three word phrase combos in English (which aren't racist, or sexist, or porno, etc)
Perhaps they used a lot of plurals with smaller, lesser languages?
Anyway I suspect English will be the default for many
There are plenty of three word combos that don't resolve, so I'm not convinced there are only 62 trillion three word phrase combos.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
I rather like w3w. When I lost my wallet last week the finder sent me a w3w location of the spot to meet him to effect its return. But that was the first time I've ever used it and the old fashioned vague description would probably have worked just as well. I'm not entirely sure what vital niche it fills. It's an admirably creative solution to a problem I personally have never had. But I suppose lots of things fall into that category. Things don't have to be useful to me personally in order to be useful.
There are various codes and identifiers in our lives and some of these are well-designed and some are not.
Postal codes are well-designed. They encode a lot of information efficiently, and their structure makes them easier to remember, and they enable efficient sorting of mail.
An HMRC UTR number may have some beneficial attributes I'm not aware of. A check-digit, perhaps. But a 10-digit number is not easy for most people to remember, and for that reason I would say it's poorly-designed, until convinced otherwise.
Clearly there are lots of coordinate systems or descriptions that one can use to identify specific locations, but the use of words, rather than numbers, make the identifiers much easier to remember, and should have other benefits in terms of error-checking.
It does seem like the person they stole the idea from had a better idea in using slightly more simpler and more distinct words than using three words from a much larger set. A shame they weren't able to hire a decent patent attorney, rather than relying on advice from randoms on the web to defend their invention.
I've seen that guy's claims
He says he used just 1000 words turned into multiple chains of 5 words. That's a shite idea because so many words will be repeated constantly it makes them all highly similar (If I have got it right)
Besides, he might be talking bollox, trying to grab the glory of someone else's idea, when the idea was just in the air, waiting to be plucked. Weren't there about fifteen people who had the idea for the lightbulb? See also Darwin and others and evolution, and so forth
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
AWS was definitely not useless when it launched. When it launched it was basically just EC2, which was nicely-implemented way to rent CPU power via an API. This was a niche rather than the general-purpose platform it eventually turned into, but it was definitely a useful product.
Yeah maybe useless was over egging it a bit, I'd revised AWS to niche product. The key was rapid iteration and feature additions by investing capital. UK tech companies don't seem to really do that's everything is very geared towards extracting value today rather than building value for tomorrow and that means if a company is unable to extract value today it is deemed unviable.
Truss: "It seems to me the money is going in [to the NHS] but we are not seeing the impact of the money on the front line.."
She is going to be an electoral disaster.
Every rightwing columnist fervently believes this mantra.
No ordinary voter out in the marginal seats believes a word of it. They just know grandma had to lie in piss sodden pants for 24 hours and uncle fred is on a 18 month waiting list.
Good luck Tory members.
There is a widespread view that the gateway to the NHS (GPs) is broken.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
Big bugbear for me this - the idea that scientists and ‘people in tech’ are not creative. Utter rubbish. Where do you think the tech comes from? It doesn’t just happen. Really smart people have ideas and then make stuff happen.
Creativity isn’t just writing trash airport fiction, however lucrative that can be.
OK, I'll rephrase. They are not known for their "imaginative emotional intelligence"
Three words is a genius way of describing every single 3 sq m place on earth. Three words!!
Has L'Académie française had anything to say about it? Or Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg? It's an effective way to plant the anglosphere's muddy footprint on every 3m square in the world but it's easy to imagine why lesser folk might take offence.
They have made it available in 57 languages. Every 3sq m corner has a different French, Italian, Arabic, Punjabi. Chinese, Swahili name. Etc etc. Probably Welsh, too
However I see your point, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. If W3W becomes the global standard then every 3sq m will have two names - the local name and the default English name
Thus the hegemony of English will extend. Oh well
That's remarkable. I wonder if other languages have enough words. English is exceptional because it has hoovered up a few other languages en passant and rightly deserves its hegemony.
Yes, I don't know how they've done it, English has a bigger vocab than any other language by a distance, and they still nearly maxed out. They've got 57 trillion geo-terms and apparently there are 62 trillion three word phrase combos in English (which aren't racist, or sexist, or porno, etc)
Perhaps they used a lot of plurals with smaller, lesser languages?
Anyway I suspect English will be the default for many
There are plenty of three word combos that don't resolve, so I'm not convinced there are only 62 trillion three word phrase combos.
That's what I read today. 62 trillion. They say they had 40,000 words to play with, once they got rid of all the dodgy or sexy or overly weird/complex ones
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
Big bugbear for me this - the idea that scientists and ‘people in tech’ are not creative. Utter rubbish. Where do you think the tech comes from? It doesn’t just happen. Really smart people have ideas and then make stuff happen.
Creativity isn’t just writing trash airport fiction, however lucrative that can be.
OK, I'll rephrase. They are not known for their "imaginative emotional intelligence"
Three words is a genius way of describing every single 3 sq m place on earth. Three words!!
Has L'Académie française had anything to say about it? Or Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg? It's an effective way to plant the anglosphere's muddy footprint on every 3m square in the world but it's easy to imagine why lesser folk might take offence.
They have made it available in 57 languages. Every 3sq m corner has a different French, Italian, Arabic, Punjabi. Chinese, Swahili name. Etc etc. Probably Welsh, too
However I see your point, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. If W3W becomes the global standard then every 3sq m will have two names - the local name and the default English name
Thus the hegemony of English will extend. Oh well
That's remarkable. I wonder if other languages have enough words. English is exceptional because it has hoovered up a few other languages en passant and rightly deserves its hegemony.
Yes, I don't know how they've done it, English has a bigger vocab than any other language by a distance, and they still nearly maxed out. They've got 57 trillion geo-terms and apparently there are 62 trillion three word phrase combos in English (which aren't racist, or sexist, or porno, etc)
Perhaps they used a lot of plurals with smaller, lesser languages?
Anyway I suspect English will be the default for many
There are plenty of three word combos that don't resolve, so I'm not convinced there are only 62 trillion three word phrase combos.
That's what I read today. 62 trillion. They say they had 40,000 words to play with, once they got rid of all the dodgy or sexy or overly weird/complex ones
Nigel Pocklington @Nigelpock · 3h The energy price cap figure for January constitutes 45% of the state pension. We cannot expect anybody to live with that cost. We need urgent intervention.
Am I the only one that still doesn’t know the Finland rumour?
Me neither. But I seem to recall a traveller's tale that a typical Finnish bath time routine includes rolling around naked in the snow thrashing each other with birch twigs. So if that's what passes for a normal domestic evening I assume their rumour mill would come up with something a little more exhilarating.
On one hand, there's clearly a thriller plot in this.
On the other, there must be a ratio where people just trying out random combinations of words ruins the viability of the company. So night, all.
Getting from the words to map coordinates and vice versa should fit in the browser, and the rest of the application is just showing you those coordinates in Google Maps, so plausibly those searches don't require any network traffic at their end at all.
You have now bitterly criticised What 3 Words for multiple entirely different rationales, 1. that it is only doing something Google Maps already does., or 2. because it is rubbish and no better than a folding map, compass and protactor and pencil, and monocle, or 3. That it is a brutally litigious company and evil, or 4. That they stole the original idea ANYWAY, and now we have 5. That it is tiny and failing and makes no profit so nurr
This is not a logical response, some of these are contradictory. This is pure emotion
I can only conclude you are a Jealous Tech Bro, consumed with envy that you didn't think of this, and lashing out thereby
In a nutshell, this attitude espoused by Alistair is why the UK has so few tech champions and America so many.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
The US seems to have a much better handle on seeing the end goal and eventual profitability and valuation of tech companies than we do. If w3w was American it would be worth 10x as much and iterated the product 10x faster.
Yes, quite. It's a kind of Tall Poppy syndrome, and as dispiriting as it is perplexing. There are similar W3W haters on Twitter, nearly all tech geeks who haven't quite made it
We often lament that the UK has not produced a Google, Apple or Amazon; well here is a British-designed, London-HQ'd start-up with a superb central idea, and the potential to become absolutely massive, maybe not an Apple but certainly an Uber. Remember that Amazon started as a bookseller. Online book selling. That was THEIR big idea. But they scaled and scaled
And how do many react to W3W, which has a much better idea than bookselling? With sneers, critiques and weird hatred. WTF
Luckily, many in Britain and elsewhere ignore the naysayers. I am right now reading that London is now attracting more FDI into tech than any other city on earth
You are joking. Uber's value proposition is that they have liquidity in big urban markets around the world. w3w's proposition is that it makes life slightly easier for Scottish mountain rescue and Gambian delivery men. It would have been an amazing idea if nobody had invented location services.
May I direct you, an idiot, to this 3 sq m home for idiots near Lake Athabasca, in remote Saskatchewan, Canada
This is yet one more reason why What3Words is, I suspect, going to succeed. It is going to be fun to play with for millions of people. 3 words. What do YOUR 3 words say?
People in tech are not known for their creative imagination, to put it kindly
I rather like w3w. When I lost my wallet last week the finder sent me a w3w location of the spot to meet him to effect its return. But that was the first time I've ever used it and the old fashioned vague description would probably have worked just as well. I'm not entirely sure what vital niche it fills. It's an admirably creative solution to a problem I personally have never had. But I suppose lots of things fall into that category. Things don't have to be useful to me personally in order to be useful.
There are various codes and identifiers in our lives and some of these are well-designed and some are not.
Postal codes are well-designed. They encode a lot of information efficiently, and their structure makes them easier to remember, and they enable efficient sorting of mail.
An HMRC UTR number may have some beneficial attributes I'm not aware of. A check-digit, perhaps. But a 10-digit number is not easy for most people to remember, and for that reason I would say it's poorly-designed, until convinced otherwise.
Clearly there are lots of coordinate systems or descriptions that one can use to identify specific locations, but the use of words, rather than numbers, make the identifiers much easier to remember, and should have other benefits in terms of error-checking.
It does seem like the person they stole the idea from had a better idea in using slightly more simpler and more distinct words than using three words from a much larger set. A shame they weren't able to hire a decent patent attorney, rather than relying on advice from randoms on the web to defend their invention.
I've seen that guy's claims
He says he used just 1000 words turned into multiple chains of 5 words. That's a shite idea because so many words will be repeated constantly it makes them all highly similar (If I have got it right)
Besides, he might be talking bollox, trying to grab the glory of someone else's idea, when the idea was just in the air, waiting to be plucked. Weren't there about fifteen people who had the idea for the lightbulb? See also Darwin and others and evolution, and so forth
So they used 3 words from a 40,000 word dictionary for 6.4*10^13 codepoints, and they needed 5.7*10^13.
The other guy used 5 words from a 1,024 word dictionary for more than 1.1*10^15 codepoints. This means he would only need to use about 1-in-20 of his possible combinations. This increases the error-checking robustness of the system, as does using a smaller dictionary, because that means you can weed out plurals, homophones, hard to spell words, and other problems with a dictionary about 40 times larger.
With 1024 different words you have an average density of each word occurring once in every 205 squares, or about twice in an acre, but you would have a unique two-word combination over an area of 1024 times that. Nearly 2 sq km. I think that's fine, given that we're talking about errors on three whole words, rather than single letters.
Incidentally, 3m by 3m squares make sense because they're about a tenth of an arc-second square at the equator. So that's replacing eight numbers (or up to 16 decimal digits) with three or five words. It is a shame the implementation isn't better. It would be as though Morse had patented his first code and then prevented anyone from improving on it.
If you're going to let people patent ideas like this then the patent system should be a lot better at ensuring the right person holds the patent. And maybe we shouldn't let such wide patents be granted.
Bloody hell, I wander off for 24 hours and you're STILL all talking about just 3 words and Finland - has Leon cast a magic spell on the site? If this keeps up we'll be begging Putin to send us some trolls to liven things up a bit.
Bloody hell, I wander off for 24 hours and you're STILL all talking about just 3 words and Finland - has Leon cast a magic spell on the site? If this keeps up we'll be begging Putin to send us some trolls to liven things up a bit.
Changing the subject, do we reckon Ukraine caused the explosions at armadillos.spectacular.misjudge or is it some kind of false flag operation aimed at getting Belarus into the war?
Done my bit for your 250-1 shot. Sadly, going to be a losing bet because ...God knows why. Truss is an order of magnitude poorer on every metric.
We don't need God's help here. Unfortunately your party has an inbuilt majority who hear only what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. And they want to hear what Truss is telling them, regardless of the fact it bears no resemblance to reality.
It's interesting that AFAIK none of the self-declared PB Tory members on here except Barty (is he even a member?) are voting for Truss.
Much as I deeply disagree with PB Tories on most topics I totally respect that they represent the small and ever-diminishing 'sane wing' of the Tory party.
What was the PB Tory voting like in the 2019 contest ? Was it similar with nearly everyone on PB voting for Hunt ? Or, was there very substantial support for Johnson ?
I am wondering how much the PB Tory voting for Sunak is a predictor for the results of the 2022 contest ?
Are we seriously suggesting the Conservative Party, having effectively defenestrated their last three leaders would oust a fourth before said leader had even faced the electorate?
Is there any modern precedent for a Prime Minister to be installed without a General Election and to be ousted without having contested a General Election as Prime Minister? I can't think of one since 1918 - might have been one earlier of course.
I'm rooting for the parliamentary party to tell her she's lost their confidence before voting has even finished
Those who are in a position to consider removing a prime minister don't think to themselves "We can't do it before the next election because there's no precedent for that, given that they were installed without fighting one, and even less so given that they took office on the same day of the week as Andrew Bonar Law."
If you are hoping that removing Truss will help your dear leader Putin, then you are going to be sorely disappointed.
The likely replacement for Truss would be Ben Wallace, and he is as committed to helping Ukraine as Truss.
We are going to be fucking tortured on the day he discovers Telegram.
You are, all of you, utterly pathetic in the way you let me derail debate after debate, into whatever discussion I fancy
I could arrive here at 10am and say “Look, I’m really fucked off with sheep pretending to be circus clowns” and by 7pm you’d still be discussing the whole sheep as clowns thing. And then a few of you would quietly moan about it like tired wives, then back to the latest sheep-clown scandal
I can’t help being Dom. It’s not my fault if you’re all subs
Done my bit for your 250-1 shot. Sadly, going to be a losing bet because ...God knows why. Truss is an order of magnitude poorer on every metric.
We don't need God's help here. Unfortunately your party has an inbuilt majority who hear only what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. And they want to hear what Truss is telling them, regardless of the fact it bears no resemblance to reality.
Done my bit for your 250-1 shot. Sadly, going to be a losing bet because ...God knows why. Truss is an order of magnitude poorer on every metric.
We don't need God's help here. Unfortunately your party has an inbuilt majority who hear only what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. And they want to hear what Truss is telling them, regardless of the fact it bears no resemblance to reality.
It's interesting that AFAIK none of the self-declared PB Tory members on here except Barty (is he even a member?) are voting for Truss.
Much as I deeply disagree with PB Tories on most topics I totally respect that they represent the small and ever-diminishing 'sane wing' of the Tory party.
What was the PB Tory voting like in the 2019 contest ? Was it similar with nearly everyone on PB voting for Hunt ? Or, was there very substantial support for Johnson ?
I am wondering how much the PB Tory voting for Sunak is a predictor for the results of the 2022 contest ?
Nah - Brexit was the key determining factor in 2019.
Johnson may be a SOB but he is our SOB, to paraphrase.
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
This is more like "if you don't get it right over the course of nine years don't bother", though... Gmail, iPhone and AWS all demonstrated that they could move from "cool idea with promise" to "clearly profitable winning product and business model" in that timeframe.
You’ve not followed biotech development, then. At least 10 years is usually needed to get a drug from discovery to approval. It’s only them that you find out whether you can make a profit with it.
Most of the failures occur earlier than the full 9 years. Getting rejected in the regulatory phase is very very expensive
EXCLUSIVE: Liz Truss campaign manager Iain Duncan Smith told an online meeting hosted by the Conservative Christian Fellowship that she 'hated' her own policy on banning gay conversion therapy, hinting that she may drop it if elected leader https://twitter.com/openDemocracy/status/1557368201029292032
To my mind w3w is a good idea executed imperfectly, but then again so was Gmail when it launched, the first iPhone was a pile of wank and AWS was completely useless when it launched. In Alistair's world if you don't get it right first time don't bother, and that seems to be the attitude of both UK investors and management.
This is more like "if you don't get it right over the course of nine years don't bother", though... Gmail, iPhone and AWS all demonstrated that they could move from "cool idea with promise" to "clearly profitable winning product and business model" in that timeframe.
You’ve not followed biotech development, then. At least 10 years is usually needed to get a drug from discovery to approval. It’s only them that you find out whether you can make a profit with it.
Most of the failures occur earlier than the full 9 years. Getting rejected in the regulatory phase is very very expensive
Sure, there’s an heavy attrition rate at every stage of the process.
My point was that you can make it all the way through regulatory approval, and still not have a profitable drug.
Comments
Every single UK emergency service: every ambulance, fire and police service, is asking people to download it. Check Twitter
Imagine you are in a field and you see a fire starting (say, during this heatwave). You can go on Google maps and put a pin down and share that (awkwardly) or you can use W3W and share it in seconds with complete, memorable precision. The fire is staring in ///dildo.whatever.ouch
It's much more intuitive
Ditto wildlife crimes, or wandering mad grandparents, or lost pets, or bigfoot seen here, etc etc etc
I don't think first responders would be asking people to use this service, unless they genuinely believed it made things easier, quicker and safer
It's in Brazil. I was kinda hoping it would be in Finland
https://what3words.com/politicians.sheep.scandal
https://what3words.com/treat.like.conscript
At least 10 years is usually needed to get a drug from discovery to approval. It’s only them that you find out whether you can make a profit with it.
This could be such fun.
https://what3words.com/betting.fools.loss
... is somewhere up a mountain in Alaska
https://what3words.com/mushrooms.plenty.field
No, really, it will. You find a big autumn crop of Liberty Caps. You want to tell your friends exactly WHAT corner of that obscure damp meadow near Hay Bluff has a fab harvest of psilocybin semilanceata
Well, now you know how to do it. Precisely
Dexter Wansel, Roy Ayers and the Jungle Brothers are all playing this month
However I see your point, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. If W3W becomes the global standard then every 3sq m will have two names - the local name and the default English name
Thus the hegemony of English will extend. Oh well
As for your previous comment, I had the original iPhone and was an alpha and beta tester for Gmail. The iPhone was part revolutionary part complete shit, an internet and media device which had EDGE and so many software glitches. Yet it was a completely new way of doing something and the potential was clear. A UK company that invented the iPhone (Palm) didn't see the same potential and investors didn't either. It went bankrupt. On Gmail, the first iteration was far, far worse than the Outlook desktop app it intended to replace and worse than Hotmail which it intended to compete with in the online space. It took multiple iterations and development time to Gmail close to working and then all of the bolt on apps like docs to make the internet only email experience worthwhile.
Anyway, my point is that American companies and investors recognise potential far better than we do and that's why we have few to no tech champions. Even a company like ARM which is hugely successful as an IP licencing company is far, far behind AMD and Nvidia as a fabless microprocessor company.
I had lived there till I was 18 completely oblivious to the fact it was a prime location.
https://what3words.com/pizza.pineapple.topping
Somewhere in Eastern Russia near Amga, Republic of Sakha.
Cane toppers: essential to avoid eye accidents.
See here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thick-Rubber-Garden-Safety-Toppers/dp/B077DV5WW6.
https://what3words.com/like.radio.head
On the outskirts of Cambridge.
The police thought it was Cumbria 2 and hit every red button.
Perhaps they used a lot of plurals with smaller, lesser languages?
Anyway I suspect English will be the default for many
https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1557476914280931331?s=21&t=NuZvBAgu6yzzzXy6SFpXcA
This goes far beyond what we’ve seen in previous leadership races, and begs questions about what the point is at this stage?
It feels less like a leadership race and more like a civil war.
* like death
https://what3words.com/flint.napping.fool
This is all absolute rubbish - there is no way to have a leadership election without some blood being spilt, and it's all been reasonably policy-based attacks; almost nothing personal (and most of the personal stuff has come from Dorries).
(Coincidentally it's the business model where w3w is a bit shaky, and I think their problems are there rather than in not getting enough investment.)
Leadsom’s grandmotherly claims were made sotto voce and caused such an uproar she was forced to self-eject.
Newen Afrobeat feat. Seun Kuti & Cheick Tidiane Seck - Opposite People (Fela Kuti)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFSRCG4DrmI
Khala My Friend, by Amanaz.
https://youtu.be/GjUOYLJ8IYI
OK, it's not Finland, but the truth is out there. (Admittedly, it's a rather soggy truth.)
Postal codes are well-designed. They encode a lot of information efficiently, and their structure makes them easier to remember, and they enable efficient sorting of mail.
An HMRC UTR number may have some beneficial attributes I'm not aware of. A check-digit, perhaps. But a 10-digit number is not easy for most people to remember, and for that reason I would say it's poorly-designed, until convinced otherwise.
Clearly there are lots of coordinate systems or descriptions that one can use to identify specific locations, but the use of words, rather than numbers, make the identifiers much easier to remember, and should have other benefits in terms of error-checking.
It does seem like the person they stole the idea from had a better idea in using slightly more simpler and more distinct words than using three words from a much larger set. A shame they weren't able to hire a decent patent attorney, rather than relying on advice from randoms on the web to defend their invention.
She is going to be an electoral disaster.
Every rightwing columnist fervently believes this mantra.
No ordinary voter out in the marginal seats believes a word of it. They just know grandma had to lie in piss sodden pants for 24 hours and uncle fred is on a 18 month waiting list.
Good luck Tory members.
Yeah, I'd guess that the issue for w3w has been poor iteration of the core product rather than raising money just because the idea and IP is extremely valuable in an era where everyone uses their phones to guide them to wherever it is they're going and having a simple, easy to understand and global system for it is a bloody great idea.
He says he used just 1000 words turned into multiple chains of 5 words. That's a shite idea because so many words will be repeated constantly it makes them all highly similar (If I have got it right)
Besides, he might be talking bollox, trying to grab the glory of someone else's idea, when the idea was just in the air, waiting to be plucked. Weren't there about fifteen people who had the idea for the lightbulb? See also Darwin and others and evolution, and so forth
Not sure quite why but reminds me a bit of this
60,000,000 Buffalo - Lovely Ladies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaZzdFy7jHo
Plus they had other self-imposed restrictions
Who'd have thunk it.
Edit to add: oops. It's actually 64 trillion.
This is going to be an endless recurring joke now, isn't it?
And that word identifies which habitable planet a person is on.
So, I for example, would say that I am on "earth".
Maybe the sort of military tactics where you don't just beat the enemy, you destroy them unto the thousandth generation.
Maybe Liz wants to make sure that Rishi is so discredited that he can't threaten her post-September.
Maybe Liz has gone full-on tonto before she has even moved into Number Ten, in order to save time later.
Lots of possibilities, most of them not good.
https://what3words.com/necklace.dress.leader
It's just outside HELSINKI
LBC
@LBC
'But you're in government, it's your job for god's sake!'
Eddie Mair's heated interview with Tory MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith on the cost-of-living crisis.
https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1557392134281596928
===
She is going to be a disaster.
@Nigelpock
·
3h
The energy price cap figure for January constitutes 45% of the state pension. We cannot expect anybody to live with that cost. We need urgent intervention.
https://twitter.com/Nigelpock/status/1557443832471605251
===
wow. 45%.
Truss better have a plan she's not telling us about or she is going to be buried.
Wow.
https://what3words.com/tailed.gagging.trips
Central Helsinki
https://what3words.com/bikers.follow.tempting
On the other, there must be a ratio where people just trying out random combinations of words ruins the viability of the company. So night, all.
OTOH I am off for a Chilterns hike tomorrow, so I need some sleep. Goodnight, PB!
Maybe the whole thing is an elaborate Kit Williams style Masquerade and there is hidden treasure?
The other guy used 5 words from a 1,024 word dictionary for more than 1.1*10^15 codepoints. This means he would only need to use about 1-in-20 of his possible combinations. This increases the error-checking robustness of the system, as does using a smaller dictionary, because that means you can weed out plurals, homophones, hard to spell words, and other problems with a dictionary about 40 times larger.
With 1024 different words you have an average density of each word occurring once in every 205 squares, or about twice in an acre, but you would have a unique two-word combination over an area of 1024 times that. Nearly 2 sq km. I think that's fine, given that we're talking about errors on three whole words, rather than single letters.
Incidentally, 3m by 3m squares make sense because they're about a tenth of an arc-second square at the equator. So that's replacing eight numbers (or up to 16 decimal digits) with three or five words. It is a shame the implementation isn't better. It would be as though Morse had patented his first code and then prevented anyone from improving on it.
If you're going to let people patent ideas like this then the patent system should be a lot better at ensuring the right person holds the patent. And maybe we shouldn't let such wide patents be granted.
Duncan- Smith had an easy ride on R4 PM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUKZJA6Bixs
Ukraine risking strikes on Belarus or Russia trying to provoke something? Always hard to tell.
I guess the satellites will tell us sooner or later whether there were any actual 'assets' involved...
I am wondering how much the PB Tory voting for Sunak is a predictor for the results of the 2022 contest ?
The likely replacement for Truss would be Ben Wallace, and he is as committed to helping Ukraine as Truss.
I could arrive here at 10am and say “Look, I’m really fucked off with sheep pretending to be circus clowns” and by 7pm you’d still be discussing the whole sheep as clowns thing. And then a few of you would quietly moan about it like tired wives, then back to the latest sheep-clown scandal
I can’t help being Dom. It’s not my fault if you’re all subs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#2022
Johnson may be a SOB but he is our SOB, to paraphrase.
Mr. Borough, Mars is also inhabited (exclusively by robots).
https://twitter.com/openDemocracy/status/1557368201029292032
My point was that you can make it all the way through regulatory approval, and still not have a profitable drug.
You mainly hear about the blockbusters.