I hope we use our Brexit freedoms to allow the Cybertruck on UK roads.
The Tesla Cybertruck is too big and too dangerous for European roads, transport campaigners have warned.
There is confusion about whether the Cybertruck could be driven in Europe because of strict road safety rules. These ban sharp edges and require speed limiters on vehicles that weigh more than 3.5 tonnes.
Tesla says the vehicle weighs four tonnes, compared with about two tonnes for normal family cars. In a letter to the European Commission campaign groups called for Cybertrucks to be removed from public roads.
Kemi Badenoch’s fans have been exchanging 'racist' messages including about Rishi Sunak in a campaign WhatsApp group for her Tory grassroot supporters, the Mirror has learned.
A former Conservative MP who is part of the chat assured members the Tory leadership hopeful, who is down to the final three candidates, “reads everything, including this”.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
I simply love watches and clocks - I'd not actually wear one for all the cash in China/Smithson Bank Accounts (whichever is the larger)
We have a massive old flat clock on our wall, maybe 4 feet diameter. I like it very much.
We have an old brass-case Smiths (*) clock on the wall; got from a ship's engine room. It has the minutes in large numbers (5 to 60 in five intervals), rather than the hours (1 to 12), as enginemen were more bothered about things happening at regular intervals throughout the hour. I think it's quite unusual to have a clock where the minutes are more prominent on the dial than the hours?
Some of my earliest memories are of my dad winding it each morning, and it's a tradition I try to maintain to this day. Sadly, I think it needs to go in for some maintenance.
(*) Smiths of Derby
That sounds a fantastic piece. Ours is with hands and has Roman numerals.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
How does a pocket sundial work, please? Does it have a built-in compass?
I haven't got my head around the trigonometry of it yet, but there's a central bit that you adjust depending on your latitude, and another bit that you adjust according to the date, and then you turn it until the sunlight shines through a hole onto the where you read the time off, and something about the interaction between where the hole is, and where the circle of the time is, means that you are pointing it in the right direction, without having a compass.
We have a massive old flat clock on our wall, maybe 4 feet diameter. I like it very much.
I owned, briefly, an English Electric master clock designed for factory or school use.
It's a proper pendulum based clockwork mechanism, but it is would by an electric motor. It also has contacts on the mechanism that open and close every second to feed slave dials round the building. The circuits are completed using mercury tilt switches. Actual glass vials half full of mercury that move so that the mercury connects the contacts, or not...
A spectacular device
The Swiss railway version sends an impulse only once a minute. The slave devices halt the second hand while the minute hand advances. Per wikipedia:
"The station clocks in Switzerland are synchronised by receiving an electrical impulse from a central master clock at each full minute, advancing the minute hand by one minute. The second hand is driven by an electrical motor independent of the master clock. It takes only about 58.5 seconds to circle the face; then the hand pauses briefly at the top of the clock. It starts a new rotation as soon as it receives the next minute impulse from the master clock.[3] This movement is emulated in some of the licensed timepieces made by Mondaine."
Harris is getting a huge historic lead in white college graduates in the latest polling:
Clinton achieved +5% margin Biden achieved +9% margin Harris has a poll showing +18% margin
Biggest margin ever recorded.
(Source CNN)
I'm seeing many times more pro-Trump/anti-Harris stuff on Twix than I am anti-Trump/pro-Harris. This is despite me being more on the pro-Harris side.
It'll be interesting to see if this election is a case of those who make the most noise, having least effect. Or if the noise matters.
That's because TwiX prioritizes engagement, and you are more likely to engage with (i.e. respond to) things you disagree with.
It's why I see Marjory Taylor Green stuff all the time.
The algo seems to have changed massively in the last couple of days, though.
Until then my "for you" feed was pretty useful. All of a sudden, it's a mix of 90% shit and right wing trolls with production related stuff. I'd not changed anything.
It's as though Musk is using it as a campaign tool.
I suspect that what Elon thinks is persuasive is likely to have to opposite effect! Being shown Marjorie Taylor Green "Democrats control the hurricanes" doesn't make me more likely to vote Republican, it makes me more likely to head down to the polling booth because people that crazy shouldn't be in power.
Musk was downright embarrassing at that latest Trump rally. I hope for his sake he's compartmentalising rather than expressing his true urges.
He seems very impulsive in his public utterances, I'd assume he is being very sincere in these matters.
Trump seems to bring out the worst in people.
In case of Musko and others, they definitely WANT to show their worst to Trump, in order to impress him as a Despicable Mini-Me.
Last time I was here was not long after Brexit. There was a loooong queue for Brits
This time? Massive queue for the EU. Tiny queue for Brits. Think their gates failed
This has been my experience in most places recently. I think we went early on e-passports or something. The only pinch point for Brits seems to be the ferries and Chunnel from time to time.
Kemi Badenoch’s fans have been exchanging 'racist' messages including about Rishi Sunak in a campaign WhatsApp group for her Tory grassroot supporters, the Mirror has learned.
A former Conservative MP who is part of the chat assured members the Tory leadership hopeful, who is down to the final three candidates, “reads everything, including this”.
Are the next few hours going to be the most concentrated example of ruthless backstabbing seen outside of the Oxford Union?
(To be fair, you can sort of see why. RJ and KB have comfortably been the top two for most of the process. And whoever makes it to the final has a more than decent chance of winning. But the loser from those two is about to be ejected with minimal dignity. And it's so hard to tell who, and it's probably out of their control...)
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
As my previous comment, "watches are handbags for men" ...though "watches are jewellery for men" would be just as appropriate. They're things us guys can get sentimentally attached to.
My speedy, I'm attached to. (Though the new FOIS has turned my head and made me wonder if it's time to swap). I can't ever imagine getting attached to a Garmin or iWatch with a three year lifespan in the same way.
It's definitely a slow news day on PB when we're into watches for two days running...
Rather shows the Tories diminished position in the scheme of things, doesn't it.
The smart thing for the Tories to do right now is to skip the "lurch to the right, red meat for the 100,000 or so members but voter repellent to the general public" bit they went through last time and skip straight to the Michael Howard caretaker type leader who will allow someone more voter friendly to emerge.
I'm not sure they've got that, even with Cleverley, though he is the best of a rotten bunch.
Jenrick isn't even Hague territory - he's "imagine if Alan B'Stard was real and you elected him" territory.
At least B'stard had a certain charisma.
Jenrick is more Piers Fletcher-Dervish. He wants to be B'Stard, but you need charisma to carry that off, and he doesn't really have it.
Farage, on the other hand... There's even a certain assonance in the names.
I agree. Farage (and Boris to some extent, as well as the likes of Mogg) have a hint of the B’stard. They look like they might be enjoying themselves, and, when they pull it off, the public likes that.
We have a massive old flat clock on our wall, maybe 4 feet diameter. I like it very much.
I owned, briefly, an English Electric master clock designed for factory or school use.
It's a proper pendulum based clockwork mechanism, but it is would by an electric motor. It also has contacts on the mechanism that open and close every second to feed slave dials round the building. The circuits are completed using mercury tilt switches. Actual glass vials half full of mercury that move so that the mercury connects the contacts, or not...
A spectacular device
The Swiss railway version sends an impulse only once a minute. The slave devices halt the second hand while the minute hand advances. Per wikipedia:
"The station clocks in Switzerland are synchronised by receiving an electrical impulse from a central master clock at each full minute, advancing the minute hand by one minute. The second hand is driven by an electrical motor independent of the master clock. It takes only about 58.5 seconds to circle the face; then the hand pauses briefly at the top of the clock. It starts a new rotation as soon as it receives the next minute impulse from the master clock.[3] This movement is emulated in some of the licensed timepieces made by Mondaine."
Actually I forgot the best bit...
In the case of a power outage, the clock keeps running (clockwork) but can't send any pulses, so it 'remembers' how many pulses it missed via some other mechanical mechanism. When the power comes back on it send all the pulses immediately so the slaves catch up.
Noah Bergren @NbergWX 8PM EDT: This is nothing short of astronomical. I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe you the storms small eye and intensity. 897mb pressure with 180 MPH max sustained winds and gusts 200+ MPH. This is now the 4th strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world. The eye is TINY at nearly 3.8 miles wide. This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.
Kemi Badenoch’s fans have been exchanging 'racist' messages including about Rishi Sunak in a campaign WhatsApp group for her Tory grassroot supporters, the Mirror has learned.
A former Conservative MP who is part of the chat assured members the Tory leadership hopeful, who is down to the final three candidates, “reads everything, including this”.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
As my previous comment, "watches are handbags for men" ...though "watches are jewellery for men" would be just as appropriate. They're things us guys can get sentimentally attached to.
My speedy, I'm attached to. (Though the new FOIS has turned my head and made me wonder if it's time to swap). I can't ever imagine getting attached to a Garmin or iWatch with a three year lifespan in the same way.
It's definitely a slow news day on PB when we're into watches for two days running...
Well, it's not like there's a big election on or anything.
Noah Bergren @NbergWX 8PM EDT: This is nothing short of astronomical. I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe you the storms small eye and intensity. 897mb pressure with 180 MPH max sustained winds and gusts 200+ MPH. This is now the 4th strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world. The eye is TINY at nearly 3.8 miles wide. This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
I simply love watches and clocks - I'd not actually wear one for all the cash in China/Smithson Bank Accounts (whichever is the larger)
We have a massive old flat clock on our wall, maybe 4 feet diameter. I like it very much.
We have an old brass-case Smiths (*) clock on the wall; got from a ship's engine room. It has the minutes in large numbers (5 to 60 in five intervals), rather than the hours (1 to 12), as enginemen were more bothered about things happening at regular intervals throughout the hour. I think it's quite unusual to have a clock where the minutes are more prominent on the dial than the hours?
Some of my earliest memories are of my dad winding it each morning, and it's a tradition I try to maintain to this day. Sadly, I think it needs to go in for some maintenance.
(*) Smiths of Derby
That sounds a fantastic piece. Ours is with hands and has Roman numerals.
My pic for the day. In need of some Brasso.
How I mss my i-phone 1 which in recent years had kept time on the bedside table with resolute accuracy until one night it went to sleep and never woke up. Its shiny metal case would glow discretely in the moonlight like the chrome bumper of a classic car, a reassuring token of ageless quality. Now, alas, it just gathers dust in a drawer, never again to announce glad confident morning.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
I simply love watches and clocks - I'd not actually wear one for all the cash in China/Smithson Bank Accounts (whichever is the larger)
We have a massive old flat clock on our wall, maybe 4 feet diameter. I like it very much.
We have an 1840s wall clock, which still keeps perfect time. Will a smartwatch still do that in 2204?
You know what, if it doesn't in 2204, then you make sure to post here and let everyone know.
Kemi Badenoch’s fans have been exchanging 'racist' messages including about Rishi Sunak in a campaign WhatsApp group for her Tory grassroot supporters, the Mirror has learned.
A former Conservative MP who is part of the chat assured members the Tory leadership hopeful, who is down to the final three candidates, “reads everything, including this”.
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There's a very interesting analysis by Nate Cohn here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/upshot/florida-poll-harris-trump.html, which basically says that Trump's relative strength in Florida, New York and California means his electoral college advantage is a lot less pronounced than it was.
I don’t care if I look like a pathetic PB centrist dad with my stupid Garmin smartwatch
I just want to die later rather than earlier, and it seems that these might help
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
I didn’t expect to be enjoying myself quite this much at this later stage. Lots of travel. Good friends. Still a decent income. Fascinating job. Get on with my kids (also worry about them - and they probably need me to hang about). Its a pretty good package
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There's a very interesting analysis by Nate Cohn here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/upshot/florida-poll-harris-trump.html, which basically says that Trump's relative strength in Florida, New York and California means his electoral college advantage is a lot less pronounced than it was.
(I continue to think the value bet is for Trump to win the popular vote, but Harris the electoral college. I think it's a lot less unlikely than people think.)
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There's a very interesting analysis by Nate Cohn here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/upshot/florida-poll-harris-trump.html, which basically says that Trump's relative strength in Florida, New York and California means his electoral college advantage is a lot less pronounced than it was.
(I continue to think the value bet is for Trump to win the popular vote, but Harris the electoral college. I think it's a lot less unlikely than people think.)
It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's value.
Kemi Badenoch’s fans have been exchanging 'racist' messages including about Rishi Sunak in a campaign WhatsApp group for her Tory grassroot supporters, the Mirror has learned.
A former Conservative MP who is part of the chat assured members the Tory leadership hopeful, who is down to the final three candidates, “reads everything, including this”.
Are the next few hours going to be the most concentrated example of ruthless backstabbing seen outside of the Oxford Union?
(To be fair, you can sort of see why. RJ and KB have comfortably been the top two for most of the process. And whoever makes it to the final has a more than decent chance of winning. But the loser from those two is about to be ejected with minimal dignity. And it's so hard to tell who, and it's probably out of their control...)
In trying to engineer Jenrick into the final two Cleverly supporters knock their own man out?
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
The ridicule that MAMILs (and now smartwatch wearers) receive is, I suspect, a distinctly British phenomenon and comes from a inferiority complex when it comes to exercise and looking after your body.
If the NHS is to survive, we need many more people like Leon to get smartwatches and don the padded shorts, to buy the fancy storm jacket and head into the Peak District. Nothing better than seeing a bunch of overweight boomers desperately trying to make it over the Bealach na Ba.
The ridicule is not the exercise but the obsession with kit. I get just as much exercise on my £700 touring bike and my shorts and t-shirts as my mate on his £10000 bike and £1000+ of kit and accessories gets. And we don't have to stop when my tech goes wrong because I don't have any.
BUT do you have issuses with chaffing? Perhaps high-tech solution for THAT might do you some good!
As for your last point above, there's a Dutch woman with YouTube channel who motorcycles to the back of beyond . . . and then beyond that . . . who is having a bike designed for her, that eliminates most of the high-tech electronics in favor of low-tech reliability AND repair . . . especially in boondock/outback situations.
Bike tech Disc brakes - broadly +ve as long as you don't boil them or lose pressure E-shifting - why? Tubeless - total disaster
A bike with disc brakes, double or triple chainset on a Shimano sealed bottom bracket and 8 speed cassette will give you the best braking and a long lived drivetrain..
There are two types of cyclists:
Those who say "e-shifting - why?" and those who have tried electronic shifting.
I got my first bike with electronic shifting at the beginning of this year. Now my three main bikes have it (only the Brompton does not).
For my electric gravel bike, I hacked it together to save money. I didn't want to buy a whole groupset given how well my Shimano mechanical one worked, so I just bought a rear SRAM AXS derailleur and two wireless blips that I mounted on the hoods. And it works perfectly.
I have never been able to keep mechanical gears indexed for longer than a couple of rides, perhaps because it's very hilly here and I'm always shifting under load. I simply don't have that problem with the electronic shifting: it's instant perfect shifts every time, with no chain slap, and no need for constant half shifts to correct indexing issues.
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There's a very interesting analysis by Nate Cohn here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/upshot/florida-poll-harris-trump.html, which basically says that Trump's relative strength in Florida, New York and California means his electoral college advantage is a lot less pronounced than it was.
(I continue to think the value bet is for Trump to win the popular vote, but Harris the electoral college. I think it's a lot less unlikely than people think.)
It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's value.
Noah Bergren @NbergWX 8PM EDT: This is nothing short of astronomical. I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe you the storms small eye and intensity. 897mb pressure with 180 MPH max sustained winds and gusts 200+ MPH. This is now the 4th strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world. The eye is TINY at nearly 3.8 miles wide. This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
I simply love watches and clocks - I'd not actually wear one for all the cash in China/Smithson Bank Accounts (whichever is the larger)
We have a massive old flat clock on our wall, maybe 4 feet diameter. I like it very much.
We have an 1840s wall clock, which still keeps perfect time. Will a smartwatch still do that in 2204?
You know what, if it doesn't in 2204, then you make sure to post here and let everyone know.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
The ridicule that MAMILs (and now smartwatch wearers) receive is, I suspect, a distinctly British phenomenon and comes from a inferiority complex when it comes to exercise and looking after your body.
If the NHS is to survive, we need many more people like Leon to get smartwatches and don the padded shorts, to buy the fancy storm jacket and head into the Peak District. Nothing better than seeing a bunch of overweight boomers desperately trying to make it over the Bealach na Ba.
The ridicule is not the exercise but the obsession with kit. I get just as much exercise on my £700 touring bike and my shorts and t-shirts as my mate on his £10000 bike and £1000+ of kit and accessories gets. And we don't have to stop when my tech goes wrong because I don't have any.
BUT do you have issuses with chaffing? Perhaps high-tech solution for THAT might do you some good!
As for your last point above, there's a Dutch woman with YouTube channel who motorcycles to the back of beyond . . . and then beyond that . . . who is having a bike designed for her, that eliminates most of the high-tech electronics in favor of low-tech reliability AND repair . . . especially in boondock/outback situations.
Bike tech Disc brakes - broadly +ve as long as you don't boil them or lose pressure E-shifting - why? Tubeless - total disaster
A bike with disc brakes, double or triple chainset on a Shimano sealed bottom bracket and 8 speed cassette will give you the best braking and a long lived drivetrain..
There are two types of cyclists:
Those who say "e-shifting - why?" and those who have tried electronic shifting.
I got my first bike with electronic shifting at the beginning of this year. Now my three main bikes have it (only the Brompton does not).
For my electric gravel bike, I hacked it together to save money. I didn't want to buy a whole groupset given how well my Shimano mechanical one worked, so I just bought a rear SRAM AXS derailleur and two wireless blips that I mounted on the hoods. And it works perfectly.
I have never been able to keep mechanical gears indexed for longer than a couple of rides, perhaps because it's very hilly here and I'm always shifting under load. I simply don't have that problem with the electronic shifting: it's instant perfect shifts every time, with no chain slap, and no need for constant half shifts to correct indexing issues.
As I’m getting older I’m slowing down. I love getting out on my bike and will definitely need to get an electric one in the next 12 months or so.
I’ll look at e-shifting. Don’t even know what it is at the moment.
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There's a very interesting analysis by Nate Cohn here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/upshot/florida-poll-harris-trump.html, which basically says that Trump's relative strength in Florida, New York and California means his electoral college advantage is a lot less pronounced than it was.
(I continue to think the value bet is for Trump to win the popular vote, but Harris the electoral college. I think it's a lot less unlikely than people think.)
It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's value.
Surely that depends entirely on the odds.
I haven't seen that market split into two. It's 3 on betfair but that covers either doing it. Harris alone should be what, about 20?
I don’t care if I look like a pathetic PB centrist dad with my stupid Garmin smartwatch
I just want to die later rather than earlier, and it seems that these might help
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
I didn’t expect to be enjoying myself quite this much at this later stage. Lots of travel. Good friends. Still a decent income. Fascinating job. Get on with my kids (also worry about them - and they probably need me to hang about). Its a pretty good package
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
Does this mean the thrillers have been put on hold?
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
Ken Clark was the last avuncular on offer.
He wasn't the chosen one then, if that's a precedent
I don’t care if I look like a pathetic PB centrist dad with my stupid Garmin smartwatch
I just want to die later rather than earlier, and it seems that these might help
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
I didn’t expect to be enjoying myself quite this much at this later stage. Lots of travel. Good friends. Still a decent income. Fascinating job. Get on with my kids (also worry about them - and they probably need me to hang about). Its a pretty good package
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
Well they certainly won't harm.
Re age, it struck me recently how unusual I must be in being 64 with both parents alive, D91 and M88. That's a combined 243 years, the three of us.
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There seems to be an issue with the recall vote and different pollsters use different methods . I expect Trump to win Florida but there’s no way he’s winning by 13 points .
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There's a very interesting analysis by Nate Cohn here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/upshot/florida-poll-harris-trump.html, which basically says that Trump's relative strength in Florida, New York and California means his electoral college advantage is a lot less pronounced than it was.
(I continue to think the value bet is for Trump to win the popular vote, but Harris the electoral college. I think it's a lot less unlikely than people think.)
It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's value.
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
A few weeks ago I was commenting on the falling Russian stock market. It does seem to have mysteriously recovered somewhat since the end of the summer but the Rouble looks to be heading towards 100 again versus the Dollar. I've just another metric which I have to say I wasn't familiar with but it's the Russian government bond index (RGBI). It's fallen to 99.38 which is worse than it was in February 2022. Given interest rates are already at 19%, the emergency value they adopted at that time, what tools do they have left?
When you think of how much European exports to 'Kyrgyzstan' have grown in the last 2 years, Washington's chiding of Ukraine for attacking Russia's energy industry and refusal to provide long range missiles you wonder how different things might be with a slightly more committed approach from the west.
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
A few weeks ago I was commenting on the falling Russian stock market. It does seem to have mysteriously recovered somewhat since the end of the summer but the Rouble looks to be heading towards 100 again versus the Dollar. I've just another metric which I have to say I wasn't familiar with but it's the Russian government bond index (RGBI). It's fallen to 99.38 which is worse than it was in February 2022. Given interest rates are already at 19%, the emergency value they adopted at that time, what tools do they have left?
When you think of how much European exports to 'Kyrgyzstan' have grown in the last 2 years, Washington's chiding of Ukraine for attacking Russia's energy industry and refusal to provide long range missiles you wonder how different things might be with a slightly more committed approach from the west.
It is worth remembering that - while the exports to Kyrgyzstan have gone through the roof - they are still only about $1bn/year.
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
If you want to know where the money is, head to Newmarket.
The first day of trading at the Book 1 Tattersalls October Yearling Sale saw 42,680,000 guineas spent by buyers on the purchase of 117 yearling horses.
The most expensive lot went for 4 million guineas.
Obviously not Premier League footballer but still....
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There seems to be an issue with the recall vote and different pollsters use different methods . I expect Trump to win Florida but there’s no way he’s winning by 13 points .
Why not?
Florida has got much more Red.
The fascinating question, though, will be what happens with the abortion referendum. The State has pushed through a six week ban (which - of course - really means a two week ban.) And there's a push to change the State's constitution guaranteeing a right until fetal viability, that looks like it might well get the 60% support required to change the constitution.
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
Proverbs 1:4
..To know wisdom and instruction; To perceive the words of understanding; To receive the instruction of wisdom, Justice, and judgment, and equity; To give subtilty to the simple, To the young man knowledge and discretion...
I don’t care if I look like a pathetic PB centrist dad with my stupid Garmin smartwatch
I just want to die later rather than earlier, and it seems that these might help
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
I didn’t expect to be enjoying myself quite this much at this later stage. Lots of travel. Good friends. Still a decent income. Fascinating job. Get on with my kids (also worry about them - and they probably need me to hang about). Its a pretty good package
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
Well they certainly won't harm.
Re age, it struck me recently how unusual I must be in being 64 with both parents alive, D91 and M88. That's a combined 243 years, the three of us.
Can anybody here beat that or get close?
That makes me happy. But not me, yet. But the gap between you and your parents is exactly the same as between me and mine. And I wouldn't be surprised to be where you are in fifteen years. My parents are gratifyingly healthy, and my grandparents were a long-lived bunch. So fingers crossed I'll get there.
I don’t care if I look like a pathetic PB centrist dad with my stupid Garmin smartwatch
I just want to die later rather than earlier, and it seems that these might help
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
I didn’t expect to be enjoying myself quite this much at this later stage. Lots of travel. Good friends. Still a decent income. Fascinating job. Get on with my kids (also worry about them - and they probably need me to hang about). Its a pretty good package
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
Well they certainly won't harm.
Re age, it struck me recently how unusual I must be in being 64 with both parents alive, D91 and M88. That's a combined 243 years, the three of us.
Can anybody here beat that or get close?
When my grandfather died two years ago, my mother was 74, her parents 96 and 97.
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
Proverbs 1:4
..To know wisdom and instruction; To perceive the words of understanding; To receive the instruction of wisdom, Justice, and judgment, and equity; To give subtilty to the simple, To the young man knowledge and discretion...
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
Staring moodily at the fountain is free.
I’m gonna go look at CERN
Ok but be low key about that. A couple of years ago I made a bit of a production of trying to access Sellafield and got arrested.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
As my previous comment, "watches are handbags for men" ...though "watches are jewellery for men" would be just as appropriate. They're things us guys can get sentimentally attached to.
My speedy, I'm attached to. (Though the new FOIS has turned my head and made me wonder if it's time to swap). I can't ever imagine getting attached to a Garmin or iWatch with a three year lifespan in the same way.
It's definitely a slow news day on PB when we're into watches for two days running...
Rather shows the Tories diminished position in the scheme of things, doesn't it.
The smart thing for the Tories to do right now is to skip the "lurch to the right, red meat for the 100,000 or so members but voter repellent to the general public" bit they went through last time and skip straight to the Michael Howard caretaker type leader who will allow someone more voter friendly to emerge.
I'm not sure they've got that, even with Cleverley, though he is the best of a rotten bunch.
Jenrick isn't even Hague territory - he's "imagine if Alan B'Stard was real and you elected him" territory.
At least B'stard had a certain charisma.
Jenrick is more Piers Fletcher-Dervish. He wants to be B'Stard, but you need charisma to carry that off, and he doesn't really have it.
Farage, on the other hand... There's even a certain assonance in the names.
I agree. Farage (and Boris to some extent, as well as the likes of Mogg) have a hint of the B’stard. They look like they might be enjoying themselves, and, when they pull it off, the public likes that.
To me Farage genuinely comes across as likeable. That doesn't actually mean I or others will like him depending on what he says and does, but the point that he has charisma is true.
We have a massive old flat clock on our wall, maybe 4 feet diameter. I like it very much.
I owned, briefly, an English Electric master clock designed for factory or school use.
It's a proper pendulum based clockwork mechanism, but it is would by an electric motor. It also has contacts on the mechanism that open and close every second to feed slave dials round the building. The circuits are completed using mercury tilt switches. Actual glass vials half full of mercury that move so that the mercury connects the contacts, or not...
A spectacular device
I have a Bakelite Chinese clock from the late 60s/early 70s. Lovely 'shellfish pink' colour. Probably cheap tat in some ways - but I'm very fond of it. Remarkably loud tick-tock. Sadly the front got cracked last time I moved house - but it's still a treasure to me.
I don’t care if I look like a pathetic PB centrist dad with my stupid Garmin smartwatch
I just want to die later rather than earlier, and it seems that these might help
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
I didn’t expect to be enjoying myself quite this much at this later stage. Lots of travel. Good friends. Still a decent income. Fascinating job. Get on with my kids (also worry about them - and they probably need me to hang about). Its a pretty good package
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
Well they certainly won't harm.
Re age, it struck me recently how unusual I must be in being 64 with both parents alive, D91 and M88. That's a combined 243 years, the three of us.
Can anybody here beat that or get close?
From the opposite end of the telescope: I was in my early thirties when I had only one parent and no grandparents left. Inbreeding and poor diet and healthcare means that we die young from various genetic problems. We are blessed with high literacy and bibliophilia verging on bibliomania, and oddly look younger than our true age for decades, but when we "go over" we go over fast, aging quickly. It feels like David Bowie in "The Hunger", if anybody remembers that.
I don’t care if I look like a pathetic PB centrist dad with my stupid Garmin smartwatch
I just want to die later rather than earlier, and it seems that these might help
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
I didn’t expect to be enjoying myself quite this much at this later stage. Lots of travel. Good friends. Still a decent income. Fascinating job. Get on with my kids (also worry about them - and they probably need me to hang about). Its a pretty good package
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
Well they certainly won't harm.
Re age, it struck me recently how unusual I must be in being 64 with both parents alive, D91 and M88. That's a combined 243 years, the three of us.
Can anybody here beat that or get close?
111. Much lower than that and someone's an orphan.
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There seems to be an issue with the recall vote and different pollsters use different methods . I expect Trump to win Florida but there’s no way he’s winning by 13 points .
Why not?
Florida has got much more Red.
The fascinating question, though, will be what happens with the abortion referendum. The State has pushed through a six week ban (which - of course - really means a two week ban.) And there's a push to change the State's constitution guaranteeing a right until fetal viability, that looks like it might well get the 60% support required to change the constitution.
RDS doing the Republican free speech thing...
I actually just realized I dramatically understated the issue here. They’re not threatening a civil suit. They’re threatening **criminal charges**. So the state of Florida is threatening criminal charges to take off the air a commercial for the abortion rights ballot initiative! https://x.com/joshtpm/status/1843480940368069048
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
Not so much fun when not a team game, but we used to have fun trying to find the most expensive watch on offer in Geneva... Cheap though.
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
They need someone who enthuses the majority of the party without pushing away the rest, not someone who will just not enflame existing tensions. Who is closest to that?
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
A few weeks ago I was commenting on the falling Russian stock market. It does seem to have mysteriously recovered somewhat since the end of the summer but the Rouble looks to be heading towards 100 again versus the Dollar. I've just another metric which I have to say I wasn't familiar with but it's the Russian government bond index (RGBI). It's fallen to 99.38 which is worse than it was in February 2022. Given interest rates are already at 19%, the emergency value they adopted at that time, what tools do they have left?
When you think of how much European exports to 'Kyrgyzstan' have grown in the last 2 years, Washington's chiding of Ukraine for attacking Russia's energy industry and refusal to provide long range missiles you wonder how different things might be with a slightly more committed approach from the west.
It is worth remembering that - while the exports to Kyrgyzstan have gone through the roof - they are still only about $1bn/year.
May be another interest rate hike next week. I wonder what the limit is with regards to interest rate rises?
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
There used to be quite a nice Japanese restaurant just down from the train station. I used to get a discount as the waitress loved my 'oh so chic' Hello Kitty bag.
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There seems to be an issue with the recall vote and different pollsters use different methods . I expect Trump to win Florida but there’s no way he’s winning by 13 points .
Why not?
Florida has got much more Red.
The fascinating question, though, will be what happens with the abortion referendum. The State has pushed through a six week ban (which - of course - really means a two week ban.) And there's a push to change the State's constitution guaranteeing a right until fetal viability, that looks like it might well get the 60% support required to change the constitution.
RDS doing the Republican free speech thing...
I actually just realized I dramatically understated the issue here. They’re not threatening a civil suit. They’re threatening **criminal charges**. So the state of Florida is threatening criminal charges to take off the air a commercial for the abortion rights ballot initiative! https://x.com/joshtpm/status/1843480940368069048
It's amazing how many people are in favour only of free speech they support.
In Virginia’s 7th district, the unmarried MAGA Republican on offer felt the need to fake having a family for use in campaign ads - so he borrowed his neighbours'!
Still. I have "State and Revolution" and "Industrial Society and its Future" in pdf form on the tablet. I shall become larned if it kills me. Or arrested. One of the two.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
As my previous comment, "watches are handbags for men" ...though "watches are jewellery for men" would be just as appropriate. They're things us guys can get sentimentally attached to.
My speedy, I'm attached to. (Though the new FOIS has turned my head and made me wonder if it's time to swap). I can't ever imagine getting attached to a Garmin or iWatch with a three year lifespan in the same way.
It's definitely a slow news day on PB when we're into watches for two days running...
Rather shows the Tories diminished position in the scheme of things, doesn't it.
The smart thing for the Tories to do right now is to skip the "lurch to the right, red meat for the 100,000 or so members but voter repellent to the general public" bit they went through last time and skip straight to the Michael Howard caretaker type leader who will allow someone more voter friendly to emerge.
I'm not sure they've got that, even with Cleverley, though he is the best of a rotten bunch.
Jenrick isn't even Hague territory - he's "imagine if Alan B'Stard was real and you elected him" territory.
At least B'stard had a certain charisma.
Jenrick is more Piers Fletcher-Dervish. He wants to be B'Stard, but you need charisma to carry that off, and he doesn't really have it.
Farage, on the other hand... There's even a certain assonance in the names.
I agree. Farage (and Boris to some extent, as well as the likes of Mogg) have a hint of the B’stard. They look like they might be enjoying themselves, and, when they pull it off, the public likes that.
To me Farage genuinely comes across as likeable. That doesn't actually mean I or others will like him depending on what he says and does, but the point that he has charisma is true.
Charisma doesn't map to likeability though. Lots of charismatic people aren't likeable. Eg Robert Maxwell, Jimmy Savile, Eamon Holmes.
I have definitely changed trains at 19 of these places (and cannot properly recall about 3 or 4 others). I have terminated at a lot of others, but for this game only changing counts
I'm sure I will be well beaten in this respect, but wanted to put a marker down.
My definites are: Birmingham New Street, Brighton, Bristol Temple Meads, Carlisle, Crewe, Doncaster, Edinburgh, Ely, Glasgow Central, Leeds, Liverpool Lime Street, Manchester Piccadilly, Newcastle, Oxenholme, Peterborough, Preston, Stockport, Wakefield Westgate and York.
A few weeks ago I was commenting on the falling Russian stock market. It does seem to have mysteriously recovered somewhat since the end of the summer but the Rouble looks to be heading towards 100 again versus the Dollar. I've just another metric which I have to say I wasn't familiar with but it's the Russian government bond index (RGBI). It's fallen to 99.38 which is worse than it was in February 2022. Given interest rates are already at 19%, the emergency value they adopted at that time, what tools do they have left?
When you think of how much European exports to 'Kyrgyzstan' have grown in the last 2 years, Washington's chiding of Ukraine for attacking Russia's energy industry and refusal to provide long range missiles you wonder how different things might be with a slightly more committed approach from the west.
It is worth remembering that - while the exports to Kyrgyzstan have gone through the roof - they are still only about $1bn/year.
May be another interest rate hike next week. I wonder what the limit is with regards to interest rate rises?
Right now the Russian economy is dominated by government war spending: the traditional private sector is being squeezed by labour shortages, high interest rates and poor export prospects.
It is worth noting how much they benefit, though, from war in the Middle East. No-one benefits more from Israel taking out Iranian oil facilities than they do, because the only way they are able to fund the war is via energy exports.
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
Staring moodily at the fountain is free.
I’m gonna go look at CERN
They have a very good canteen. Would recommend.
However if you ate the tachyon pudding yesterday and forget to buy it today, the chef gets really upset. 😃
Still. I have "State and Revolution" and "Industrial Society and its Future" in pdf form on the tablet. I shall become larned if it kills me. Or arrested. One of the two.
I was chatting to a chemistry professor a while back (government(s) advising level guy) and we both realised we had got interested in it after reading 'The Anarchists Cookbook' as kids.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
As my previous comment, "watches are handbags for men" ...though "watches are jewellery for men" would be just as appropriate. They're things us guys can get sentimentally attached to.
My speedy, I'm attached to. (Though the new FOIS has turned my head and made me wonder if it's time to swap). I can't ever imagine getting attached to a Garmin or iWatch with a three year lifespan in the same way.
It's definitely a slow news day on PB when we're into watches for two days running...
Rather shows the Tories diminished position in the scheme of things, doesn't it.
The smart thing for the Tories to do right now is to skip the "lurch to the right, red meat for the 100,000 or so members but voter repellent to the general public" bit they went through last time and skip straight to the Michael Howard caretaker type leader who will allow someone more voter friendly to emerge.
I'm not sure they've got that, even with Cleverley, though he is the best of a rotten bunch.
Jenrick isn't even Hague territory - he's "imagine if Alan B'Stard was real and you elected him" territory.
At least B'stard had a certain charisma.
Jenrick is more Piers Fletcher-Dervish. He wants to be B'Stard, but you need charisma to carry that off, and he doesn't really have it.
Farage, on the other hand... There's even a certain assonance in the names.
I agree. Farage (and Boris to some extent, as well as the likes of Mogg) have a hint of the B’stard. They look like they might be enjoying themselves, and, when they pull it off, the public likes that.
To me Farage genuinely comes across as likeable. That doesn't actually mean I or others will like him depending on what he says and does, but the point that he has charisma is true.
Charisma doesn't map to likeability though. Lots of charismatic people aren't likeable. Eg Robert Maxwell, Jimmy Savile, Eamon Holmes.
True, but it can be an element of it. Farage often says things I don't like one bit, but a part of me does like him still.
That's very interesting, especially given the national move to Harris in the NYT Siena poll out today.
There seems to be an issue with the recall vote and different pollsters use different methods . I expect Trump to win Florida but there’s no way he’s winning by 13 points .
Why not?
Florida has got much more Red.
The fascinating question, though, will be what happens with the abortion referendum. The State has pushed through a six week ban (which - of course - really means a two week ban.) And there's a push to change the State's constitution guaranteeing a right until fetal viability, that looks like it might well get the 60% support required to change the constitution.
RDS doing the Republican free speech thing...
I actually just realized I dramatically understated the issue here. They’re not threatening a civil suit. They’re threatening **criminal charges**. So the state of Florida is threatening criminal charges to take off the air a commercial for the abortion rights ballot initiative! https://x.com/joshtpm/status/1843480940368069048
It's amazing how many people are in favour only of free speech they support.
i.e It's in serious trouble. Who'd have thought 20 years ago we'd end up here.
I don’t care if I look like a pathetic PB centrist dad with my stupid Garmin smartwatch
I just want to die later rather than earlier, and it seems that these might help
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
I didn’t expect to be enjoying myself quite this much at this later stage. Lots of travel. Good friends. Still a decent income. Fascinating job. Get on with my kids (also worry about them - and they probably need me to hang about). Its a pretty good package
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
Well they certainly won't harm.
Re age, it struck me recently how unusual I must be in being 64 with both parents alive, D91 and M88. That's a combined 243 years, the three of us.
Can anybody here beat that or get close?
From the opposite end of the telescope: I was in my early thirties when I had only one parent and no grandparents left. Inbreeding and poor diet and healthcare means that we die young from various genetic problems. We are blessed with high literacy and bibliophilia verging on bibliomania, and oddly look younger than our true age for decades, but when we "go over" we go over fast, aging quickly. It feels like David Bowie in "The Hunger", if anybody remembers that.
Oh, I am a happy bunny today.
Well that's not wholly dark, the notion of holding off decay entirely until one day, whoosh, the dam bursts. Pros there as well as cons.
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
As my previous comment, "watches are handbags for men" ...though "watches are jewellery for men" would be just as appropriate. They're things us guys can get sentimentally attached to.
My speedy, I'm attached to. (Though the new FOIS has turned my head and made me wonder if it's time to swap). I can't ever imagine getting attached to a Garmin or iWatch with a three year lifespan in the same way.
It's definitely a slow news day on PB when we're into watches for two days running...
Rather shows the Tories diminished position in the scheme of things, doesn't it.
The smart thing for the Tories to do right now is to skip the "lurch to the right, red meat for the 100,000 or so members but voter repellent to the general public" bit they went through last time and skip straight to the Michael Howard caretaker type leader who will allow someone more voter friendly to emerge.
I'm not sure they've got that, even with Cleverley, though he is the best of a rotten bunch.
Jenrick isn't even Hague territory - he's "imagine if Alan B'Stard was real and you elected him" territory.
At least B'stard had a certain charisma.
Jenrick is more Piers Fletcher-Dervish. He wants to be B'Stard, but you need charisma to carry that off, and he doesn't really have it.
Farage, on the other hand... There's even a certain assonance in the names.
I agree. Farage (and Boris to some extent, as well as the likes of Mogg) have a hint of the B’stard. They look like they might be enjoying themselves, and, when they pull it off, the public likes that.
To me Farage genuinely comes across as likeable. That doesn't actually mean I or others will like him depending on what he says and does, but the point that he has charisma is true.
Charisma doesn't map to likeability though. Lots of charismatic people aren't likeable. Eg Robert Maxwell, Jimmy Savile, Eamon Holmes.
Jeffrey Archer is charismatic too. Perhaps you'd have him down as likeable though?
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
As my previous comment, "watches are handbags for men" ...though "watches are jewellery for men" would be just as appropriate. They're things us guys can get sentimentally attached to.
My speedy, I'm attached to. (Though the new FOIS has turned my head and made me wonder if it's time to swap). I can't ever imagine getting attached to a Garmin or iWatch with a three year lifespan in the same way.
It's definitely a slow news day on PB when we're into watches for two days running...
Rather shows the Tories diminished position in the scheme of things, doesn't it.
The smart thing for the Tories to do right now is to skip the "lurch to the right, red meat for the 100,000 or so members but voter repellent to the general public" bit they went through last time and skip straight to the Michael Howard caretaker type leader who will allow someone more voter friendly to emerge.
I'm not sure they've got that, even with Cleverley, though he is the best of a rotten bunch.
Jenrick isn't even Hague territory - he's "imagine if Alan B'Stard was real and you elected him" territory.
At least B'stard had a certain charisma.
Jenrick is more Piers Fletcher-Dervish. He wants to be B'Stard, but you need charisma to carry that off, and he doesn't really have it.
Farage, on the other hand... There's even a certain assonance in the names.
I agree. Farage (and Boris to some extent, as well as the likes of Mogg) have a hint of the B’stard. They look like they might be enjoying themselves, and, when they pull it off, the public likes that.
To me Farage genuinely comes across as likeable. That doesn't actually mean I or others will like him depending on what he says and does, but the point that he has charisma is true.
Charisma doesn't map to likeability though. Lots of charismatic people aren't likeable. Eg Robert Maxwell, Jimmy Savile, Eamon Holmes.
True, but it can be an element of it. Farage often says things I don't like one bit, but a part of me does like him still.
Yes I know what you mean. Before he went up Trump's arse I didn't mind him so much. And he is a very good speaker.
Still. I have "State and Revolution" and "Industrial Society and its Future" in pdf form on the tablet. I shall become larned if it kills me. Or arrested. One of the two.
I was chatting to a chemistry professor a while back (government(s) advising level guy) and we both realised we had got interested in it after reading 'The Anarchists Cookbook' as kids.
It's a plot point in the 1990s film "Seven" (Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman) that the FBI kept track of people taking subversive books out on loan from the library. Only 30 years ago but it feels like another age.
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
Proverbs 1:4
..To know wisdom and instruction; To perceive the words of understanding; To receive the instruction of wisdom, Justice, and judgment, and equity; To give subtilty to the simple, To the young man knowledge and discretion...
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
Staring moodily at the fountain is free.
I’m gonna go look at CERN
They have a very good canteen. Would recommend.
However if you ate the tachyon pudding yesterday and forget to buy it today, the chef gets really upset. 😃
Including flights and accommodation I might just have crept over my £400 Geneva budget
If you are of a certain mindset, you might find yourself getting a little obsessed with metrics. "I must beat my step count!!!" is a beginners=level one.
Enjoy Geneva.
These things are amazeybollox
It’s like having a little genie tugging at your arm. “Don’t miss your flight!”
Did you miss many flights without it?
I find people who actually enjoy being buzzed by constant notifications very weird - my phone is permanently on silent - and even weirder when people enjoy constant notifications on the wrist.
Sort of like how it suddenly became acceptable to use your phone at the dinner table in the late 2000s. The idea that you're less present and in the moment and more attached to the tech that's telling you what to do or how to behave.
If I live to be 180, I will still never own a "smart" watch. My watch tells the time. Nothing more, nothing less.
And if that works for you, cool.
Alerts are configurable. Just about everything on such watches (Garmin, Apple or whatever...) is configurable. Mrs J has her watch much more tightly tied down (not linked to any other accounts) than I have.
Oh, I get it. Leon absolutely nails it when he says smart watches are for centrist dads. They are for MAMIL types who obsess over their step count, or how much REM sleep they got last night. People who will bore you about their gore-tex clobber they bought for their latest hike across the peaks. They have a catchment, and more power to the people who enjoy them. Nothing wrong with being a MAMIL who's into gore-tex. Many of my friends are. But I prefer a life without being buzzed, or tracked.
I was thinking about the Tory guy who was wearing a rolex in the winter fuel allowance video the other day. Datejusts were de rigeur for men in their 30s/40s in the 80s, which is why they are such an old man watch now. There are photos of datejusts with their early 80s price tags still attached - about £600. But a watch like that will travel through time with you, and be something you can pass along to your children - while during the same number of years, between eight and twenty iterations of the Apple SmartWatch will be thrown on a landfill somewhere. They are, to me, distinctly mid.
I still have my grandfather's watch, and while it's worthless, it tells the time well enough. It will be ticking along long after I am dead. There is something romantic about time and timelessness, which watches provide, while smart watches - dead or obsolete in a few years - do not. I'm in love with the romance of watches, which makes me just as odd as a MAMIL obsessed with his step count. But I find no romance in smart watches, which are disposable bits of kit, as opposed to marvels of mechanical engineering or heirlooms to be passed from father to son.
As I say, nothing wrong with smart watches - they're just not for me.
That's quite an entertaining rant, except for the fact you can use these watches as just watches to tell the time, with no tracking, stepcounts etc. from memory, on Garmin at least, you need to enable much of this stuff. (Apple may be different).
And before you say that you're paying a lot for 'just a watch'; just look at Rolex et al.
You seem personally insulted, despite the fact I go out of my way to point out it's horses for courses all the way through.
I'm a watch collector (a nerd?! on PB? never!) and would never own a smartwatch. As I say, I'm in love with the romance of the history, the mechanical engineering, and so on. A less kind analysis would say that watches are to men what handbags are to women. Though most of my watches are in the £250-1500 bracket, save for a couple of grail pieces.
I gain no pleasure from having my body functions tracked via my wrist or having notifications appear on it while I'm at dinner. I do like the idea that some of the watches I have I will have worn for sixty or more years before I die, and have watches that my forefathers owned. But as I say, it's horses for courses. If your smartwatch gives you pleasure, wear it.
I do not own a Rolex.
I have a fitbit tracker thing in my right wrist and a fancier watch for my left wrist and a pocket watch from my wife for our marriage. I even have a pocket sundial (not so useful in Ireland). I'd love to collect a few more fancy mechanical watches. I might upgrade to a fancier hiking smartwatch at some point.
I don't see any conflict between the two types of devices.
Absolutely - good compromise, that! If I ever felt the need to track my heart rate etc that's what I would do, too.
I totally see why people who value the functionality of a smartwatch rave about them. But I wouldn't wear one to a black tie do (the last black tie do I went to, I wore a £150 Orient Bambino).
To those who don't see the sentimentality in mechanical watches or the history in them, I ask you - would Christopher Walken have stuffed a Garmin up his ass and kept it there for two years to make sure it was passed down to Bruce Willis?
That's the power of watches. They travel with us, through time.
That's the power of jewelry, surely?
Because that's what a nice Omega is. I wore one because it looked good, and it made me look good.
As I've gotten older and more health conscious, and less concerned about what others think about me - or, to put it another way, as I'm no longer looking to attract a mate - then a Garmin suited me better.
But horses for courses.
As my previous comment, "watches are handbags for men" ...though "watches are jewellery for men" would be just as appropriate. They're things us guys can get sentimentally attached to.
My speedy, I'm attached to. (Though the new FOIS has turned my head and made me wonder if it's time to swap). I can't ever imagine getting attached to a Garmin or iWatch with a three year lifespan in the same way.
It's definitely a slow news day on PB when we're into watches for two days running...
Rather shows the Tories diminished position in the scheme of things, doesn't it.
The smart thing for the Tories to do right now is to skip the "lurch to the right, red meat for the 100,000 or so members but voter repellent to the general public" bit they went through last time and skip straight to the Michael Howard caretaker type leader who will allow someone more voter friendly to emerge.
I'm not sure they've got that, even with Cleverley, though he is the best of a rotten bunch.
Jenrick isn't even Hague territory - he's "imagine if Alan B'Stard was real and you elected him" territory.
At least B'stard had a certain charisma.
Jenrick is more Piers Fletcher-Dervish. He wants to be B'Stard, but you need charisma to carry that off, and he doesn't really have it.
Farage, on the other hand... There's even a certain assonance in the names.
I agree. Farage (and Boris to some extent, as well as the likes of Mogg) have a hint of the B’stard. They look like they might be enjoying themselves, and, when they pull it off, the public likes that.
To me Farage genuinely comes across as likeable. That doesn't actually mean I or others will like him depending on what he says and does, but the point that he has charisma is true.
Charisma doesn't map to likeability though. Lots of charismatic people aren't likeable. Eg Robert Maxwell, Jimmy Savile, Eamon Holmes.
Jeffrey Archer is charismatic too. Perhaps you'd have him down as likeable though?
Still. I have "State and Revolution" and "Industrial Society and its Future" in pdf form on the tablet. I shall become larned if it kills me. Or arrested. One of the two.
I was chatting to a chemistry professor a while back (government(s) advising level guy) and we both realised we had got interested in it after reading 'The Anarchists Cookbook' as kids.
It's a plot point in the 1990s film "Seven" (Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman) that the FBI kept track of people taking subversive books out on loan from the library. Only 30 years ago but it feels like another age.
"Avuncular" is what Cleverly has been called. But does avuncular make a good leader? Tory MPs need a leader to be definite, not vague. Kemi fits the bill For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
Proverbs 1:4
..To know wisdom and instruction; To perceive the words of understanding; To receive the instruction of wisdom, Justice, and judgment, and equity; To give subtilty to the simple, To the young man knowledge and discretion...
Waffle. Sounds like clever jim
So you don't think that much of the Bible, then.
There's everything there. And like the curate's egg it's good in parts (actually quite a lot of parts) but I'm a BigEndian
Comments
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-manual-confirms-the-truck-s-tow-hitch-is-too-weak-for-its-own-good-240332.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton
Kemi Badenoch’s fans have been exchanging 'racist' messages including about Rishi Sunak in a campaign WhatsApp group for her Tory grassroot supporters, the Mirror has learned.
A former Conservative MP who is part of the chat assured members the Tory leadership hopeful, who is down to the final three candidates, “reads everything, including this”.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/kemi-badenochs-fans-exchange-racist-33848207?utm_source=beloud.com&utm_medium=beloud.com
Expect to see the BBC covering watches and wall clocks at some point next week.
"The station clocks in Switzerland are synchronised by receiving an electrical impulse from a central master clock at each full minute, advancing the minute hand by one minute. The second hand is driven by an electrical motor independent of the master clock. It takes only about 58.5 seconds to circle the face; then the hand pauses briefly at the top of the clock. It starts a new rotation as soon as it receives the next minute impulse from the master clock.[3] This movement is emulated in some of the licensed timepieces made by Mondaine."
(To be fair, you can sort of see why. RJ and KB have comfortably been the top two for most of the process. And whoever makes it to the final has a more than decent chance of winning. But the loser from those two is about to be ejected with minimal dignity. And it's so hard to tell who, and it's probably out of their control...)
In the case of a power outage, the clock keeps running (clockwork) but can't send any pulses, so it 'remembers' how many pulses it missed via some other mechanical mechanism. When the power comes back on it send all the pulses immediately so the slaves catch up.
Noah Bergren
@NbergWX
8PM EDT: This is nothing short of astronomical. I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe you the storms small eye and intensity. 897mb pressure with 180 MPH max sustained winds and gusts 200+ MPH. This is now the 4th strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world. The eye is TINY at nearly 3.8 miles wide. This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.
https://x.com/NbergWX/status/1843444771135861007
@nytimes General election poll - Florida
🔴 Trump 55% (+13)
🔵 Harris 41%
Siena #A - 622 LV - 10/6
Genuinely surprised to read this.
Given all the booze and drugs you've done, I always kind of thought you took the "live well, die young" mentality?
But it doesn’t just need me alive it needs me relatively fit and healthy. Think these watches might help
Seems to be citywide policy. How clever and generous
Those who say "e-shifting - why?" and those who have tried electronic shifting.
I got my first bike with electronic shifting at the beginning of this year. Now my three main bikes have it (only the Brompton does not).
For my electric gravel bike, I hacked it together to save money. I didn't want to buy a whole groupset given how well my Shimano mechanical one worked, so I just bought a rear SRAM AXS derailleur and two wireless blips that I mounted on the hoods. And it works perfectly.
I have never been able to keep mechanical gears indexed for longer than a couple of rides, perhaps because it's very hilly here and I'm always shifting under load. I simply don't have that problem with the electronic shifting: it's instant perfect shifts every time, with no chain slap, and no need for constant half shifts to correct indexing issues.
https://news.sky.com/story/nobel-physics-prize-awarded-to-godfather-of-ai-who-warned-the-technology-could-end-humanity-13230231
I’ll look at e-shifting. Don’t even know what it is at the moment.
For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? 1 Corinthians 14:8
e-shifting allows someone to do that to a bike...
“Anyone staying in approved accommodation in Geneva is entitled to a free transport card. When you stay in Geneva, you will receive a free digital version of the Geneva Transport Card. This card enables you to use public transport free of charge in Geneva for the duration of your stay.”
If I don’t spend a penny on transport I may be able to have TWO kebabs
Re age, it struck me recently how unusual I must be in being 64 with both parents alive, D91 and M88. That's a combined 243 years, the three of us.
Can anybody here beat that or get close?
p.s. vrai
When you think of how much European exports to 'Kyrgyzstan' have grown in the last 2 years, Washington's chiding of Ukraine for attacking Russia's energy industry and refusal to provide long range missiles you wonder how different things might be with a slightly more committed approach from the west.
https://jacobin.com/2024/10/keir-starmer-anti-populism-labour
If you want to know where the money is, head to Newmarket.
The first day of trading at the Book 1 Tattersalls October Yearling Sale saw 42,680,000 guineas spent by buyers on the purchase of 117 yearling horses.
The most expensive lot went for 4 million guineas.
Obviously not Premier League footballer but still....
Florida has got much more Red.
The fascinating question, though, will be what happens with the abortion referendum. The State has pushed through a six week ban (which - of course - really means a two week ban.) And there's a push to change the State's constitution guaranteeing a right until fetal viability, that looks like it might well get the 60% support required to change the constitution.
..To know wisdom and instruction; To perceive the words of understanding; To receive the instruction of wisdom, Justice, and judgment, and equity; To give subtilty to the simple, To the young man knowledge and discretion...
But not me, yet.
But the gap between you and your parents is exactly the same as between me and mine. And I wouldn't be surprised to be where you are in fifteen years. My parents are gratifyingly healthy, and my grandparents were a long-lived bunch. So fingers crossed I'll get there.
Oh, I am a happy bunny today.
I actually just realized I dramatically understated the issue here. They’re not threatening a civil suit. They’re threatening **criminal charges**. So the state of Florida is threatening criminal charges to take off the air a commercial for the abortion rights ballot initiative!
https://x.com/joshtpm/status/1843480940368069048
We were discussing the word interchange and its exact (transportational) meaning, as it is on a spelling list.
I happened across this national rail list of what it considers to be the main 64 interchange stations on the network.
https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/travel-information/changing-trains/
I have definitely changed trains at 19 of these places (and cannot properly recall about 3 or 4 others). I have terminated at a lot of others, but for this game only changing counts
I'm sure I will be well beaten in this respect, but wanted to put a marker down.
My definites are: Birmingham New Street, Brighton, Bristol Temple Meads, Carlisle, Crewe, Doncaster, Edinburgh, Ely, Glasgow Central, Leeds, Liverpool Lime Street, Manchester Piccadilly, Newcastle, Oxenholme, Peterborough, Preston, Stockport, Wakefield Westgate and York.
It is worth noting how much they benefit, though, from war in the Middle East. No-one benefits more from Israel taking out Iranian oil facilities than they do, because the only way they are able to fund the war is via energy exports.