The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
I've just - for reasons - taken a quick look at the X account of Ashlea Simon, the leader of Britain First. She doesn't quite have your prose skills but the sentiments and agenda are almost identical. Don't know what you have to say about that.
I told you, I did the latest political compass test, and I came out EXACTLY on the spot supposedly occupied by the classic Conservatives. It’s just that the actual Conservatives have moved to the left of Blair
You're saying you're a fossilised old thing, then.
It works because about 90% off people never click the link or try and find actual evidence.
Python is awful - don't use whitespace to represent significancy...
It is no more ridiculous than using lots of brackets (of varying types).
Python has fantastic, clean syntax. It has incredible data science libraries. And these days, computers (and computing power) is cheap.
Other than occasional bits of Javascript, when I have a need to do something webby, I wouldn't use anything else. There's simply no point, because quick to write, readable code, is worth a lot more than a few processor cycles.
oh I just have a dislike of Python but I started off when Javascript was Livescript and Perl was the in thing.
I personally prefer the latest version of Delphi (i.e. C# )..
99% of my "coding" these days is data analysis, where Python + Pandas + Jupyter is absolutely superb, especially if you use Google's hosted Colab service. I'm playing around with massive datasets and running analyses in seconds that would historically have taken days. (And also required a team of people.)
You use whatever has the best libraries for whatever it is you want to do. If that's Python, then great. And if it's JavaScript, for God's sake use TypeScript!
The real problem with Python and JavaScript is the large numbers of self taught people.
Who haven’t heard of code structure, testing pyramids or even code versioning tools.
“No, Quant Boy, the Python file you emailed me isn’t going directly into production. Aside from the fact it doesn’t actually run, we need tests. And test data. And some QA. and running on all the non-prod environments first…. Also, where is the specification? ‘cause Compliance will quite interested in how we are pricing stuff.”
While I largely agree with what you say, it is also great to have the freedom to implement stuff as you see fit without having to specify every last widget to the n-th degree. Obviously that's easier when working iteratively as a sole developer on small projects.
Also, bad code implemented by self-taught developers is by no means restricted to Python and JavaScript. The codebase at my last workplace was a tangled mess of undocumented C++ dating back decades and presided over by an old-school self-taught coder with a pathological hatred of whitespace and line breaks. That was the last straw for me.
Indeed
Just that these days the self taught types are hacking in Python.
There was this mad guy who was going to replace Excel with a spreadsheet backed by Python as the scripting language. Whatever happened to him?
It's funny you ask... because that company (Resolver Systems) ended up becoming PythonAnywhere, which was acquired by Anaconda, and which has just launched Python in Excel (https://docs.anaconda.com/excel/).
Python, Anaconda, GitHub, Jupyter, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib... you have no idea how happy it makes me that I no longer have to worry about those things.
Matplotlib needs taking round the back of the barn and put out of its misery.
I’ve emotionally gone from being mentally and emotionally reconciled to a Trump win to having hope that Harris actually might do it. Sadly it’s the hope that kills you.
*Raises eyebrows*
Has Governor Walz's daughter taken up a new career?
You’re going to have to explain that one to me.
She’s called Hope and may have become an assassin according to your post…
It wasn’t really worth explaining…
But she is called Hope as she was an IVF baby and somehow the Republicans have managed to put themselves in the position of looking anti-IVF.
I thought they *were* anti-IVF?
I am anti taxpayer-funded IVF.
In the scheme of things I can think of a whole set of items that I object to far more.
Giving a family a chance of children seems to be a noble use of a tiny percentage of what I pay in taxes.
Certainly with fertility rates now below replacement level in the UK and USA
Sadly, reproductive services are something that the NHS have all but abandoned.
Technically, they still aim to offer three cycles to under-40s, and one to those aged 40 and 41 - but in most of the country are nowhere close to achieving this. The usual pattern is to mange the problem by delaying long enough that people age out of eligibility, so if you're in your mid 30s they'll drag it out so you get one cycle at 38 or 39, and another a couple of years later. And that's only if you're very persistent.
In reality, most people on average need around four cycles, with some trying up to six before giving up. Each cycle typically costs around £10k.
Fertility rapidly declines once you hit your late 20s, but as a society we've set ourselves up so that people are unable to even consider having children until a decade later. So we're effectively expecting people to pay £20k or so on average to be able to have children, and that's before you even get on to the nightmarish situation that NHS maternity services are in.
Agreed, though there is the freezing eggs option too.
Of course in the 1930s there was mass unemployment and most people of all ages rented but yet most 20 to 30 year olds had children and the fertility rate was above average so it is also a lifestyle choice, especially with more women wanting careers and leaving children until their 30s and early 40s if they decide to have them at all
Egg-freezing is £20k and only works about half the time. It's also less likely to be covered by private health insurance than IVF, though some employers do explicitly fund it separately.
As for it being a lifestyle choice, I think it's a bit stronger than that. It's a choice between building your career, being able to rent a flat by yourself, and generally having a stable life that you control before getting pregnant - or having kids in your 20s, and hoping that the state will provide an adequate safety net if things go wrong.
Not many people trust that safety net these days, and I don't think it's fair to blame them for that.
As with so much else, the best way to fix this would be to ease the pressure on housing. If the best a 20-something at the start of a professional career can expect is to live in a houseshare for the next decade, then is it any wonder why they're not settling down and having kids?
Absolutely!
And this is another reason why too everyone who is working ought to be able to afford a home of their own, from their own efforts, with no inheritance in their twenties as was achievable in the past and could be again if the prices were more appropriate.
An inheritance if you get one (and many won't) is likely to come in your sixties or later nowadays and won't get you on the housing ladder in your twenties.
Most people rented 100 years ago, they still managed to have children in their 20s
'Managed' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Society was organised entirely differently, and there were little to no reliable forms of contraception.
I am staggered by those who stagger through life waiting for an inheritance.
Inheritance is irrelevant to this argument as it 100 years ago most couples in their 20s rented and did not have an inheritance but still managed to have children.
Of course we could also go Vatican and restrict contraception too, certainly to 20-35 year olds at peak fertility in settled relationships
I'm not sure how settled most of those relationships would be if contraception was entirely eliminated.
Full Vatican of course would be no sex unless married and no contraception if having sex in marriage
Of course, we could just ignore religion in our everyday lives.
And continue with below replacement level birthrate
So you make it inevitable that millions are born into poverty and end up reliant on the state. I thought you Tories hated benefit culture, now you want to turn the taps on?
No that is the other extreme. Below replacement level birth rates just make it inevitable those of working age have to pay ever higher taxes to support the old, retirement ages become later as we need to work longer and economic growth slows.
Conservatives support the family too, they may not be socialists but they are not laissez faire economic liberals either. Plus now it is the middle class having lower birth rates than the working class if anything as graduate women delay childbirth for careers first
Oh come on, @HYUFD: you must know that the exceptionally high cost of housing is a massive deterrent to having children early.
One of my best friends, who I've known since fourth form, got married at 22, bought a house, and had kids early. He worked for the council.
That would be completely impossible today.
His children are not going to be able to afford houses - even assuming they save a significant proportion of their disposable income - until they are into their 30s.
It is part of the answer but not the only one, as I said on the previous thread in the 1930s most 20-30 year olds rented and a few were unemployed in the depression but most had 2 or more children by 35.
Yes we need more affordable homes to buy or rent but women continuing to prioritise graduate careers as their focus until their mid 30s-early 40s rather than marriage and children as well will continue to keep the fertility rate down
What has the 1930s got to do with modern Britain and re your last paragraph my daughter in law had her first child at 30 and her third child at 40 so she is hardly keeping fertility rates down
First child at 30 is better than the UK average of 32 now
We should ensure homes are affordable so people can settle down into a home of their own in their twenties.
We should but even if the average home was only 4 times average salary and immigration was brought under control reducing demand I suspect many professional women graduates would still put their careers first in their 20s and not think about having children until over 30. Many young men would also put playing the field first in their 20s too. Even if they all owned their own home by 30
I can think of some not so young men still playing the field in middle age. Even eminent Conservatives. So you're in the wrong party.
I'm old enough to remember Back to Basics, see.
Yes but even David Mellor and Cecil Parkinson had had 2 children each before they were naughty boys
Yes but even David Mellor and Cecil Parkinson had had 2 children each before they were caught being naughty boys
Tim Yeo had three children before being caught being a naughty boy.
No. 1 came as a surprise to his wife...
I've never understood who has time for an affair: I mean it would really get in the way of posting on PB.
A 3-minute gap between posts is all that is needed.
Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey Still no answer to why it will take to next year before Alex Rudakubana the alleged murderer of the 3 young girls in South Oct will stand trial ?
Community notes can be very entertaining sometimes. A genuinely great idea.
People dis Twitter* under Musk, but he has implemented two genuinely useful features:
(1) Community notes (2) People I follow
It means I see fewer Marjorie Taylor Greene posts. Which is good.
* I refuse to call it "X"
Community Notes predates Musk
Sort of.
There was a program that created Notes that predated Musk, but it wasn't very widespread nor was it open source - and it had a different name.
The current version dates from Musk.
The story I’ve seen elsewhere is that the current version was in development before Musk bought the company. He just happened to be in charge when it was finished up & pushed to production.
Always remember the six stages of a project:
1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise for those not involved
There are some interesting horror stories out there about the Twitter code base and what was going on before the takeover. There was a reason that features were simply not appearing in production...
Given Musk is apparently not a good coder, I wouldn't assume he's made the codebase any better...
I see he's been caught retweeting a ludicrous piece of mendacity from a hard right racist fringe British politician. What chance do we have of social media getting better at combatting lies and misinformation when the person who owns a chunk of it is intent on encouraging it?
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
Yes. Russia will become a feudal state, subject to China, like 13th century Brittany paying obeisance to France. Or Scotland at any time
Bit of a bummer for the ultra-nationalist Russian philosophes who envisaged China subservient to Moscow
I have no particular background or insight into Russian political culture, but it does occur to me that some of the explanation for Putin’s behaviour/Russian nationalism in the recent couple of decades is their cultural, economic and military threat from the south.
They feel insecure as hell. Their solution is to dominate their western neighbours.
It is worth remembering both Arizona and Nevada will have abortion access on the ballot. In the mid-terms, in states where that was a question it proved damaging to the Republicans.
Trump has made clear he will leave abortion law to each state, he does not back a Federal abortion ban as some evangelicals want
Trump is what a typical New York social liberal would have been 20 years ago.
The Bill Maher viewpoint, where he says that his opinions haven’t changed for decades, but those of his (Dem) party have changed significantly.
That's a load of balls. A typical NY liberal would hardly have celebrated his achievement in enabling the repeal of Roe v Wade.
20 years ago this was on no-one’s radar.
That's rather the point. Though it's been a long term project of the US right since the Federalist Society was formed.
Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey Still no answer to why it will take to next year before Alex Rudakubana the alleged murderer of the 3 young girls in South Oct will stand trial ?
Community notes can be very entertaining sometimes. A genuinely great idea.
People dis Twitter* under Musk, but he has implemented two genuinely useful features:
(1) Community notes (2) People I follow
It means I see fewer Marjorie Taylor Greene posts. Which is good.
* I refuse to call it "X"
Community Notes predates Musk
Sort of.
There was a program that created Notes that predated Musk, but it wasn't very widespread nor was it open source - and it had a different name.
The current version dates from Musk.
The story I’ve seen elsewhere is that the current version was in development before Musk bought the company. He just happened to be in charge when it was finished up & pushed to production.
Always remember the six stages of a project:
1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise for those not involved
There are some interesting horror stories out there about the Twitter code base and what was going on before the takeover. There was a reason that features were simply not appearing in production...
Given Musk is apparently not a good coder, I wouldn't assume he's made the codebase any better...
I see he's been caught retweeting a ludicrous piece of mendacity from a hard right racist fringe British politician. What chance do we have of social media getting better at combatting lies and misinformation when the person who owns a chunk of it is intent on encouraging it?
You were fine when it was left wing Facebook and Twitter prohibiting anyone even MENTIONING the lab leak hypothesis - for a year
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
Yes. Russia will become a feudal state, subject to China, like 13th century Brittany paying obeisance to France. Or Scotland at any time
Bit of a bummer for the ultra-nationalist Russian philosophes who envisaged China subservient to Moscow
I have no particular background or insight into Russian political culture, but it does occur to me that some of the explanation for Putin’s behaviour/Russian nationalism in the recent couple of decades is their cultural, economic and military threat from the south.
They feel insecure as hell.
Yes. They are almost certain to be dominated by China - an economy six times the size - and they won’t like it at all. It inverts their experience of the last 250 years at least, when Russia/USSR was superior
You can't do it whilst smoking... unless they spin *really* fast..
I read that one of the British golfer is buggered as this Olympics as they normally chain smoke their way around normally and Olympics is a smoke free zone.
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
Yes. Russia will become a feudal state, subject to China, like 13th century Brittany paying obeisance to France. Or Scotland at any time
Bit of a bummer for the ultra-nationalist Russian philosophes who envisaged China subservient to Moscow
I have no particular background or insight into Russian political culture, but it does occur to me that some of the explanation for Putin’s behaviour/Russian nationalism in the recent couple of decades is their cultural, economic and military threat from the south.
They feel insecure as hell. Their solution is to dominate their western neighbours.
Indeed, their western neighbours don't have nuclear weapons unlike China either, at least until you get to France
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
This is like the call for everybody to go to Mastodon....or Threads....the people who make the most noise about it are usually the ones most addicted to the tw@tters.
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
China and the USSR fought division level engagements on that border.
But.
The Chinese don’t need to do anything. Every year, more Chinese move across the border. They are getting the resources and everything they want (except taxes) right now. What could they gain?
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
China and the USSR fought division level engagements on that border.
But.
The Chinese don’t need to do anything. Every year, more Chinese move across the border. They are getting the resources and everything they want (except taxes) right now. What could they gain?
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
Equally China is well aware Taiwan doesn't have nuclear weapons unlike Russia
I do worry how some of you will cope if Trump wins
I thought you were rooting against him now that Biden's been swapped for Harris? Or was that another little porkie?
You can read??? Which part of my comment says “yay I want Trump to win”?
It's going to be a long 3 months for you, isn't it. Pretence can be quite tiring.
Or, you could accept that I don’t want Trump to win. Then you could relax. Your obsession with my “real” political views is now verging on the bizarre and stalky
See my comments today about Trump’s insane tariff proposals on Chinese trade. That alone would crash the world economy. I don’t want that. I don’t want him to win
The difference is that I haven’t got Trump Derangement Syndrome, unlike quite a few on here. The idea of him winning is unpleasant for me, but it doesn’t send me into a spasm of suicidal weirdness
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey Still no answer to why it will take to next year before Alex Rudakubana the alleged murderer of the 3 young girls in South Oct will stand trial ?
Community notes can be very entertaining sometimes. A genuinely great idea.
People dis Twitter* under Musk, but he has implemented two genuinely useful features:
(1) Community notes (2) People I follow
It means I see fewer Marjorie Taylor Greene posts. Which is good.
* I refuse to call it "X"
Community Notes predates Musk
Sort of.
There was a program that created Notes that predated Musk, but it wasn't very widespread nor was it open source - and it had a different name.
The current version dates from Musk.
The story I’ve seen elsewhere is that the current version was in development before Musk bought the company. He just happened to be in charge when it was finished up & pushed to production.
Always remember the six stages of a project:
1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise for those not involved
There are some interesting horror stories out there about the Twitter code base and what was going on before the takeover. There was a reason that features were simply not appearing in production...
Given Musk is apparently not a good coder, I wouldn't assume he's made the codebase any better...
You're not say that he does all the coding for his companies, are you?
No. But I can guarantee that he will hire coders that match his image of a good coder... i.e. him. And the recruitment staff will be recruited on the same basis (I *still* see the old story of him personally interviewing all SpaceX staff...) (fx: hits head on wall.)
SpaceX is actually different, as space and NASA demand certain boxes ticked. I bet he hates those boxes.
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
Equally China is well aware Taiwan doesn't have nuclear weapons unlike Russia
Taiwan has extremely competent engineers, nuclear reactors and a variety of missiles and military aircraft.
It is widely assumed that they could make a bomb, if they wanted to.
Their level of preparation is not as extreme as Japan - which has a whole series of solid fueled space launchers that look exactly like ICBMs - but it would be *weeks* if they ever decided to go for it.
The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
I've just - for reasons - taken a quick look at the X account of Ashlea Simon, the leader of Britain First. She doesn't quite have your prose skills but the sentiments and agenda are almost identical. Don't know what you have to say about that.
I told you, I did the latest political compass test, and I came out EXACTLY on the spot supposedly occupied by the classic Conservatives. It’s just that the actual Conservatives have moved to the left of Blair
You're saying you're a fossilised old thing, then.
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
I've just - for reasons - taken a quick look at the X account of Ashlea Simon, the leader of Britain First. She doesn't quite have your prose skills but the sentiments and agenda are almost identical. Don't know what you have to say about that.
I told you, I did the latest political compass test, and I came out EXACTLY on the spot supposedly occupied by the classic Conservatives. It’s just that the actual Conservatives have moved to the left of Blair
I'm sure you did do that test and I'm sure that was the result. I did it too and I kept at it until I came out where I wanted. They're great, those tests.
Still, there it is. A statistically significant overlap between your output and that of the far right.
Eg do you remember when you said Kamala Harris was "dumb as a rock"?
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I suspect their resistance to your project is highly rational, for the very same reason you give.
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I my last place of employ they really tried hard to get everyone to use Teams. You knew though that you were in conversations with the senior team when you got a whatsapp message though
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
Yes, comrade.
Muscovites (and those from St Petersburg) don't really understand their country. The parties they go to in District 1 do not know what life is like in the other districts, where millions of people do not even have inside toilets, regardless of the state's massive wealth and power. And the fact District 1 is sending people from the other districts to fight in a pointless war, whilst protecting their own.
But those other Districts are resource-rich, and China needs those resources. And all they need to do is show how their own Districts have improved under the Chinese system, and how the Russian system has used and abused theirs.
It is worth remembering both Arizona and Nevada will have abortion access on the ballot. In the mid-terms, in states where that was a question it proved damaging to the Republicans.
Trump has made clear he will leave abortion law to each state, he does not back a Federal abortion ban as some evangelicals want
Trump is what a typical New York social liberal would have been 20 years ago.
The Bill Maher viewpoint, where he says that his opinions haven’t changed for decades, but those of his (Dem) party have changed significantly.
That's a load of balls. A typical NY liberal would hardly have celebrated his achievement in enabling the repeal of Roe v Wade.
20 years ago this was on no-one’s radar.
That's rather the point. Though it's been a long term project of the US right since the Federalist Society was formed.
Getting the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade has indeed been the project of decades for Republicans.
It’s not something that Trump himself cares about, but he knows it’s something his biggest supporters care about, and will be seen among Republicans as his biggest triumph as President.
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
Betfair take 5% of winnings though
Sure but it's only 5% of the 6% you make if you think backing both Trump and Harris is safe. (I don't). And also I think you can choose options on BF that reduce the commission, but lose any freebies. (In fact you can and their 'basic' option means you pay 2%)
The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
It would make a change from his usual concerns.
"He has been a strong voice for residents on issues ranging from housing and fly-tipping to unfair car parking charges."
The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
I've just - for reasons - taken a quick look at the X account of Ashlea Simon, the leader of Britain First. She doesn't quite have your prose skills but the sentiments and agenda are almost identical. Don't know what you have to say about that.
I told you, I did the latest political compass test, and I came out EXACTLY on the spot supposedly occupied by the classic Conservatives. It’s just that the actual Conservatives have moved to the left of Blair
I'm sure you did do that test and I'm sure that was the result. I did it too and I kept at it until I came out where I wanted. They're great, those tests.
Still, there it is. A statistically significant overlap between your output and that of the far right.
Eg do you remember when you said Kamala Harris was "dumb as a rock"?
I did the test once. You’re beginning to irritate me
Yes I did say that about Harris and I now think I misjudged her. I was relying on second hand reports from biased Americans, never a good thing. Always look with your own eyes and make a true objective assessment
The skilful way she’s handled this extraordinarily difficult transition - from Biden to her - tells me she has political cunning and brains. I think she will probably win (unless Trump drops out: not impossible). That will please me because Trump is a crazy fucker
If Trump drops out and a sane anti-woke Republican becomes the GOP candidate I will enthusiastically back that person over Harris
Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking. I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/“save” his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.
He just has to get over to Independents the fact that Harris and Walz are raging filthy commies.
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I my last place of employ they really tried hard to get everyone to use Teams. You knew though that you were in conversations with the senior team when you got a whatsapp message though
I made a point of not having WhatsApp on my own phone (my phone, not their phone) from the day I was hired.
One very senior manager didn’t understand that iMessage was a data message rather than an SMS, and wondered why I didn’t have WA on my phone.
I used to deliver a talk to schools and parents about IT security, called “Why I’m not on Facebook”.
Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey Still no answer to why it will take to next year before Alex Rudakubana the alleged murderer of the 3 young girls in South Oct will stand trial ?
Community notes can be very entertaining sometimes. A genuinely great idea.
People dis Twitter* under Musk, but he has implemented two genuinely useful features:
(1) Community notes (2) People I follow
It means I see fewer Marjorie Taylor Greene posts. Which is good.
* I refuse to call it "X"
Community Notes predates Musk
Sort of.
There was a program that created Notes that predated Musk, but it wasn't very widespread nor was it open source - and it had a different name.
The current version dates from Musk.
The story I’ve seen elsewhere is that the current version was in development before Musk bought the company. He just happened to be in charge when it was finished up & pushed to production.
Always remember the six stages of a project:
1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise for those not involved
There are some interesting horror stories out there about the Twitter code base and what was going on before the takeover. There was a reason that features were simply not appearing in production...
Given Musk is apparently not a good coder, I wouldn't assume he's made the codebase any better...
I see he's been caught retweeting a ludicrous piece of mendacity from a hard right racist fringe British politician. What chance do we have of social media getting better at combatting lies and misinformation when the person who owns a chunk of it is intent on encouraging it?
You were fine when it was left wing Facebook and Twitter prohibiting anyone even MENTIONING the lab leak hypothesis - for a year
Your schtick is getting like Donald Trump's. Past its sell-by. I recommend a reboot. He can't but I reckon you maybe can.
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
Betfair take 5% of winnings though
Sure but it's only 5% of the 6% you make if you think backing both Trump and Harris is safe. (I don't). And also I think you can choose options on BF that reduce the commission, but lose any freebies. (In fact you can and their 'basic' option means you pay 2%)
Anyone vaguely serious about gambling should be on their basic option. Even in the ridiculously inefficient political markets, a few % really eats into your edge. The freebies are peanuts in comparison.
Those *super* serious (more serious than me) eventually end up on a "winners tax" though that really eats into profits.
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
He's more likely to can Vance, than he is to hand over to him.
But it's an interesting question - what's our best guess as to what the nutter comes out with ? VP announcement ? A Trump crypto-coin ? Just a rant ?
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Given Twitter has only the 15th largest number of users of the different platforms, they can happily do both!
The third column is monthly active suers:
1 Facebook 3.06 billion 13,200,000,000 2 YouTube 2.70 billion 73,400,000,000 3 WhatsApp 2.40 billion 3,900,000,000 4 Instagram 2.35 billion 6,900,000,000 5 TikTok 1.67 billion 2,700,000,000 6 WeChat 1.31 billion 5,700,000 7 Messenger 1.10 billion 261,200,000 8 Telegram 900 million 614,000,000 9 Viber 820 million 16,600,000 10 Snapchat 800 million 194,800,000 11 Douyin 752 million 210,400,000 12 Baidu 676 million 1,600,000,000 13 Qzone 615 million 476,500,000 14 Spotify 602 million 718,800,000 15 X (Twitter) 600 million 4,100,000,000
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
Yes, comrade.
Muscovites (and those from St Petersburg) don't really understand their country. The parties they go to in District 1 do not know what life is like in the other districts, where millions of people do not even have inside toilets, regardless of the state's massive wealth and power. And the fact District 1 is sending people from the other districts to fight in a pointless war, whilst protecting their own.
But those other Districts are resource-rich, and China needs those resources. And all they need to do is show how their own Districts have improved under the Chinese system, and how the Russian system has used and abused theirs.
You think that me saying that China won't bother to invade Russia because it's getting everything it wants already is me pushing some sort of pro-Russian talking point? You really are an utter helmet.
A couple who joined a protest in Hartlepool after going to an afternoon bingo session have each been jailed for two years and two months.
Steven Mailen, 54, of Arch Court, Hartlepool and his partner Ryan Sheers, 29, of Powlett Road, Hartlepool both pleaded guilty to violent disorder after they became involved with a mob on Murray Street on 31 July.
We have had queers for Palestine, now there are gays for the nazis...
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I my last place of employ they really tried hard to get everyone to use Teams. You knew though that you were in conversations with the senior team when you got a whatsapp message though
I made a point of not having WhatsApp on my own phone (my phone, not their phone) from the day I was hired.
One very senior manager didn’t understand that iMessage was a data message rather than an SMS, and wondered why I didn’t have WA on my phone.
I used to deliver a talk to schools and parents about IT security, called “Why I’m not on Facebook”.
I suspect you're fighting a bit of an uphill battle. (I didn't mention Slack, but there's Slack. And then the lawyers will use some allegdgy super-secure thing, and HR have to use their new system which they spent a fortune on and will really start to deliver in another two or three years once the bugs have been addressed)
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
He's more likely to can Vance, than he is to hand over to him.
But it's an interesting question - what's our best guess as to what the nutter comes out with ? VP announcement ? A Trump crypto-coin ? Just a rant ?
It’ll be a rant and maybe he’ll agree to do the ABC debate he pulled out of.
My Wife is thinking of going to Connecticut in November to vote in person as she always has problems with her absentee ballot. I’m sure she’s aware that her vote won’t make much odds in the Nutmeg State but it shows how seriously she’s taking it.
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
Betfair take 5% of winnings though
Sure but it's only 5% of the 6% you make if you think backing both Trump and Harris is safe. (I don't). And also I think you can choose options on BF that reduce the commission, but lose any freebies. (In fact you can and their 'basic' option means you pay 2%)
Your username is remarkably adroit just now considering we just won the points race portion in the velodrome
A couple who joined a protest in Hartlepool after going to an afternoon bingo session have each been jailed for two years and two months.
Steven Mailen, 54, of Arch Court, Hartlepool and his partner Ryan Sheers, 29, of Powlett Road, Hartlepool both pleaded guilty to violent disorder after they became involved with a mob on Murray Street on 31 July.
We have had queers for Palestine, now there are gays for the nazis...
We also had someone who works at a bicycle shop knock someone off a bicycle. People are odd.
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
He's more likely to can Vance, than he is to hand over to him.
But it's an interesting question - what's our best guess as to what the nutter comes out with ? VP announcement ? A Trump crypto-coin ? Just a rant ?
Yep, canning Vance is a real possibility.
My guess as to his 2pm (US) thing - a rant and something stupid - all Trump voters to be eligible for a golden Trump sticker, or the like. Maybe some news of a chat with Vlad, and the formation of a committee for a new world order.
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Given Twitter has only the 15th largest number of users of the different platforms, they can happily do both!
The third column is monthly active suers:
1 Facebook 3.06 billion 13,200,000,000 2 YouTube 2.70 billion 73,400,000,000 3 WhatsApp 2.40 billion 3,900,000,000 4 Instagram 2.35 billion 6,900,000,000 5 TikTok 1.67 billion 2,700,000,000 6 WeChat 1.31 billion 5,700,000 7 Messenger 1.10 billion 261,200,000 8 Telegram 900 million 614,000,000 9 Viber 820 million 16,600,000 10 Snapchat 800 million 194,800,000 11 Douyin 752 million 210,400,000 12 Baidu 676 million 1,600,000,000 13 Qzone 615 million 476,500,000 14 Spotify 602 million 718,800,000 15 X (Twitter) 600 million 4,100,000,000
Seems to be a degree of panic among the Russian milibloggers over events in Kursk Oblast. Massive confusion about where Ukrainian forces are, and whether forces encountered are part of the main body of troops or sabotage/reconnaissance groups.
No sign yet of Russian reinforcements stabilizing the situation, though there are videos of lots of Ukrainian equipment being taken out by Lancet drones.
Still not sure whether this is just a raid, or the start of a large effort to seize Russian territory for use in bargaining during peace negotiations, or a strategy to lengthen the front line to weaken the Russian defence of occupied Ukrainian territory.
It’s all very weird. There’s a suggestion that the Russian town of Sudzha (highlighted) is about to fall to Ukrainian troops, who have already made several km of progress into Russia. The Russians appear to be totally flat-footed, with no spare troops anywhere to come to their aid.
Reports I've heard point out that troops in Russia are likely to be wet-behind-the-ears conscripts, who are not sent to Ukraine.
I've no idea on the UA tactics, unless they expect it to draw Russian troops away from frontlines in quantities justifying the 2-3k UA troops who are reported to be involved.
The UA troops involved are presumably some of the best they have, who must know that they are on a suicide mission if they can’t extract themselves.
But it does highlight that Russia can’t defend its own border, with their forces spread thinly to allow deployments further South.
If this is a successful raid by UA troops, we might well see this as a regular occurrence. I can’t imagine that the UA army can actually hold any Russian territory for more than a few days, but they’ve shown they can do it and draw what’s likely to be a massive redeployment of Russian troops from more important (to UA) places.
The folk looking at this escapade with greatest interest will be in Beijing.
Everything east of the Urals is yours for the taking, guys...
Oh indeed, if the Russians can’t defend their border with Ukraine 100km North of the conflict zone, what chance they can defend 10,000km of border anywhere else?
America might quietly suggest they would be rather more relaxed about Chinese ambitions of empire being manifested in that direction rather than in acquiring Taiwan.
You’re an excellent commenter, and properly respected, but this whole “China should invade Russia” discourse is a big pipe of crazy copium. Which you smoke every tine you worry about Ukraine
China is not going to invade Russia. It’s not going to annexe Siberia. It’s not going to do anything remotely like this because to do so would be instant world war 3 and Beijing would be a heap of radioactive ruins within 43 minutes
Nor is America about to “encourage” China to invade Russia, for the same reasons
It isn't just that. It's also that it doesn't really need to. What's it going to do with its new colony of Russia? Extract cheap oil from it? It's doing that already. Vs. having to invade and defend it. You don't invade somewhere you don't need to. Taiwan is personal - that's different.
Yes, comrade.
Muscovites (and those from St Petersburg) don't really understand their country. The parties they go to in District 1 do not know what life is like in the other districts, where millions of people do not even have inside toilets, regardless of the state's massive wealth and power. And the fact District 1 is sending people from the other districts to fight in a pointless war, whilst protecting their own.
But those other Districts are resource-rich, and China needs those resources. And all they need to do is show how their own Districts have improved under the Chinese system, and how the Russian system has used and abused theirs.
You think that me saying that China won't bother to invade Russia because it's getting everything it wants already is me pushing some sort of pro-Russian talking point? You really are an utter helmet.
Nah.
If you actually read *real* news sources, rather than the ones that led you to think MH17 was shot down by Ukraine, or that there were Ukrainian Biolabs (and hence shilling for Russia...), you might know that China has been investing around the world for resources: especially Africa. The 'Belt and Road Initiative' is just part of a massive resource grab.
Yet there is a massive resource-rich area directly across their northern border. And one they have had conflicts over before.
If you're trying to say that China doesn't covet Russia's southeastern territories, then you stupid and/or a Russian shill.
Yeah, but Trump could just pull out if he feels he's sure to lose. No doubt causing all sorts of trouble at the same time. Hopefully some time soon though his trouble making days will be firmly on the wane.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
Betfair take 5% of winnings though
Sure but it's only 5% of the 6% you make if you think backing both Trump and Harris is safe. (I don't). And also I think you can choose options on BF that reduce the commission, but lose any freebies. (In fact you can and their 'basic' option means you pay 2%)
Your username is remarkably adroit just now considering we just won the points race portion in the velodrome
Well my username was chosen after the 'Duke of Omnium' in Trollope's Palliser series (who I think is the most fabulous political character), so no cycling claims.
The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
I've just - for reasons - taken a quick look at the X account of Ashlea Simon, the leader of Britain First. She doesn't quite have your prose skills but the sentiments and agenda are almost identical. Don't know what you have to say about that.
I told you, I did the latest political compass test, and I came out EXACTLY on the spot supposedly occupied by the classic Conservatives. It’s just that the actual Conservatives have moved to the left of Blair
I'm sure you did do that test and I'm sure that was the result. I did it too and I kept at it until I came out where I wanted. They're great, those tests.
Still, there it is. A statistically significant overlap between your output and that of the far right.
Eg do you remember when you said Kamala Harris was "dumb as a rock"?
I did the test once. You’re beginning to irritate me
Yes I did say that about Harris and I now think I misjudged her. I was relying on second hand reports from biased Americans, never a good thing. Always look with your own eyes and make a true objective assessment
The skilful way she’s handled this extraordinarily difficult transition - from Biden to her - tells me she has political cunning and brains. I think she will probably win (unless Trump drops out: not impossible). That will please me because Trump is a crazy fucker
If Trump drops out and a sane anti-woke Republican becomes the GOP candidate I will enthusiastically back that person over Harris
There. Sorted. Now stop being weird
Yes, "dumb as a rock" was an exact MAGA phrase all over Hard Right Twitter. Not your finest hour, regurgitating that.
But ok, that's a good post there and I can't ask for more. Whether you truly, on Nov 6th, will be wanting to wake up to "Harris wins, Trump loses" is between you and your god. We're all entitled to our secret chamber and in any case what we want or don't want can be a complex layered thing.
I would like to see more enthusiasm from you as Trump implodes. You don't seem to be enjoying it very much, which I think is a shame.
Worst for the Tories/best for us (LDs): Badenoch, Jenrick Maybe bad, maybe good: Patel, Tugendhat Best for Tores/worst for us: Cleverly Who?: Stride
I think Patel would be worst, she has by far the highest negatives of the above in polls albeit she has an aggressive semi charisma.
Any of the above could win though if Labour muck up the economy and fail to stop the boats
Patel is a roll of the dice, in my opinion. She certainly has negatives, and she really didn't come across as any too bright when trying to debate on the death penalty that time, but she's almost unencumbered by the recent Tory disasters, leaving Cabinet in 2022. She'd be attractive to some on the Reform side (albeit putting off a few of the most hardcore racists and bigots due to her race and sex) with her long record of right-wingery. It remains to be seen how off-putting (or not) she'd be to the more liberal and one-nation voters lost by the Tories this year.
It works because about 90% off people never click the link or try and find actual evidence.
Python is awful - don't use whitespace to represent significancy...
It is no more ridiculous than using lots of brackets (of varying types).
Python has fantastic, clean syntax. It has incredible data science libraries. And these days, computers (and computing power) is cheap.
Other than occasional bits of Javascript, when I have a need to do something webby, I wouldn't use anything else. There's simply no point, because quick to write, readable code, is worth a lot more than a few processor cycles.
oh I just have a dislike of Python but I started off when Javascript was Livescript and Perl was the in thing.
I personally prefer the latest version of Delphi (i.e. C# )..
99% of my "coding" these days is data analysis, where Python + Pandas + Jupyter is absolutely superb, especially if you use Google's hosted Colab service. I'm playing around with massive datasets and running analyses in seconds that would historically have taken days. (And also required a team of people.)
You use whatever has the best libraries for whatever it is you want to do. If that's Python, then great. And if it's JavaScript, for God's sake use TypeScript!
The real problem with Python and JavaScript is the large numbers of self taught people.
Who haven’t heard of code structure, testing pyramids or even code versioning tools.
“No, Quant Boy, the Python file you emailed me isn’t going directly into production. Aside from the fact it doesn’t actually run, we need tests. And test data. And some QA. and running on all the non-prod environments first…. Also, where is the specification? ‘cause Compliance will quite interested in how we are pricing stuff.”
While I largely agree with what you say, it is also great to have the freedom to implement stuff as you see fit without having to specify every last widget to the n-th degree. Obviously that's easier when working iteratively as a sole developer on small projects.
Also, bad code implemented by self-taught developers is by no means restricted to Python and JavaScript. The codebase at my last workplace was a tangled mess of undocumented C++ dating back decades and presided over by an old-school self-taught coder with a pathological hatred of whitespace and line breaks. That was the last straw for me.
Indeed
Just that these days the self taught types are hacking in Python.
There was this mad guy who was going to replace Excel with a spreadsheet backed by Python as the scripting language. Whatever happened to him?
It's funny you ask... because that company (Resolver Systems) ended up becoming PythonAnywhere, which was acquired by Anaconda, and which has just launched Python in Excel (https://docs.anaconda.com/excel/).
Python, Anaconda, GitHub, Jupyter, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib... you have no idea how happy it makes me that I no longer have to worry about those things.
Matplotlib needs taking round the back of the barn and put out of its misery.
I use Plotly.
But you know what Matplotlib has that I genuinely love: the ability to produce charts in XKCD style.
Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey Still no answer to why it will take to next year before Alex Rudakubana the alleged murderer of the 3 young girls in South Oct will stand trial ?
Community notes can be very entertaining sometimes. A genuinely great idea.
People dis Twitter* under Musk, but he has implemented two genuinely useful features:
(1) Community notes (2) People I follow
It means I see fewer Marjorie Taylor Greene posts. Which is good.
* I refuse to call it "X"
Community Notes predates Musk
Sort of.
There was a program that created Notes that predated Musk, but it wasn't very widespread nor was it open source - and it had a different name.
The current version dates from Musk.
The story I’ve seen elsewhere is that the current version was in development before Musk bought the company. He just happened to be in charge when it was finished up & pushed to production.
Always remember the six stages of a project:
1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise for those not involved
There are some interesting horror stories out there about the Twitter code base and what was going on before the takeover. There was a reason that features were simply not appearing in production...
Given Musk is apparently not a good coder, I wouldn't assume he's made the codebase any better...
You're not say that he does all the coding for his companies, are you?
No. But I can guarantee that he will hire coders that match his image of a good coder... i.e. him. And the recruitment staff will be recruited on the same basis (I *still* see the old story of him personally interviewing all SpaceX staff...) (fx: hits head on wall.)
SpaceX is actually different, as space and NASA demand certain boxes ticked. I bet he hates those boxes.
Nope - long before SpaceX got a NASA contract, they were racing ahead of the rest of the Space Industry on the software side. Simply because they hired top engineers without legacy “we don’t do that here” to tell them *not do modern software development*.
When they got a NASA contract, their system for tracking parts got all kinds of wow reviews. All they had done was implement a single logical system, using standard stuff (bar codes etc), rather than a pile of paperwork multiples by several incompatible legacy systems.
The usage of FPGAs emulating PowerPC architecture wasn’t invented by SpaceX either. But they were one of the first to apply it to aerospace. Just as doing radiation tolerance at the macro, rather than micro level. Both were in place before NASA started audits etc. Both took a bit of convincing before they were cleared for Human Rated flight.
The initial review of the Dragon control interface was a bit hilarious - instead of taking the “fake an aircraft dash”, the SpaceX engineers created a system of context driven, intuitive menus and screen controls, using industrial psychologists, former astronauts etc.
The NASA reviewers initially had an Out Of Context problem - they couldn’t understand why it didn’t just have an aircraft dashboard. But once they dug into it, they really liked the concept. Which was to align the interface with the checklists and procedures, rather than have a translation layer from procedure to switches.
On Tesla - a friend worked for Tata, in their outfit tearing down rival cars. He was a software engineer / electronics guy and his comment was that Tesla simply implemented modern software and hardware practise in an industry full of appalling IT. The mechanicals he thought were pretty poor, by comparison.
One amusing story he told me - he was debugging a certain car. A whole pile of different computers talking to each other via a mess of cables. He eliminated a stream of errors that one computer was polluting the system with. Which caused another part of the system to crash. Turned out that the stream of errors was preventing a condition in one of the other computers. Luxury car, on the road and in production.
The boffins predictions for Team GB are looking about right which was basically same number of medals as Tokoyo but down on golds.
Which is consistent with a final position in the medal table of 5th maybe 4th and small chance of 6th or below compared with 3rd last time given that the medal table is primarily ranked on gold medals
A brief observation about banking. I started my first business back in 2020. With Covid still raging and government cash being funnelled via banks to fraudsters businesses it was practically impossible to open a new account. I ended up using Revolut who to be fair are bloody brilliant. I was since able to open other accounts but only with a trading history to show.
Since then I have incorporated two other businesses and a few weeks ago started my 4th business. Wifey's shop business (the 3rd one opened) was relatively straight forward, but trying to do banking for the new business is once again having me scratch my head and wonder why something simple is still a pain in the arse.
I do worry how some of you will cope if Trump wins
I thought you were rooting against him now that Biden's been swapped for Harris? Or was that another little porkie?
You can read??? Which part of my comment says “yay I want Trump to win”?
It's going to be a long 3 months for you, isn't it. Pretence can be quite tiring.
Or, you could accept that I don’t want Trump to win. Then you could relax. Your obsession with my “real” political views is now verging on the bizarre and stalky
See my comments today about Trump’s insane tariff proposals on Chinese trade. That alone would crash the world economy. I don’t want that. I don’t want him to win
The difference is that I haven’t got Trump Derangement Syndrome, unlike quite a few on here. The idea of him winning is unpleasant for me, but it doesn’t send me into a spasm of suicidal weirdness
Yes, ok. We are both in our own different ways rooting for Trump to be smashed on Nov 5th. All sorted now.
The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
I've just - for reasons - taken a quick look at the X account of Ashlea Simon, the leader of Britain First. She doesn't quite have your prose skills but the sentiments and agenda are almost identical. Don't know what you have to say about that.
I told you, I did the latest political compass test, and I came out EXACTLY on the spot supposedly occupied by the classic Conservatives. It’s just that the actual Conservatives have moved to the left of Blair
I'm sure you did do that test and I'm sure that was the result. I did it too and I kept at it until I came out where I wanted. They're great, those tests.
Still, there it is. A statistically significant overlap between your output and that of the far right.
Eg do you remember when you said Kamala Harris was "dumb as a rock"?
I did the test once. You’re beginning to irritate me
Yes I did say that about Harris and I now think I misjudged her. I was relying on second hand reports from biased Americans, never a good thing. Always look with your own eyes and make a true objective assessment
The skilful way she’s handled this extraordinarily difficult transition - from Biden to her - tells me she has political cunning and brains. I think she will probably win (unless Trump drops out: not impossible). That will please me because Trump is a crazy fucker
If Trump drops out and a sane anti-woke Republican becomes the GOP candidate I will enthusiastically back that person over Harris
There. Sorted. Now stop being weird
Yes, "dumb as a rock" was an exact MAGA phrase all over Hard Right Twitter. Not your finest hour, regurgitating that.
But ok, that's a good post there and I can't ask for more. Whether you truly, on Nov 6th, will be wanting to wake up to "Harris wins, Trump loses" is between you and your god. We're all entitled to our secret chamber and in any case what we want or don't want can be a complex layered thing.
I would like to see more enthusiasm from you as Trump implodes. You don't seem to be enjoying it very much, which I think is a shame.
If I’m not enjoying it, that’s easily explained. I despise the Woke Democrats and I think Wokeness is a massive danger to the West (tho there are signs in the USA that it may be receding; and Harris herself is not that Woke)
However I see Trump as an even greater threat to our security and prosperity. So I am forced to choose the lesser of two serious evils (in my eyes). This is not fertile grounds for “enthusiasm”
What would enthuse me is a firmly anti-Woke but sane Republican who won’t abandon NATO and won’t crash the world economy with tariffs
It works because about 90% off people never click the link or try and find actual evidence.
Python is awful - don't use whitespace to represent significancy...
It is no more ridiculous than using lots of brackets (of varying types).
Python has fantastic, clean syntax. It has incredible data science libraries. And these days, computers (and computing power) is cheap.
Other than occasional bits of Javascript, when I have a need to do something webby, I wouldn't use anything else. There's simply no point, because quick to write, readable code, is worth a lot more than a few processor cycles.
oh I just have a dislike of Python but I started off when Javascript was Livescript and Perl was the in thing.
I personally prefer the latest version of Delphi (i.e. C# )..
99% of my "coding" these days is data analysis, where Python + Pandas + Jupyter is absolutely superb, especially if you use Google's hosted Colab service. I'm playing around with massive datasets and running analyses in seconds that would historically have taken days. (And also required a team of people.)
You use whatever has the best libraries for whatever it is you want to do. If that's Python, then great. And if it's JavaScript, for God's sake use TypeScript!
The real problem with Python and JavaScript is the large numbers of self taught people.
Who haven’t heard of code structure, testing pyramids or even code versioning tools.
“No, Quant Boy, the Python file you emailed me isn’t going directly into production. Aside from the fact it doesn’t actually run, we need tests. And test data. And some QA. and running on all the non-prod environments first…. Also, where is the specification? ‘cause Compliance will quite interested in how we are pricing stuff.”
While I largely agree with what you say, it is also great to have the freedom to implement stuff as you see fit without having to specify every last widget to the n-th degree. Obviously that's easier when working iteratively as a sole developer on small projects.
Also, bad code implemented by self-taught developers is by no means restricted to Python and JavaScript. The codebase at my last workplace was a tangled mess of undocumented C++ dating back decades and presided over by an old-school self-taught coder with a pathological hatred of whitespace and line breaks. That was the last straw for me.
Indeed
Just that these days the self taught types are hacking in Python.
There was this mad guy who was going to replace Excel with a spreadsheet backed by Python as the scripting language. Whatever happened to him?
It's funny you ask... because that company (Resolver Systems) ended up becoming PythonAnywhere, which was acquired by Anaconda, and which has just launched Python in Excel (https://docs.anaconda.com/excel/).
Python, Anaconda, GitHub, Jupyter, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib... you have no idea how happy it makes me that I no longer have to worry about those things.
Matplotlib needs taking round the back of the barn and put out of its misery.
I use Plotly.
But you know what Matplotlib has that I genuinely love: the ability to produce charts in XKCD style.
There are some niche things that the likes of plotly can't do or is very difficult, but the renderimg engine for matplotlib by modern standards is so poor. I am surprised a google, who love to make 27 different solutions to the same problem haven't produced some sort of plotting library.
Interesting article, though seems to be based on a lot of ceteris paribus assumptions.
Presumably if we *don't* build 1.5m more homes, prices will get even more crazy, so 1.5m is the bare minimum we need to stand still - which tracks with immigration figures etc.
And supply being inelastic at any price sorta says 'well yeah, it's called planning regulations making it impossible to build anything'.
So my solution to this problem would be to build a heck of a lot more than 1.5m homes (probably by building up, and to do that you'd need to abolish or significantly reform leasehold so it's not a total scam), and make it significantly easier to get planning permission for all kinds of developments in all kinds of places.
I know I sound like Captain Obvious, but that article really does get across the sheer scale of the UK housing crisis and how much more than the current proposals on the table will be needed to get on top of it.
A brief observation about banking. I started my first business back in 2020. With Covid still raging and government cash being funnelled via banks to fraudsters businesses it was practically impossible to open a new account. I ended up using Revolut who to be fair are bloody brilliant. I was since able to open other accounts but only with a trading history to show.
Since then I have incorporated two other businesses and a few weeks ago started my 4th business. Wifey's shop business (the 3rd one opened) was relatively straight forward, but trying to do banking for the new business is once again having me scratch my head and wonder why something simple is still a pain in the arse.
Because we have passed so much additional legislation banks are shit scared of taking on new business. Banks themselves hardly want it and will direct you to the alternative funders sector.
The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
I've just - for reasons - taken a quick look at the X account of Ashlea Simon, the leader of Britain First. She doesn't quite have your prose skills but the sentiments and agenda are almost identical. Don't know what you have to say about that.
I told you, I did the latest political compass test, and I came out EXACTLY on the spot supposedly occupied by the classic Conservatives. It’s just that the actual Conservatives have moved to the left of Blair
I'm sure you did do that test and I'm sure that was the result. I did it too and I kept at it until I came out where I wanted. They're great, those tests.
Still, there it is. A statistically significant overlap between your output and that of the far right.
Eg do you remember when you said Kamala Harris was "dumb as a rock"?
I did the test once. You’re beginning to irritate me
Yes I did say that about Harris and I now think I misjudged her. I was relying on second hand reports from biased Americans, never a good thing. Always look with your own eyes and make a true objective assessment
The skilful way she’s handled this extraordinarily difficult transition - from Biden to her - tells me she has political cunning and brains. I think she will probably win (unless Trump drops out: not impossible). That will please me because Trump is a crazy fucker
If Trump drops out and a sane anti-woke Republican becomes the GOP candidate I will enthusiastically back that person over Harris
There. Sorted. Now stop being weird
Yes, "dumb as a rock" was an exact MAGA phrase all over Hard Right Twitter. Not your finest hour, regurgitating that.
But ok, that's a good post there and I can't ask for more. Whether you truly, on Nov 6th, will be wanting to wake up to "Harris wins, Trump loses" is between you and your god. We're all entitled to our secret chamber and in any case what we want or don't want can be a complex layered thing.
I would like to see more enthusiasm from you as Trump implodes. You don't seem to be enjoying it very much, which I think is a shame.
If I’m not enjoying it, that’s easily explained. I despise the Woke Democrats and I think Wokeness is a massive danger to the West (tho there are signs in the USA that it may be receding; and Harris herself is not that Woke)
However I see Trump as an even greater threat to our security and prosperity. So I am forced to choose the lesser of two serious evils (in my eyes). This is not fertile grounds for “enthusiasm”
What would enthuse me is a firmly anti-Woke but sane Republican who won’t abandon NATO and won’t crash the world economy with tariffs
Someone like Nikki Haley, who we both could support!
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Given Twitter has only the 15th largest number of users of the different platforms, they can happily do both!
The third column is monthly active suers:
1 Facebook 3.06 billion 13,200,000,000 2 YouTube 2.70 billion 73,400,000,000 3 WhatsApp 2.40 billion 3,900,000,000 4 Instagram 2.35 billion 6,900,000,000 5 TikTok 1.67 billion 2,700,000,000 6 WeChat 1.31 billion 5,700,000 7 Messenger 1.10 billion 261,200,000 8 Telegram 900 million 614,000,000 9 Viber 820 million 16,600,000 10 Snapchat 800 million 194,800,000 11 Douyin 752 million 210,400,000 12 Baidu 676 million 1,600,000,000 13 Qzone 615 million 476,500,000 14 Spotify 602 million 718,800,000 15 X (Twitter) 600 million 4,100,000,000
Given that the SEC looks to be cracking down on fake user fraud, it'll be interesting to see which of those drop and how fast.
The riots have stopped but a lower level violence will now replace it. Smaller acts. Local “events”
Bleak as bleh. I may actually move to lovely Pristina
Another example of this sort of thing.
"Suspended Labour councillor arrested over video ‘urging people to cut throats’ Ricky Jones arrested after video emerged in which he appeared to call for violence against ‘Nazi fascists’"
His problem is that he is surely going to get a significant jail term, because he called for actual murder and people are getting 30 months for simply “shouting at policemen”
I've just - for reasons - taken a quick look at the X account of Ashlea Simon, the leader of Britain First. She doesn't quite have your prose skills but the sentiments and agenda are almost identical. Don't know what you have to say about that.
I told you, I did the latest political compass test, and I came out EXACTLY on the spot supposedly occupied by the classic Conservatives. It’s just that the actual Conservatives have moved to the left of Blair
I'm sure you did do that test and I'm sure that was the result. I did it too and I kept at it until I came out where I wanted. They're great, those tests.
Still, there it is. A statistically significant overlap between your output and that of the far right.
Eg do you remember when you said Kamala Harris was "dumb as a rock"?
I did the test once. You’re beginning to irritate me
Yes I did say that about Harris and I now think I misjudged her. I was relying on second hand reports from biased Americans, never a good thing. Always look with your own eyes and make a true objective assessment
The skilful way she’s handled this extraordinarily difficult transition - from Biden to her - tells me she has political cunning and brains. I think she will probably win (unless Trump drops out: not impossible). That will please me because Trump is a crazy fucker
If Trump drops out and a sane anti-woke Republican becomes the GOP candidate I will enthusiastically back that person over Harris
There. Sorted. Now stop being weird
Yes, "dumb as a rock" was an exact MAGA phrase all over Hard Right Twitter. Not your finest hour, regurgitating that.
But ok, that's a good post there and I can't ask for more. Whether you truly, on Nov 6th, will be wanting to wake up to "Harris wins, Trump loses" is between you and your god. We're all entitled to our secret chamber and in any case what we want or don't want can be a complex layered thing.
I would like to see more enthusiasm from you as Trump implodes. You don't seem to be enjoying it very much, which I think is a shame.
If I’m not enjoying it, that’s easily explained. I despise the Woke Democrats and I think Wokeness is a massive danger to the West (tho there are signs in the USA that it may be receding; and Harris herself is not that Woke)
However I see Trump as an even greater threat to our security and prosperity. So I am forced to choose the lesser of two serious evils (in my eyes). This is not fertile grounds for “enthusiasm”
What would enthuse me is a firmly anti-Woke but sane Republican who won’t abandon NATO and won’t crash the world economy with tariffs
Someone like Nikki Haley, who we both could support!
I don’t know much about her, but if she is that, then Yes
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I my last place of employ they really tried hard to get everyone to use Teams. You knew though that you were in conversations with the senior team when you got a whatsapp message though
I made a point of not having WhatsApp on my own phone (my phone, not their phone) from the day I was hired.
One very senior manager didn’t understand that iMessage was a data message rather than an SMS, and wondered why I didn’t have WA on my phone.
I used to deliver a talk to schools and parents about IT security, called “Why I’m not on Facebook”.
Excellent.
I used to have that ranty all the time but have just about given up. I just tell people that if you insist on using Facebook then I won't see any of it.
My employer encourages everyone to post crap on Workplace and LinkedIn but I don't feel I'm missing out on anything by ignoring them...
Interesting article, though seems to be based on a lot of ceteris paribus assumptions.
Presumably if we *don't* build 1.5m more homes, prices will get even more crazy, so 1.5m is the bare minimum we need to stand still - which tracks with immigration figures etc.
And supply being inelastic at any price sorta says 'well yeah, it's called planning regulations making it impossible to build anything'.
So my solution to this problem would be to build a heck of a lot more than 1.5m homes (probably by building up, and to do that you'd need to abolish or significantly reform leasehold so it's not a total scam), and make it significantly easier to get planning permission for all kinds of developments in all kinds of places.
I know I sound like Captain Obvious, but that article really does get across the sheer scale of the UK housing crisis and how much more than the current proposals on the table will be needed to get on top of it.
8 million fewer properties than France for a similar size of population....
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I my last place of employ they really tried hard to get everyone to use Teams. You knew though that you were in conversations with the senior team when you got a whatsapp message though
I made a point of not having WhatsApp on my own phone (my phone, not their phone) from the day I was hired.
One very senior manager didn’t understand that iMessage was a data message rather than an SMS, and wondered why I didn’t have WA on my phone.
I used to deliver a talk to schools and parents about IT security, called “Why I’m not on Facebook”.
Excellent.
I used to have that ranty all the time but have just about given up. I just tell people that if you insist on using Facebook then I won't see any of it.
My employer encourages everyone to post crap on Workplace and LinkedIn but I don't feel I'm missing out on anything by ignoring them...
I have a tiresome thing where I have deactivated my FB but reactivate every Sunday evening to check the village message board. If I’ve not been named and shamed for something I deactivate it again.
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I my last place of employ they really tried hard to get everyone to use Teams. You knew though that you were in conversations with the senior team when you got a whatsapp message though
I made a point of not having WhatsApp on my own phone (my phone, not their phone) from the day I was hired.
One very senior manager didn’t understand that iMessage was a data message rather than an SMS, and wondered why I didn’t have WA on my phone.
I used to deliver a talk to schools and parents about IT security, called “Why I’m not on Facebook”.
Excellent.
I used to have that ranty all the time but have just about given up. I just tell people that if you insist on using Facebook then I won't see any of it.
My employer encourages everyone to post crap on Workplace and LinkedIn but I don't feel I'm missing out on anything by ignoring them...
Worst for the Tories/best for us (LDs): Badenoch, Jenrick Maybe bad, maybe good: Patel, Tugendhat Best for Tores/worst for us: Cleverly Who?: Stride
I think Patel would be worst, she has by far the highest negatives of the above in polls albeit she has an aggressive semi charisma.
Any of the above could win though if Labour muck up the economy and fail to stop the boats
Patel is a roll of the dice, in my opinion. She certainly has negatives, and she really didn't come across as any too bright when trying to debate on the death penalty that time, but she's almost unencumbered by the recent Tory disasters, leaving Cabinet in 2022. She'd be attractive to some on the Reform side (albeit putting off a few of the most hardcore racists and bigots due to her race and sex) with her long record of right-wingery. It remains to be seen how off-putting (or not) she'd be to the more liberal and one-nation voters lost by the Tories this year.
She’s also rather attractive. Shouldn’t matter, but it kinda does - a tiny bit. If you’re forced to look at someone for five years then it helps if looking at them is pleasing
Same applies to Starmer’s nasal voice. It’s deeply grating - to me. Such a trivial thing should not be salient but I do find myself avoiding his speeches and statements simply because of his voice-tone
A brief observation about banking. I started my first business back in 2020. With Covid still raging and government cash being funnelled via banks to fraudsters businesses it was practically impossible to open a new account. I ended up using Revolut who to be fair are bloody brilliant. I was since able to open other accounts but only with a trading history to show.
Since then I have incorporated two other businesses and a few weeks ago started my 4th business. Wifey's shop business (the 3rd one opened) was relatively straight forward, but trying to do banking for the new business is once again having me scratch my head and wonder why something simple is still a pain in the arse.
Because we have passed so much additional legislation banks are shit scared of taking on new business. Banks themselves hardly want it and will direct you to the alternative funders sector.
Yep. And of course the alternate funders want an account to pay into.
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I my last place of employ they really tried hard to get everyone to use Teams. You knew though that you were in conversations with the senior team when you got a whatsapp message though
I made a point of not having WhatsApp on my own phone (my phone, not their phone) from the day I was hired.
One very senior manager didn’t understand that iMessage was a data message rather than an SMS, and wondered why I didn’t have WA on my phone.
I used to deliver a talk to schools and parents about IT security, called “Why I’m not on Facebook”.
I suspect you're fighting a bit of an uphill battle. (I didn't mention Slack, but there's Slack. And then the lawyers will use some allegdgy super-secure thing, and HR have to use their new system which they spent a fortune on and will really start to deliver in another two or three years once the bugs have been addressed)
It’s actually not that difficult. I’ve already convinced those who sign the cheques that they should insist on either Teams on email requests, rather than WhatsApp or SMS, because the company actually has records of them to which they can refer a decade from now.
Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey Still no answer to why it will take to next year before Alex Rudakubana the alleged murderer of the 3 young girls in South Oct will stand trial ?
Community notes can be very entertaining sometimes. A genuinely great idea.
People dis Twitter* under Musk, but he has implemented two genuinely useful features:
(1) Community notes (2) People I follow
It means I see fewer Marjorie Taylor Greene posts. Which is good.
* I refuse to call it "X"
Community Notes predates Musk
Sort of.
There was a program that created Notes that predated Musk, but it wasn't very widespread nor was it open source - and it had a different name.
The current version dates from Musk.
The story I’ve seen elsewhere is that the current version was in development before Musk bought the company. He just happened to be in charge when it was finished up & pushed to production.
Always remember the six stages of a project:
1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise for those not involved
There are some interesting horror stories out there about the Twitter code base and what was going on before the takeover. There was a reason that features were simply not appearing in production...
Given Musk is apparently not a good coder, I wouldn't assume he's made the codebase any better...
You're not say that he does all the coding for his companies, are you?
No. But I can guarantee that he will hire coders that match his image of a good coder... i.e. him. And the recruitment staff will be recruited on the same basis (I *still* see the old story of him personally interviewing all SpaceX staff...) (fx: hits head on wall.)
SpaceX is actually different, as space and NASA demand certain boxes ticked. I bet he hates those boxes.
Nope - long before SpaceX got a NASA contract, they were racing ahead of the rest of the Space Industry on the software side. Simply because they hired top engineers without legacy “we don’t do that here” to tell them *not do modern software development*.
When they got a NASA contract, their system for tracking parts got all kinds of wow reviews. All they had done was implement a single logical system, using standard stuff (bar codes etc), rather than a pile of paperwork multiples by several incompatible legacy systems.
The usage of FPGAs emulating PowerPC architecture wasn’t invented by SpaceX either. But they were one of the first to apply it to aerospace. Just as doing radiation tolerance at the macro, rather than micro level. Both were in place before NASA started audits etc. Both took a bit of convincing before they were cleared for Human Rated flight.
The initial review of the Dragon control interface was a bit hilarious - instead of taking the “fake an aircraft dash”, the SpaceX engineers created a system of context driven, intuitive menus and screen controls, using industrial psychologists, former astronauts etc.
The NASA reviewers initially had an Out Of Context problem - they couldn’t understand why it didn’t just have an aircraft dashboard. But once they dug into it, they really liked the concept. Which was to align the interface with the checklists and procedures, rather than have a translation layer from procedure to switches.
On Tesla - a friend worked for Tata, in their outfit tearing down rival cars. He was a software engineer / electronics guy and his comment was that Tesla simply implemented modern software and hardware practise in an industry full of appalling IT. The mechanicals he thought were pretty poor, by comparison.
One amusing story he told me - he was debugging a certain car. A whole pile of different computers talking to each other via a mess of cables. He eliminated a stream of errors that one computer was polluting the system with. Which caused another part of the system to crash. Turned out that the stream of errors was preventing a condition in one of the other computers. Luxury car, on the road and in production.
There are times when I think you haven't drunk the Musk Kool-Aid, then you produce something like that.
Musk is one man. He does not, Bill Gates-like, read every line of code. He does not do everything inside the organisation. SpaceX is different, because it took people from other space companies, who knew how to do things in space. Musk knew how to code a game. And code some of Paypal's predecessor. Badly.
I'd strongly argue that Tesla's inability to drive from one side of the US to another - as promised by Musk in 2016 - is a sign that they're not as strong in software as you would like to think.
I've got a counter-example for your amusing story. A German car company developed a concept car that had no direct mechanical link between steering wheel and steering, as required by law. everything in the car used the same control/data bus. It worked really well.
Until someone changed the CD in the CD multi-changer, and so much data was sent over the bus that the steering locked up for a few seconds.
The result: a separate bus for 'critical' functions like steering and braking. And another for non-critical functions.
The *mess of cables* you decry might actually have sensible purposes. And this is something that *anybody* reverse-engineering anything needs to consider: if you think the people who designed the thing you're reverse-engineering was stupid; perhaps you don't understand it fully, and it is *you* who is being stupid.
Due to significant changes on this platform in recent months, X is no longer consistent with our Trust values. Therefore RNOH is closing its account. Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. Thanks to everyone who has followed & supported us for the last 13 years.
I wonder if many other public bodies will follow suit
Ah, so should the public sector be trying to work with the largest audience possible, or be partaking in performative wokery choosing one platform over another?
Encouraging Zuckerberg is not great either.
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Oh indeed.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
I my last place of employ they really tried hard to get everyone to use Teams. You knew though that you were in conversations with the senior team when you got a whatsapp message though
I made a point of not having WhatsApp on my own phone (my phone, not their phone) from the day I was hired.
One very senior manager didn’t understand that iMessage was a data message rather than an SMS, and wondered why I didn’t have WA on my phone.
I used to deliver a talk to schools and parents about IT security, called “Why I’m not on Facebook”.
I suspect you're fighting a bit of an uphill battle. (I didn't mention Slack, but there's Slack. And then the lawyers will use some allegdgy super-secure thing, and HR have to use their new system which they spent a fortune on and will really start to deliver in another two or three years once the bugs have been addressed)
It’s actually not that difficult. I’ve already convinced those who sign the cheques that they should insist on either Teams on email requests, rather than WhatsApp or SMS, because the company actually has records of them to which they can refer a decade from now.
A lot of the time, your boss prefers to contact you on whatsapp precisely because there isn't a record / paper trail you can follow on company servers. Makes it harder to prove bullying / constructive dismissal...
During lockdown my line manger started communicating with me via whatsapp to my personal number/phone. I insisted everything go via work channels on work devices - I was not issued with a work mobile at the time.
Without getting into specifics, this was later very *useful* when bringing certain issues to the attention of HR...
Worst for the Tories/best for us (LDs): Badenoch, Jenrick Maybe bad, maybe good: Patel, Tugendhat Best for Tores/worst for us: Cleverly Who?: Stride
I think Patel would be worst, she has by far the highest negatives of the above in polls albeit she has an aggressive semi charisma.
Any of the above could win though if Labour muck up the economy and fail to stop the boats
Patel is a roll of the dice, in my opinion. She certainly has negatives, and she really didn't come across as any too bright when trying to debate on the death penalty that time, but she's almost unencumbered by the recent Tory disasters, leaving Cabinet in 2022. She'd be attractive to some on the Reform side (albeit putting off a few of the most hardcore racists and bigots due to her race and sex) with her long record of right-wingery. It remains to be seen how off-putting (or not) she'd be to the more liberal and one-nation voters lost by the Tories this year.
She’s also rather attractive. Shouldn’t matter, but it kinda does - a tiny bit. If you’re forced to look at someone for five years then it helps if looking at them is pleasing
Same applies to Starmer’s nasal voice. It’s deeply grating - to me. Such a trivial thing should not be salient but I do find myself avoiding his speeches and statements simply because of his voice-tone
I am clearly a very superficial person
I find it quite remarkable how many entirely unfounded grudges (wrong word, I just mean disapprovals, but can't think of the right word) I have against various people in public life just because of some mannerism, whether real or simply erroneously perceived by me.
I start the day listening to the Today programme on R4 - I'm annoyed by Emma Barnett's 'but what do you think' style, and infuriated by the idiocy of Sean Farrington. (I concede that 6am might not be my most friendly time)
I also have other non-morning hated people - Fred Seirax (I think that's his name) = I despise the man, but I have no good reason for doing so.
And I don't like Wes Streeting, even though I think he's really quite good.
My views do change sometimes though. I didn't like Chris Packham when he first appeared on TV, but I now certainly do - I even bought his book.
Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey Still no answer to why it will take to next year before Alex Rudakubana the alleged murderer of the 3 young girls in South Oct will stand trial ?
Community notes can be very entertaining sometimes. A genuinely great idea.
People dis Twitter* under Musk, but he has implemented two genuinely useful features:
(1) Community notes (2) People I follow
It means I see fewer Marjorie Taylor Greene posts. Which is good.
* I refuse to call it "X"
Community Notes predates Musk
Sort of.
There was a program that created Notes that predated Musk, but it wasn't very widespread nor was it open source - and it had a different name.
The current version dates from Musk.
The story I’ve seen elsewhere is that the current version was in development before Musk bought the company. He just happened to be in charge when it was finished up & pushed to production.
Always remember the six stages of a project:
1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise for those not involved
There are some interesting horror stories out there about the Twitter code base and what was going on before the takeover. There was a reason that features were simply not appearing in production...
Given Musk is apparently not a good coder, I wouldn't assume he's made the codebase any better...
You're not say that he does all the coding for his companies, are you?
No. But I can guarantee that he will hire coders that match his image of a good coder... i.e. him. And the recruitment staff will be recruited on the same basis (I *still* see the old story of him personally interviewing all SpaceX staff...) (fx: hits head on wall.)
SpaceX is actually different, as space and NASA demand certain boxes ticked. I bet he hates those boxes.
Nope - long before SpaceX got a NASA contract, they were racing ahead of the rest of the Space Industry on the software side. Simply because they hired top engineers without legacy “we don’t do that here” to tell them *not do modern software development*.
When they got a NASA contract, their system for tracking parts got all kinds of wow reviews. All they had done was implement a single logical system, using standard stuff (bar codes etc), rather than a pile of paperwork multiples by several incompatible legacy systems.
The usage of FPGAs emulating PowerPC architecture wasn’t invented by SpaceX either. But they were one of the first to apply it to aerospace. Just as doing radiation tolerance at the macro, rather than micro level. Both were in place before NASA started audits etc. Both took a bit of convincing before they were cleared for Human Rated flight.
The initial review of the Dragon control interface was a bit hilarious - instead of taking the “fake an aircraft dash”, the SpaceX engineers created a system of context driven, intuitive menus and screen controls, using industrial psychologists, former astronauts etc.
The NASA reviewers initially had an Out Of Context problem - they couldn’t understand why it didn’t just have an aircraft dashboard. But once they dug into it, they really liked the concept. Which was to align the interface with the checklists and procedures, rather than have a translation layer from procedure to switches.
On Tesla - a friend worked for Tata, in their outfit tearing down rival cars. He was a software engineer / electronics guy and his comment was that Tesla simply implemented modern software and hardware practise in an industry full of appalling IT. The mechanicals he thought were pretty poor, by comparison.
One amusing story he told me - he was debugging a certain car. A whole pile of different computers talking to each other via a mess of cables. He eliminated a stream of errors that one computer was polluting the system with. Which caused another part of the system to crash. Turned out that the stream of errors was preventing a condition in one of the other computers. Luxury car, on the road and in production.
There are times when I think you haven't drunk the Musk Kool-Aid, then you produce something like that.
Musk is one man. He does not, Bill Gates-like, read every line of code. He does not do everything inside the organisation. SpaceX is different, because it took people from other space companies, who knew how to do things in space. Musk knew how to code a game. And code some of Paypal's predecessor. Badly.
I'd strongly argue that Tesla's inability to drive from one side of the US to another - as promised by Musk in 2016 - is a sign that they're not as strong in software as you would like to think.
I've got a counter-example for your amusing story. A German car company developed a concept car that had no direct mechanical link between steering wheel and steering, as required by law. everything in the car used the same control/data bus. It worked really well.
Until someone changed the CD in the CD multi-changer, and so much data was sent over the bus that the steering locked up for a few seconds.
The result: a separate bus for 'critical' functions like steering and braking. And another for non-critical functions.
The *mess of cables* you decry might actually have sensible purposes. And this is something that *anybody* reverse-engineering anything needs to consider: if you think the people who designed the thing you're reverse-engineering was stupid; perhaps you don't understand it fully, and it is *you* who is being stupid.
Musk is behaving like an absolute anus on TwiX. Deplorably.
But on a specific point I believe that the current FSD release (12.5.1?) is more than capable of doing the coast to coast trip on auto going off the videos out there. The leaps forward in its capabilities in the last few versions have been spectacular, and the improvements are coming almost exponentially.
Interesting article, though seems to be based on a lot of ceteris paribus assumptions.
Presumably if we *don't* build 1.5m more homes, prices will get even more crazy, so 1.5m is the bare minimum we need to stand still - which tracks with immigration figures etc.
And supply being inelastic at any price sorta says 'well yeah, it's called planning regulations making it impossible to build anything'.
So my solution to this problem would be to build a heck of a lot more than 1.5m homes (probably by building up, and to do that you'd need to abolish or significantly reform leasehold so it's not a total scam), and make it significantly easier to get planning permission for all kinds of developments in all kinds of places.
I know I sound like Captain Obvious, but that article really does get across the sheer scale of the UK housing crisis and how much more than the current proposals on the table will be needed to get on top of it.
8 million fewer properties than France for a similar size of population....
And France has bigger problems with overcrowding and roughly similar house prices, consistent with the Economist analysis.
Kate Hoey @CatharineHoey Still no answer to why it will take to next year before Alex Rudakubana the alleged murderer of the 3 young girls in South Oct will stand trial ?
Community notes can be very entertaining sometimes. A genuinely great idea.
People dis Twitter* under Musk, but he has implemented two genuinely useful features:
(1) Community notes (2) People I follow
It means I see fewer Marjorie Taylor Greene posts. Which is good.
* I refuse to call it "X"
Community Notes predates Musk
Sort of.
There was a program that created Notes that predated Musk, but it wasn't very widespread nor was it open source - and it had a different name.
The current version dates from Musk.
The story I’ve seen elsewhere is that the current version was in development before Musk bought the company. He just happened to be in charge when it was finished up & pushed to production.
Always remember the six stages of a project:
1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise for those not involved
There are some interesting horror stories out there about the Twitter code base and what was going on before the takeover. There was a reason that features were simply not appearing in production...
Given Musk is apparently not a good coder, I wouldn't assume he's made the codebase any better...
You're not say that he does all the coding for his companies, are you?
No. But I can guarantee that he will hire coders that match his image of a good coder... i.e. him. And the recruitment staff will be recruited on the same basis (I *still* see the old story of him personally interviewing all SpaceX staff...) (fx: hits head on wall.)
SpaceX is actually different, as space and NASA demand certain boxes ticked. I bet he hates those boxes.
Nope - long before SpaceX got a NASA contract, they were racing ahead of the rest of the Space Industry on the software side. Simply because they hired top engineers without legacy “we don’t do that here” to tell them *not do modern software development*.
When they got a NASA contract, their system for tracking parts got all kinds of wow reviews. All they had done was implement a single logical system, using standard stuff (bar codes etc), rather than a pile of paperwork multiples by several incompatible legacy systems.
The usage of FPGAs emulating PowerPC architecture wasn’t invented by SpaceX either. But they were one of the first to apply it to aerospace. Just as doing radiation tolerance at the macro, rather than micro level. Both were in place before NASA started audits etc. Both took a bit of convincing before they were cleared for Human Rated flight.
The initial review of the Dragon control interface was a bit hilarious - instead of taking the “fake an aircraft dash”, the SpaceX engineers created a system of context driven, intuitive menus and screen controls, using industrial psychologists, former astronauts etc.
The NASA reviewers initially had an Out Of Context problem - they couldn’t understand why it didn’t just have an aircraft dashboard. But once they dug into it, they really liked the concept. Which was to align the interface with the checklists and procedures, rather than have a translation layer from procedure to switches.
On Tesla - a friend worked for Tata, in their outfit tearing down rival cars. He was a software engineer / electronics guy and his comment was that Tesla simply implemented modern software and hardware practise in an industry full of appalling IT. The mechanicals he thought were pretty poor, by comparison.
One amusing story he told me - he was debugging a certain car. A whole pile of different computers talking to each other via a mess of cables. He eliminated a stream of errors that one computer was polluting the system with. Which caused another part of the system to crash. Turned out that the stream of errors was preventing a condition in one of the other computers. Luxury car, on the road and in production.
There are times when I think you haven't drunk the Musk Kool-Aid, then you produce something like that.
Musk is one man. He does not, Bill Gates-like, read every line of code. He does not do everything inside the organisation. SpaceX is different, because it took people from other space companies, who knew how to do things in space. Musk knew how to code a game. And code some of Paypal's predecessor. Badly.
I'd strongly argue that Tesla's inability to drive from one side of the US to another - as promised by Musk in 2016 - is a sign that they're not as strong in software as you would like to think.
I've got a counter-example for your amusing story. A German car company developed a concept car that had no direct mechanical link between steering wheel and steering, as required by law. everything in the car used the same control/data bus. It worked really well.
Until someone changed the CD in the CD multi-changer, and so much data was sent over the bus that the steering locked up for a few seconds.
The result: a separate bus for 'critical' functions like steering and braking. And another for non-critical functions.
The *mess of cables* you decry might actually have sensible purposes. And this is something that *anybody* reverse-engineering anything needs to consider: if you think the people who designed the thing you're reverse-engineering was stupid; perhaps you don't understand it fully, and it is *you* who is being stupid.
Musk is behaving like an absolute anus on TwiX. Deplorably.
But on a specific point I believe that the current FSD release (12.5.1?) is more than capable of doing the coast to coast trip on auto going off the videos out there. The leaps forward in its capabilities in the last few versions have been spectacular, and the improvements are coming almost exponentially.
The new first minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan, ends the blanket 20mph change and at the same time appoints Drakeford, who bought it in, temporary Minister of Health for Wales
Comments
Answer: Not by much"
https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/08/08/would-building-15m-homes-bring-down-british-house-prices
They feel insecure as hell. Their solution is to dominate their western neighbours.
Though it's been a long term project of the US right since the Federalist Society was formed.
BBC News - Banksy howling wolf artwork removed
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrjyv2dwnvo
I doubt the people doing this have thought this one through or have the contacts required to sell it to a dodgy art collector.
It reminds of the Only Fools and Horses episode with the hooky scat-alite dishes nicked from Heathrow airport.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.176878927
But.
The Chinese don’t need to do anything. Every year, more Chinese move across the border. They are getting the resources and everything they want (except taxes) right now. What could they gain?
See my comments today about Trump’s insane tariff proposals on Chinese trade. That alone would crash the world economy. I don’t want that. I don’t want him to win
The difference is that I haven’t got Trump Derangement Syndrome, unlike quite a few on here. The idea of him winning is unpleasant for me, but it doesn’t send me into a spasm of suicidal weirdness
Why not go back to just having a public website? I hear forums still work if you want to encourage public discussion.
Edit: I actually backed Vance at 290s this morning for that reason - admittedly only risking one of my highly polished Omnium pounds.
SpaceX is actually different, as space and NASA demand certain boxes ticked. I bet he hates those boxes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8x03e6605o
"This happened in an area without cctv"
In an airport? Other than the toilets, i can imagine any area without cctv coverage at an international airport.
It is widely assumed that they could make a bomb, if they wanted to.
Their level of preparation is not as extreme as Japan - which has a whole series of solid fueled space launchers that look exactly like ICBMs - but it would be *weeks* if they ever decided to go for it.
One of my major projects at work at the moment, is trying to get everyone using Teams instead of a whole bunch of ad-hoc WhatsApp groups for discussions that have a financial impact on the company.
Still, there it is. A statistically significant overlap between your output and that of the far right.
Eg do you remember when you said Kamala Harris was "dumb as a rock"?
Muscovites (and those from St Petersburg) don't really understand their country. The parties they go to in District 1 do not know what life is like in the other districts, where millions of people do not even have inside toilets, regardless of the state's massive wealth and power. And the fact District 1 is sending people from the other districts to fight in a pointless war, whilst protecting their own.
But those other Districts are resource-rich, and China needs those resources. And all they need to do is show how their own Districts have improved under the Chinese system, and how the Russian system has used and abused theirs.
It’s not something that Trump himself cares about, but he knows it’s something his biggest supporters care about, and will be seen among Republicans as his biggest triumph as President.
Yes I did say that about Harris and I now think I misjudged her. I was relying on second hand reports from biased Americans, never a good thing. Always look with your own eyes and make a true objective assessment
The skilful way she’s handled this extraordinarily difficult transition - from Biden to her - tells me she has political cunning and brains. I think she will probably win (unless Trump drops out: not impossible). That will please me because Trump is a crazy fucker
If Trump drops out and a sane anti-woke Republican becomes the GOP candidate I will enthusiastically back that person over Harris
There. Sorted. Now stop being weird
One very senior manager didn’t understand that iMessage was a data message rather than an SMS, and wondered why I didn’t have WA on my phone.
I used to deliver a talk to schools and parents about IT security, called “Why I’m not on Facebook”.
Pillock.
Those *super* serious (more serious than me) eventually end up on a "winners tax" though that really eats into profits.
But it's an interesting question - what's our best guess as to what the nutter comes out with ?
VP announcement ?
A Trump crypto-coin ?
Just a rant ?
The third column is monthly active suers:
1 Facebook 3.06 billion 13,200,000,000
2 YouTube 2.70 billion 73,400,000,000
3 WhatsApp 2.40 billion 3,900,000,000
4 Instagram 2.35 billion 6,900,000,000
5 TikTok 1.67 billion 2,700,000,000
6 WeChat 1.31 billion 5,700,000
7 Messenger 1.10 billion 261,200,000
8 Telegram 900 million 614,000,000
9 Viber 820 million 16,600,000
10 Snapchat 800 million 194,800,000
11 Douyin 752 million 210,400,000
12 Baidu 676 million 1,600,000,000
13 Qzone 615 million 476,500,000
14 Spotify 602 million 718,800,000
15 X (Twitter) 600 million 4,100,000,000
A couple who joined a protest in Hartlepool after going to an afternoon bingo session have each been jailed for two years and two months.
Steven Mailen, 54, of Arch Court, Hartlepool and his partner Ryan Sheers, 29, of Powlett Road, Hartlepool both pleaded guilty to violent disorder after they became involved with a mob on Murray Street on 31 July.
We have had queers for Palestine, now there are gays for the nazis...
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1821568901010067665
Two tier policing has been over hyped. In fact there is likely more evidence of the police still being racially biased against ethnic minorities l
My Wife is thinking of going to Connecticut in November to vote in person as she always has problems with her absentee ballot. I’m sure she’s aware that her vote won’t make much odds in the Nutmeg State but it shows how seriously she’s taking it.
My guess as to his 2pm (US) thing - a rant and something stupid - all Trump voters to be eligible for a golden Trump sticker, or the like. Maybe some news of a chat with Vlad, and the formation of a committee for a new world order.
If you actually read *real* news sources, rather than the ones that led you to think MH17 was shot down by Ukraine, or that there were Ukrainian Biolabs (and hence shilling for Russia...), you might know that China has been investing around the world for resources: especially Africa. The 'Belt and Road Initiative' is just part of a massive resource grab.
Yet there is a massive resource-rich area directly across their northern border. And one they have had conflicts over before.
If you're trying to say that China doesn't covet Russia's southeastern territories, then you stupid and/or a Russian shill.
But ok, that's a good post there and I can't ask for more. Whether you truly, on Nov 6th, will be wanting to wake up to "Harris wins, Trump loses" is between you and your god. We're all entitled to our secret chamber and in any case what we want or don't want can be a complex layered thing.
I would like to see more enthusiasm from you as Trump implodes. You don't seem to be enjoying it very much, which I think is a shame.
She certainly has negatives, and she really didn't come across as any too bright when trying to debate on the death penalty that time, but she's almost unencumbered by the recent Tory disasters, leaving Cabinet in 2022. She'd be attractive to some on the Reform side (albeit putting off a few of the most hardcore racists and bigots due to her race and sex) with her long record of right-wingery. It remains to be seen how off-putting (or not) she'd be to the more liberal and one-nation voters lost by the Tories this year.
Russian pundit Alexander Kazakov says that the UK - "our worst enemy" - is behind Ukraine’s advance into Kursk Region
"This is a London story and [Ukrainian military intelligence chief] Budanov is London’s man!"
https://x.com/francis_scarr/status/1821531460647727516
(gently wipes a tear from one eye)
Who the hell uses Viber? Is there niche part of the world where it is massive?
But you know what Matplotlib has that I genuinely love: the ability to produce charts in XKCD style.
When they got a NASA contract, their system for tracking parts got all kinds of wow reviews. All they had done was implement a single logical system, using standard stuff (bar codes etc), rather than a pile of paperwork multiples by several incompatible legacy systems.
The usage of FPGAs emulating PowerPC architecture wasn’t invented by SpaceX either. But they were one of the first to apply it to aerospace. Just as doing radiation tolerance at the macro, rather than micro level. Both were in place before NASA started audits etc. Both took a bit of convincing before they were cleared for Human Rated flight.
The initial review of the Dragon control interface was a bit hilarious - instead of taking the “fake an aircraft dash”, the SpaceX engineers created a system of context driven, intuitive menus and screen controls, using industrial psychologists, former astronauts etc.
The NASA reviewers initially had an Out Of Context problem - they couldn’t understand why it didn’t just have an aircraft dashboard. But once they dug into it, they really liked the concept. Which was to align the interface with the checklists and procedures, rather than have a translation layer from procedure to switches.
On Tesla - a friend worked for Tata, in their outfit tearing down rival cars. He was a software engineer / electronics guy and his comment was that Tesla simply implemented modern software and hardware practise in an industry full of appalling IT. The mechanicals he thought were pretty poor, by comparison.
One amusing story he told me - he was debugging a certain car. A whole pile of different computers talking to each other via a mess of cables. He eliminated a stream of errors that one computer was polluting the system with. Which caused another part of the system to crash. Turned out that the stream of errors was preventing a condition in one of the other computers. Luxury car, on the road and in production.
fraudstersbusinesses it was practically impossible to open a new account. I ended up using Revolut who to be fair are bloody brilliant. I was since able to open other accounts but only with a trading history to show.Since then I have incorporated two other businesses and a few weeks ago started my 4th business. Wifey's shop business (the 3rd one opened) was relatively straight forward, but trying to do banking for the new business is once again having me scratch my head and wonder why something simple is still a pain in the arse.
Good exchange. Worth it.
However I see Trump as an even greater threat to our security and prosperity. So I am forced to choose the lesser of two serious evils (in my eyes). This is not fertile grounds for “enthusiasm”
What would enthuse me is a firmly anti-Woke but sane Republican who won’t abandon NATO and won’t crash the world economy with tariffs
Presumably if we *don't* build 1.5m more homes, prices will get even more crazy, so 1.5m is the bare minimum we need to stand still - which tracks with immigration figures etc.
And supply being inelastic at any price sorta says 'well yeah, it's called planning regulations making it impossible to build anything'.
So my solution to this problem would be to build a heck of a lot more than 1.5m homes (probably by building up, and to do that you'd need to abolish or significantly reform leasehold so it's not a total scam), and make it significantly easier to get planning permission for all kinds of developments in all kinds of places.
I know I sound like Captain Obvious, but that article really does get across the sheer scale of the UK housing crisis and how much more than the current proposals on the table will be needed to get on top of it.
I used to have that ranty all the time but have just about given up. I just tell people that if you insist on using Facebook then I won't see any of it.
My employer encourages everyone to post crap on Workplace and LinkedIn but I don't feel I'm missing out on anything by ignoring them...
Same applies to Starmer’s nasal voice. It’s deeply grating - to me. Such a trivial thing should not be salient but I do find myself avoiding his speeches and statements simply because of his voice-tone
I am clearly a very superficial person
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/08/jermaine-grant-kenya-deported/
Musk is one man. He does not, Bill Gates-like, read every line of code. He does not do everything inside the organisation. SpaceX is different, because it took people from other space companies, who knew how to do things in space. Musk knew how to code a game. And code some of Paypal's predecessor. Badly.
I'd strongly argue that Tesla's inability to drive from one side of the US to another - as promised by Musk in 2016 - is a sign that they're not as strong in software as you would like to think.
I've got a counter-example for your amusing story. A German car company developed a concept car that had no direct mechanical link between steering wheel and steering, as required by law. everything in the car used the same control/data bus. It worked really well.
Until someone changed the CD in the CD multi-changer, and so much data was sent over the bus that the steering locked up for a few seconds.
The result: a separate bus for 'critical' functions like steering and braking. And another for non-critical functions.
The *mess of cables* you decry might actually have sensible purposes. And this is something that *anybody* reverse-engineering anything needs to consider: if you think the people who designed the thing you're reverse-engineering was stupid; perhaps you don't understand it fully, and it is *you* who is being stupid.
✅ Favourable 37% (-3)
❌ Unfavourable 53% (+4)
The honeymoon is well and truly over.
Via
@YouGov
, 5-8 August (+/- vs 31 July)
During lockdown my line manger started communicating with me via whatsapp to my personal number/phone. I insisted everything go via work channels on work devices - I was not issued with a work mobile at the time.
Without getting into specifics, this was later very *useful* when bringing certain issues to the attention of HR...
1/3 -14 or better
6/1 stays at -16 (+-1)
6/1 -18 or worse
I start the day listening to the Today programme on R4 - I'm annoyed by Emma Barnett's 'but what do you think' style, and infuriated by the idiocy of Sean Farrington. (I concede that 6am might not be my most friendly time)
I also have other non-morning hated people - Fred Seirax (I think that's his name) = I despise the man, but I have no good reason for doing so.
And I don't like Wes Streeting, even though I think he's really quite good.
My views do change sometimes though. I didn't like Chris Packham when he first appeared on TV, but I now certainly do - I even bought his book.
But on a specific point I believe that the current FSD release (12.5.1?) is more than capable of doing the coast to coast trip on auto going off the videos out there. The leaps forward in its capabilities in the last few versions have been spectacular, and the improvements are coming almost exponentially.
Not that we have them in the UK!
Perhaps you can see why it has not been done?
The new first minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan, ends the blanket 20mph change and at the same time appoints Drakeford, who bought it in, temporary Minister of Health for Wales