“Musk's attempts to destabilise the UK are far more egregious than anything the Chinese have done.”
I propose this is preserved in Lithuanian amber, so that young PBers in the far future can marvel at such things, and feel a bit better if they ever say similarly twattish things, themselves
Southam's comments make perfect sense if you replace "the UK" with "my sense of equilibrium". Financing terrorism or conducting economic war against us is fine because it doesn't affect his mental state, but people like Trump or Musk are evil because they make him feel bad and force him to question his assumptions about the march of progress.
I see Trump and Musk as far more pressing concerns as there is a US Presidential election in two weeks and if Trump wins - which seems very likely - vital UK security, defence and economic interests will be put at immediate and very significant risk.
This is what the analyses below miss.
Xi will do what a geosrtatrlegic adversary and competing, distant bureaucratic apparatus can ; military and espionage activity, subversion, use of tiktok.
But what makes Musk a much more pressing issue to deal with is that U.S daily life, culture, economy and military are far more intertwined wifh ours This is also precisely why he was able to so quickly and effectively interfere, at street-level, in August, in a language.people understand.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
The tempting fallacy, that you can design perfectly, given enough effort, is persistent in the modern world.
If we assemble just enough data, enough smart people looking at the problem, then we can design a product perfectly.
If nothing else, we are about 50 years away from the computational capability required to simulate reality at a deep enough level to do that.
Anyone who votes for Trump knows who he is. They have agency and they are happy to overlook his racism, his criminality, his opposition to democracy and the rule of law, his support for Putin and so on. But the Democrats messed up by failing to understand just how many Americans really don't mind voting for such a candidate if they do not like the alternative. If it wasn't for the harm a Trump presidency will do the UK, I would be watching all this with detached interest. But the forthcoming betrayal of Ukraine and trans-Atlantic trade war are going to be very bad for us. It's worrying.
People vote for fascists, again and again, despite the lessons from history.
We assume that Hitler was an aberration, but it appears a lot of Americans don't see it that way.
Trump isn't Hitler. He is more like Peron, or Boulanger.
Trump is Trump. But the pattern of dehumanising an “enemy within” and the proposed ‘strong man’ approach to fix a supposed security risk is too familiar and very concerning, whether the better model is Hitler, Perón or Boulanger.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. We live in a country where the deputy Prime Minister calls political opponents 'scum'.
That’s not remotely comparable. Calling your political opponents “scum” once and apologising for it does not compare with repeatedly calling immigrants “animals” and less than human, and when challenged on the matter, doubling down on the comments. Or indeed threatening using the military against your political opponents.
Also, I made those attacks on Trumps. I am not Angela Rayner. I did not vote for and do no support Rayner’s party. Rayner does not speak for me. So, this is a pretty desperate attempt at whataboutery to bring Rayner’s comments into the discussion.
"Calling your political opponents “scum” once and apologising for it"
Point 1 - I doubt she's only done it once. Point 2 - she almost certainly believes it (and that's up to her) Point 3 - the apology was rather dragged out of her, like you get from a five year old. I don't believe she meant it
Does any of that change the fact that Rayner is not acting like Trump, and that however Rayner is acting is whataboutery and nothing to do with what was being discussed?
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
The tempting fallacy, that you can design perfectly, given enough effort, is persistent in the modern world.
If we assemble just enough data, enough smart people looking at the problem, then we can design a product perfectly.
If nothing else, we are about 50 years away from the computational capability required to simulate reality at a deep enough level to do that.
I think there is a happy middle, perhaps. I know that Dyson's 'story' of his struggle involves the many iterations, almost as a badge of pride, but that may be more his myth making.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
The tempting fallacy, that you can design perfectly, given enough effort, is persistent in the modern world.
If we assemble just enough data, enough smart people looking at the problem, then we can design a product perfectly.
If nothing else, we are about 50 years away from the computational capability required to simulate reality at a deep enough level to do that.
I think there is a happy middle, perhaps. I know that Dyson's 'story' of his struggle involves the many iterations, almost as a badge of pride, but that may be more his myth making.
Those who worked with him at the time recall many, many attempts, mounds of prototype bits etc.
This was one reason that early Dyson products consisted of multiple pieces of plastic clipped/screwed together. Partly it was to do with small sizes for injection moulding and partly because each piece had been optimised by iterative design.
Washington State 2024 General Election Ballot Returns as of Tuesday, Oct 22 = Eday -14
Total ballots returned = 515,318 (10.4%) of 4,957,807 active registered voters challenged (no sig or sig mismatch, etc.) = 4,262 (0.8% of ballots returned)
Note that > voter registration will nudge upward, as inactive voters apply for ballots plus new registrations up to and including Election Day. > aside from some military/overseas, ballots were mailed to voters starting Wednesday of last week. > last night was first ballot returns posting by WA Secretary of State. > voters 65 and older account for 46.0% of all returns so far. > compared with ED-14 four years ago in 2020, when total returns = 19.0%, current returns are lagging to put it mildly; HOWEVER reckon this may be mainly due to 4 major statewide initiative measures at the top of statewide ballots. > as for challenged ballots, many will be "cured" by voters submitting required signatures or other info, in time to be counted for this election.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
There are plenty of militarised groups with very strong reasons to dislike the Turkish aerospace industries.
Russians, Kurds, Syrians, Libyans, IS and not including plenty of groups and their sub-groups that have been the target of Turkish weapons. So no not Armenia.
Flowers/donations can be sent to the Musk Derangement Syndrome Research Institute, which does vital work helping those afflicted with this sad mental virus, albeit too late for our esteemed friend from Devon
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
He didn't start with very much money - his dad certainly didn't give him anything.
As to his engineering contribution - It depends who you talk to. Tom Mueller tells a different story.
There are plenty of militarised groups with very strong reasons to dislike the Turkish aerospace industries.
Russians, Kurds, Syrians, Libyans, IS and not including plenty of groups and their sub-groups that have been the target of Turkish weapons. So no not Armenia.
Indeed. There have been Armenian terrorist attacks on Turkey or Turkish interests, but I think the last ones of note were in 1985 by the Armenian Revolutionary Army.
Anyone who votes for Trump knows who he is. They have agency and they are happy to overlook his racism, his criminality, his opposition to democracy and the rule of law, his support for Putin and so on. But the Democrats messed up by failing to understand just how many Americans really don't mind voting for such a candidate if they do not like the alternative. If it wasn't for the harm a Trump presidency will do the UK, I would be watching all this with detached interest. But the forthcoming betrayal of Ukraine and trans-Atlantic trade war are going to be very bad for us. It's worrying.
People vote for fascists, again and again, despite the lessons from history.
We assume that Hitler was an aberration, but it appears a lot of Americans don't see it that way.
Trump isn't Hitler. He is more like Peron, or Boulanger.
Trump is Trump. But the pattern of dehumanising an “enemy within” and the proposed ‘strong man’ approach to fix a supposed security risk is too familiar and very concerning, whether the better model is Hitler, Perón or Boulanger.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. We live in a country where the deputy Prime Minister calls political opponents 'scum'.
That’s not remotely comparable. Calling your political opponents “scum” once and apologising for it does not compare with repeatedly calling immigrants “animals” and less than human, and when challenged on the matter, doubling down on the comments. Or indeed threatening using the military against your political opponents.
Also, I made those attacks on Trumps. I am not Angela Rayner. I did not vote for and do no support Rayner’s party. Rayner does not speak for me. So, this is a pretty desperate attempt at whataboutery to bring Rayner’s comments into the discussion.
"Calling your political opponents “scum” once and apologising for it"
Point 1 - I doubt she's only done it once. Point 2 - she almost certainly believes it (and that's up to her) Point 3 - the apology was rather dragged out of her, like you get from a five year old. I don't believe she meant it
Does any of that change the fact that Rayner is not acting like Trump, and that however Rayner is acting is whataboutery and nothing to do with what was being discussed?
No, not at all, and I wasn't implying that. I just find people bringing up Rayner's apology as not a good example of someone actually apologising is all.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
He didn't start with very much money - his dad certainly didn't give him anything.
As to his engineering contribution - It depends who you talk to. Tom Mueller tells a different story.
If you would like to detail Musk’s supposed engineering contributions to the giant chopsticks catching the rocket, feel free.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
The tempting fallacy, that you can design perfectly, given enough effort, is persistent in the modern world.
If we assemble just enough data, enough smart people looking at the problem, then we can design a product perfectly.
If nothing else, we are about 50 years away from the computational capability required to simulate reality at a deep enough level to do that.
I think there is a happy middle, perhaps. I know that Dyson's 'story' of his struggle involves the many iterations, almost as a badge of pride, but that may be more his myth making.
Many great men throughout history have their myths; in many cases, they try to mould and control those myths.
Frequently, the myths lack a great deal of nuance, or are outright fabrications. Made worse nowadays by fanbois who cannot stand to hear anything negative about their hero.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
He didn't start with very much money - his dad certainly didn't give him anything.
As to his engineering contribution - It depends who you talk to. Tom Mueller tells a different story.
If you would like to detail Musk’s supposed engineering contributions to the giant chopsticks catching the rocket, feel free.
According to a number of people who were present in the relevant meetings, he was the one he who presented and pushed the idea forward. In his self appointed role as chief engineer.
The alternatives were landing on the launch mount and landing legs on the booster.
Industry scuttlebutt has it that they have plans to destroy the Taiwanese plants in the event of a Chinese invasion. Fabs are very big and would be quite hard to destroy; but there are machines that would be much simpler to sabotage.
I've no idea if the rumours are true, but they would make sense.
This is fascinating. But it would help if you say who “they” are??!
As Malms says, the Taiwanese government and TSMC. One person posited it goes further, and money given/granted/invested in TSMC by the Taiwanese government was done with the proviso: "If China invade, you destroy the lot."
It would be hard to destroy everything, but very easy to destroy machines that are essentially irreplaceable, especially with the stronger sanctions that would probably come from the west against China. Nearly all the machines to make chips come from the west.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Industry scuttlebutt has it that they have plans to destroy the Taiwanese plants in the event of a Chinese invasion. Fabs are very big and would be quite hard to destroy; but there are machines that would be much simpler to sabotage.
I've no idea if the rumours are true, but they would make sense.
This is fascinating. But it would help if you say who “they” are??!
As Malms says, the Taiwanese government and TSMC. One person posited it goes further, and money given/granted/invested in TSMC by the Taiwanese government was done with the proviso: "If China invade, you destroy the lot."
It would be hard to destroy everything, but very easy to destroy machines that are essentially irreplaceable, especially with the stronger sanctions that would probably come from the west against China. Nearly all the machines to make chips come from the west.
The other point is the plausibility of the idea.
Destroying the machines would smash a chunk of the Chinese economy (not to mention the Western economy). It would be quite likely, in the following chaos, that the Chinese export miracle would cease in a large part.
Threatening to destroy them would also be a powerful incentive for the rest of the world to stop China from invading Taiwan.
Why would the Taiwanese *not* threaten to do this?
The tempting fallacy, that you can design perfectly, given enough effort, is persistent in the modern world.
If we assemble just enough data, enough smart people looking at the problem, then we can design a product perfectly.
A good example of why perfect design doesn't exist is the semiconductor industry. They have put enormous effort into designing purely with simulation technology, given that actually getting a physical chip to test can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
But invariably the chips have bugs in them. They often don't perform as well as the simulations suggested, or they consume more power. The design has to be revised and gets another 'stepping', with the accompanying large bill to make more chips.
Even then serious issues can still creep through (see Intel's recent problems with its i7 and i9 chips as an example).
Flowers/donations can be sent to the Musk Derangement Syndrome Research Institute, which does vital work helping those afflicted with this sad mental virus, albeit too late for our esteemed friend from Devon
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Given the number of drivers who dream abuse at people on zebra crossings....
The thing is that Zebra crossings are an agreed idea.
The crossings we have to the bus islands are in a no-mans-land where people believe different things about them. I think that is dangerous.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. Tesla was a failing company when he basically did a hostile takeover and booted out the original owners. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people. I know somebody who had to deal with Jobs very closely back in the day and the guy was an absolute dick at times.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
The tempting fallacy, that you can design perfectly, given enough effort, is persistent in the modern world.
If we assemble just enough data, enough smart people looking at the problem, then we can design a product perfectly.
A good example of why perfect design doesn't exist is the semiconductor industry. They have put enormous effort into designing purely with simulation technology, given that actually getting a physical chip to test can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
But invariably the chips have bugs in them. They often don't perform as well as the simulations suggested, or they consume more power. The design has to be revised and gets another 'stepping', with the accompanying large bill to make more chips.
Even then serious issues can still creep through (see Intel's recent problems with its i7 and i9 chips as an example).
I remember when NVIDA were doomed, because they were having trouble getting the defect rate down on the their huge GPU chips - one was the largest single chip ever made to that point, IIRC.
They did a number of redesigns, but....
What they actually did was - Make the huge chips. Then, by blowing "fuses" between sections, deactivate the bad parts. Since the GPU chips performance was determined by the number of sections in action, the chips with most defects became low end graphics card chips. The perfect ones (at the start a single digit percentage) were sold at vast prices for doing computation on.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Don't get me started on those Highway Code changes of a couple of years ago.
I'm still hoping they are revised - reversed ideally.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
He didn't get any contracts until SpaceX was well underway. The NASA contract that saved the company was a way down the road. As was a DOD contract.
Musk is not an engineering "genius". That is a comprehensive misunderstanding of his role and type.
He is a visionary and a businessman; that combination is not that common. It would be expected that he has some mighty failures in between the various significant projects.
Musk is not an engineering "genius". That is a comprehensive misunderstanding of his role and type.
He is a visionary and a businessman; that combination is not that common. It would be expected that he has some mighty failures in between the various significant projects.
More exactly, he has a skill in driving an organisation to (sometimes) move technologies from TRL 1-3 to TRL 9
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
He didn't start with very much money - his dad certainly didn't give him anything.
As to his engineering contribution - It depends who you talk to. Tom Mueller tells a different story.
If you would like to detail Musk’s supposed engineering contributions to the giant chopsticks catching the rocket, feel free.
According to a number of people who were present in the relevant meetings, he was the one he who presented and pushed the idea forward. In his self appointed role as chief engineer.
(Snip)
But the problem is that Musk has such a fragile ego that you have to say such things about him. Failure to appease the great man's ego gets you in trouble.
As a minor example, Ashlee Vance wrote a hagiography of Musk a decade ago; and Musk blacklisted him for years because there were a couple of bits that were not hagiographic enough.
The money has got to come from somewhere and every single tax rise is derided. No government can win.
In addition, everyone is pissed off that the NHS and other public sector institutions are shit. If you cut their funding, they will get even shitter. No government can win.
Make the buggers work for their money, pay rises in private sector have to be funded by profits or sackings. The public sector just keeps adding deadwood at higher cost.
Richard III (Duke of Gloucester) Do then: but I'll not hear.
Duchess of York I will be mild and gentle in my speech.
Richard III And brief, good mother; for I am in haste.
Duchess of York Art thou so hasty? I have stay'd for thee, God knows, in anguish, pain and agony.
Richard III And came I not at last to comfort you?
Duchess of York No, by the holy rood, thou know'st it well, Thou camest on earth to make the earth my hell. A grievous burthen was thy birth to me; Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy; Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious, Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous, Thy age confirm'd, proud, subdued, bloody, treacherous, More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred: What comfortable hour canst thou name, That ever graced me in thy company?
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Given the number of drivers who dream abuse at people on zebra crossings....
The thing is that Zebra crossings are an agreed idea.
The crossings we have to the bus islands are in a no-mans-land where people believe different things about them. I think that is dangerous.
Well put - an agreed idea. I was searching for an explanation but I can't beat that.
I don't think I've ever seen a driver screaming abuse at people on zebra crossings though. The odd driver screaming abuse at a lollipop lady, mind you, yes.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
He didn't get any contracts until SpaceX was well underway. The NASA contract that saved the company was a way down the road. As was a DOD contract.
That's rather undermined by what Musk has said himself about ?2008? and his annus horribilis, when both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went under. He did not get the money from NASA until objectives were reached; but the promise of the money from NASA (especially in the CRS project, awarded in 2008) allowed him to attract in other investors. Money which saved SpaceX.
I must say it does irritate me when Britons write letters, take leave and go out to campaign in US elections, on any side.
It's none of our business. And would piss me off were I an American.
I agree with you 100% CR.
There’s something dozy about Starmer’s government, and all the pushy but useless advisers around him and running the party are very naive.
Why are Labour flooding a foreign election with activists in a time of sensitivity about foreign interference in elections?
I think Labour have messed up and given Trump a win. Not a technical win, but a broad brush win. But this isn’t a technical election, but a broad brush election.
Dopey, naive Labour handing Trump easy broad brush win. In a tight election. 🤬
To me this is straw clutching and making straw men. A non-story.
Activists crossing the pond in search of experience or technique, whilst helping a sister party, is just standard operating procedure. Tory <> Republican. Labour <> Democrat. With some overlap of categories. Either flying over at the time, or whilst on the other side for work or education.
Does anyone go back far enough to know the start of this habit? I'd date it perhaps to cheap air travel in the 1960s/1970s.
Yours is a strong response to what I put. But you are still wrong on two points of reality.
It HAS allowed Trump campaign to score a broadbrush win here, adding the UK Labour Party to the list of malign foreign actors such as the Putin regime, interfering in US democracy. It matters as malign foreign actors in the election are now seen as not entirely for Trump, but Harris too. And matters as it allows MAGA leadership prominent media time to paint UK Labour Party as extremely left wing and anti American. And for many Americans, this is how they will now know Starmer’s Labour. This is actually happening in front your eyes, so you can’t dismiss it as harmless.
Also, in reality, there is no such thing as sister parties in other countries.Those sisters parties are patriotic nationalists to their own country, whose interests and values cannot completely be shared with ours. It’s as daft as finding the aliens from the planet Zarg rather cute. They are not cute. Any second they can turn ugly and vicious, and lethal to you.
What the immature children running the Labour Party done here is simply daft.
I think you are some way off on both.
IMO it's really just Trump's people desperate to triangulate on his Election Interference, for which a huge amount of evidence has come into the public domain in the last fortnight - another straw to clutch at. I'm not sure what marginal effects will be, as the polling on the numbers who have made their mind up have been high for some time.
It *may* have given Trump a PR stunt. But how many Usonians know about it? How many have flagged it as changing their perceptions? How many speeches has he mentioned it in? How many extra votes has he got because of it? How many votes has he lost? Where? From whom? How does the line play alongside his paymaster Elon Musk's interventions in UK politics?
"Sister parties" is imo simply a reality what exists of long lasting relationships between parties in different countries, either at an institutional level or at a more relationship level. The Lib Dems, for example, have been in the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), which has existed since the mid-1970s, across scores of countries; that's sister parties. At a cross-Atlantic level it has been happening forever, and it will continue to happen.
I know you are fundamentally wrong right on the bottom line - the Labour staff and campaigners flying over to the USA have different culture and values than the Americans they will be assisting. In such instances stop interfering in other countries democratic decision making and elections. Something British PM Starmer can no longer say to Putin, Starmer has stripped himself of the right to voice that.
But you were doing okay, until daft enough to mention the LibDems sister parties. Oh dear. This has produced hysterical scenes in the past, as UK liberals stand next to anyone, such as Russian fascists, who have liberal in the name of their party. Is it the word “liberal” that defines its a sister party, and your friends? Lenin was in the Liberal Democrat’s. There’s another friend of LibDems.
If not, what> Shared values, culture and ethics? What makes Labour Party managers think the Democrats are their sister Party in values, culture and ethics? Does Bill “capital punishment” Clinton represent the values of the UK Labour Party? In PB parlance, Bill is from a bizarre alien planet - he went to Oxford. 😄
Sister parties are a fantasy. All that sister parties amount to is finding 2 aliens on the Planet Zarg, and preferring one to the other - a choice most likely based not on liking one, but disliking the other option. It’s fake and naive sisterhood. THEY ARE ALIENS IN IT FOR THEMSELVES. Pet them at your peril.
And you completely sidestepped the damage TrumpGate is now doing to the UK Labour Party, and the interests of the UK too. As Max succinctly put it - Trump wins, bad news for Labour and the UK, Kam wins, no benefit whatever, as she defends US interest over the UK’s, every time it comes to the crunch.
"One in six Conservative voters are likely to die before the next election....Labour’s much younger voter base means that only 1 in 19 people who voted for the party this month are likely to die before getting a chance to vote in 2029" (NB from last July)"
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
He didn't get any contracts until SpaceX was well underway. The NASA contract that saved the company was a way down the road. As was a DOD contract.
That's rather undermined by what Musk has said himself about ?2008? and his annus horribilis, when both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went under. He did not get the money from NASA until objectives were reached; but the promise of the money from NASA (especially in the CRS project, awarded in 2008) allowed him to attract in other investors. Money which saved SpaceX.
Yeah - 2008 hit just as he was looking for another funding round. SpaceX was found in 2002 and by 2008 was launching (attempting to, anyway) Falcon 1.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
He didn't start with very much money - his dad certainly didn't give him anything.
As to his engineering contribution - It depends who you talk to. Tom Mueller tells a different story.
If you would like to detail Musk’s supposed engineering contributions to the giant chopsticks catching the rocket, feel free.
According to a number of people who were present in the relevant meetings, he was the one he who presented and pushed the idea forward. In his self appointed role as chief engineer.
The alternatives were landing on the launch mount and landing legs on the booster.
Guys, guys, I can see what's happened. Leon has confused Musk with Tony Stark. As you were...
"One in six Conservative voters are likely to die before the next election....Labour’s much younger voter base means that only 1 in 19 people who voted for the party this month are likely to die before getting a chance to vote in 2029" (NB from last July)"
"One in six Conservative voters are likely to die before the next election....Labour’s much younger voter base means that only 1 in 19 people who voted for the party this month are likely to die before getting a chance to vote in 2029" (NB from last July)"
I remember reading the same sort of thing after the 1997 and 2001 elections, with the implication that the Tories would struggle to get back into office again.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Given the number of drivers who dream abuse at people on zebra crossings....
The thing is that Zebra crossings are an agreed idea.
The crossings we have to the bus islands are in a no-mans-land where people believe different things about them. I think that is dangerous.
Possibly, but there is some evidence ambiguity can help reduce collisions - for example, making residential streets feel pedestrianised. Some councils even have a policy of not putting centre lines in for the same reason.
At the ped crossings on cycle lanes here, most pedestrians stop for cyclists, leading to a protracted back and forth as I try to give way. It's easier to communicate than if you're in a car - "off you go", or a hand gesture. Eye contact is another benefit you don't get with a driver- *I have seen you*, and a cessation of pedalling is enough communication for most.
People are really nice. My morning commute is a series of thank yous and smiles.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
He didn't get any contracts until SpaceX was well underway. The NASA contract that saved the company was a way down the road. As was a DOD contract.
That's rather undermined by what Musk has said himself about ?2008? and his annus horribilis, when both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went under. He did not get the money from NASA until objectives were reached; but the promise of the money from NASA (especially in the CRS project, awarded in 2008) allowed him to attract in other investors. Money which saved SpaceX.
Yeah - 2008 hit just as he was looking for another funding round. SpaceX was found in 2002 and by 2008 was launching (attempting to, anyway) Falcon 1.
Yes, and that was pretty much the point many other space launch companies went tits-up. Especially as Musk decided that the F1 was a dead-end so he went onto the much bigger F9, which did not launch for another couple of years.
CRS saved SpaceX. The timing was blooming lucky for Musk. Ditto Tesla and subsidies: Obama gave Tesla a $465 million loan.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Given the number of drivers who dream abuse at people on zebra crossings....
The thing is that Zebra crossings are an agreed idea.
The crossings we have to the bus islands are in a no-mans-land where people believe different things about them. I think that is dangerous.
Well put - an agreed idea. I was searching for an explanation but I can't beat that.
I don't think I've ever seen a driver screaming abuse at people on zebra crossings though. The odd driver screaming abuse at a lollipop lady, mind you, yes.
There was a quite troublesome conversion of a zebra crossing to a pelican crossing in a village round here last year - for a good couple of months the zebra stripes were still present, the beacons had been stripped out and the as-yet-unconnected traffic lights sat hooded over. Half of both pedestrians / drivers still saw it as a zebra, half didn't.
Now, thankfully, fully converted to a pelican crossing.
"One in six Conservative voters are likely to die before the next election....Labour’s much younger voter base means that only 1 in 19 people who voted for the party this month are likely to die before getting a chance to vote in 2029" (NB from last July)"
I remember reading the same sort of thing after the 1997 and 2001 elections, with the implication that the Tories would struggle to get back into office again.
I seemed to remember there was this obscure article written by this bloke I think he was called Simon somebody.....
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
He didn't start with very much money - his dad certainly didn't give him anything.
As to his engineering contribution - It depends who you talk to. Tom Mueller tells a different story.
If you would like to detail Musk’s supposed engineering contributions to the giant chopsticks catching the rocket, feel free.
According to a number of people who were present in the relevant meetings, he was the one he who presented and pushed the idea forward. In his self appointed role as chief engineer.
The alternatives were landing on the launch mount and landing legs on the booster.
Guys, guys, I can see what's happened. Leon has confused Musk with Tony Stark. As you were...
Amusing note: Until a week ago, the chopsticks were (to a number of professional rocket plumbers) Elon's crazy, stupid idea that wouldn't work.
I think it was Foch, of whom a journalist asked if he was responsible for wining The Battle of the Marne. The general thought for a moment, then said that he was quite certain he would have been blamed for a defeat.
"One in six Conservative voters are likely to die before the next election....Labour’s much younger voter base means that only 1 in 19 people who voted for the party this month are likely to die before getting a chance to vote in 2029" (NB from last July)"
I remember reading the same sort of thing after the 1997 and 2001 elections, with the implication that the Tories would struggle to get back into office again.
The difference is now that the traditional things that turned you into a Conservative, like being able to afford a house, have kids, or even hold down a stable job rather than exist in the 'gig' economy are a great deal further out of reach for most young people than they were in 1997.
“Musk's attempts to destabilise the UK are far more egregious than anything the Chinese have done.”
I propose this is preserved in Lithuanian amber, so that young PBers in the far future can marvel at such things, and feel a bit better if they ever say similarly twattish things, themselves
Southam's comments make perfect sense if you replace "the UK" with "my sense of equilibrium". Financing terrorism or conducting economic war against us is fine because it doesn't affect his mental state, but people like Trump or Musk are evil because they make him feel bad and force him to question his assumptions about the march of progress.
I see Trump and Musk as far more pressing concerns as there is a US Presidential election in two weeks and if Trump wins - which seems very likely - vital UK security, defence and economic interests will be put at immediate and very significant risk.
This is what the analyses below miss.
Xi will do what a geosrtatrlegic adversary and competing, distant bureaucratic apparatus can ; military and espionage activity, subversion, use of tiktok.
But what makes Musk a much more pressing issue to deal with is that U.S daily life, culture, economy and military are far more intertwined wifh ours This is also precisely why he was able to so quickly and effectively interfere, at street-level, in August, in a language.people understand.
The one thing that gives me hope - if that is the right word - is that North Korean troops now look to be heading to, if they are not already in, Russia to fight against Ukraine. That would not happen without China's permission. However much he would want to, it surely becomes much harder for Trump to betray Ukraine on that basis. Even the supine GOP in Congress would not allow that.
“Musk's attempts to destabilise the UK are far more egregious than anything the Chinese have done.”
I propose this is preserved in Lithuanian amber, so that young PBers in the far future can marvel at such things, and feel a bit better if they ever say similarly twattish things, themselves
Southam's comments make perfect sense if you replace "the UK" with "my sense of equilibrium". Financing terrorism or conducting economic war against us is fine because it doesn't affect his mental state, but people like Trump or Musk are evil because they make him feel bad and force him to question his assumptions about the march of progress.
I see Trump and Musk as far more pressing concerns as there is a US Presidential election in two weeks and if Trump wins - which seems very likely - vital UK security, defence and economic interests will be put at immediate and very significant risk.
This is what the analyses below miss.
Xi will do what a geosrtatrlegic adversary and competing, distant bureaucratic apparatus can ; military and espionage activity, subversion, use of tiktok.
But what makes Musk a much more pressing issue to deal with is that U.S daily life, culture, economy and military are far more intertwined wifh ours This is also precisely why he was able to so quickly and effectively interfere, at street-level, in August, in a language.people understand.
The one thing that gives me hope - if that is the right word - is that North Korean troops now look to be heading to, if they are not already in, Russia to fight against Ukraine. That would not happen without China's permission. However much he would want to, it surely becomes much harder for Trump to betray Ukraine on that basis. Even the supine GOP in Congress would not allow that.
Anyone who votes for Trump knows who he is. They have agency and they are happy to overlook his racism, his criminality, his opposition to democracy and the rule of law, his support for Putin and so on. But the Democrats messed up by failing to understand just how many Americans really don't mind voting for such a candidate if they do not like the alternative. If it wasn't for the harm a Trump presidency will do the UK, I would be watching all this with detached interest. But the forthcoming betrayal of Ukraine and trans-Atlantic trade war are going to be very bad for us. It's worrying.
People vote for fascists, again and again, despite the lessons from history.
We assume that Hitler was an aberration, but it appears a lot of Americans don't see it that way.
Trump isn't Hitler. He is more like Peron, or Boulanger.
Trump is Trump. But the pattern of dehumanising an “enemy within” and the proposed ‘strong man’ approach to fix a supposed security risk is too familiar and very concerning, whether the better model is Hitler, Perón or Boulanger.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. We live in a country where the deputy Prime Minister calls political opponents 'scum'.
That’s not remotely comparable. Calling your political opponents “scum” once and apologising for it does not compare with repeatedly calling immigrants “animals” and less than human, and when challenged on the matter, doubling down on the comments. Or indeed threatening using the military against your political opponents.
Also, I made those attacks on Trumps. I am not Angela Rayner. I did not vote for and do no support Rayner’s party. Rayner does not speak for me. So, this is a pretty desperate attempt at whataboutery to bring Rayner’s comments into the discussion.
"Calling your political opponents “scum” once and apologising for it"
Point 1 - I doubt she's only done it once. Point 2 - she almost certainly believes it (and that's up to her) Point 3 - the apology was rather dragged out of her, like you get from a five year old. I don't believe she meant it
Point 3 - it's crystal clear Rayner didn't mean her apology, as she:
- took more than a month to apologise - only apologised when she was verbally abused herself - spent most of her apology justifying what she had said - apologised for the word used, not for the sentiments behind her statement.
I'm amazed she got away with it but lazy journalists hear what they expect to hear, rather than what politicians actually say.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Don't get me started on those Highway Code changes of a couple of years ago.
I'm still hoping they are revised - reversed ideally.
They are really good changes that were poorly communicated. They are standard in most other countries, to the extent you can turn through a green man in Australia, as long as you give way to peds and cyclists.
"One in six Conservative voters are likely to die before the next election....Labour’s much younger voter base means that only 1 in 19 people who voted for the party this month are likely to die before getting a chance to vote in 2029" (NB from last July)"
I remember reading the same sort of thing after the 1997 and 2001 elections, with the implication that the Tories would struggle to get back into office again.
The difference is now that the traditional things that turned you into a Conservative, like being able to afford a house, have kids, or even hold down a stable job rather than exist in the 'gig' economy are a great deal further out of reach for most young people than they were in 1997.
"One in six Conservative voters are likely to die before the next election....Labour’s much younger voter base means that only 1 in 19 people who voted for the party this month are likely to die before getting a chance to vote in 2029" (NB from last July)"
I remember reading the same sort of thing after the 1997 and 2001 elections, with the implication that the Tories would struggle to get back into office again.
The difference is now that the traditional things that turned you into a Conservative, like being able to afford a house, have kids, or even hold down a stable job rather than exist in the 'gig' economy are a great deal further out of reach for most young people than they were in 1997.
I think the whole Trump phenomenon could have been dealt with successfully almost as soon as it arose. But that was always unlikely given the American attitude of never admitting you might be wrong about anything.
You think Obama should have admitted to not being eligible to be US President?
We're often told young people cannot watch films or even tv shows due to lack of attention, it would not be a surprise if some claimed not to be able to read books either, though I'll watch the video to see what the claimed reason is for it.
It is weird with the former examples that people would just enable kids in that behaviour rather than point out that 95% absolutely can do it because kids have not suddenly and drastically become more stupid or unable to focus even with device distractions, but I do know from my brother that it can be a struggle.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
(Oh I see the TansportXtra piece is by Vincent Stops. Quite. When I asked him for data to support his case he just blocked me. He has a weird downer on separating modes of travel to reduce conflict.
He says that improvement in the UK, and he argues the opposite in NL is to do with us 'not going Dutch' and their 'going Dutch' failing. He leaves out that increases in cycle mileage in the UK (so reducing per mile casualties) are exactly where we *are* going Dutch such as in Central London or Manchester, and the in recent years trend (eg in traffic island design) in NL has been *away* from safer designs.)
Zebra crossings on mobility tracks have the same status as one on the carriageway, except that AFAIK the only difference is that on a mobility track the use of belisha beacons is an optional feature (saves the need to run a power supply with no indication it causes a problem). It is defined in Statutory Regulations or possibly TSRGD 2016.
We've had motor vehicles driving up and down bus stop bypasses all over London for nearly a century, but apparently this has never been a problem. It's mainly about local Councils (eg outer boroughs) not having followed design guidance, and adaptation taking time, with a small side helping of failure to control some poor behaviour. I think this Govt may fix all of those over time.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. Tesla was a failing company when he basically did a hostile takeover and booted out the original owners. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people. I know somebody who had to deal with Jobs very closely back in the day and the guy was an absolute dick at times.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
Apart from its potential to impact people in this very election, I don't really see what he would get out of the twitter purchase (which admittedly he tried to back out of).
He doesn't believe in free speech absolutism like he claimed so it wasn't some moral mission, and it takes up a lot of time and energy (including his personal attention spent believing anything he reads on there), which he could surely spend more productively on some of his other worthy businesses.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
To round out your last paragraph - they shot someone driving a car linked to three recent shootings and thus they had a strong belief that the driver, whoever he was, would be armed.
Like with some previous police shootings - Harry Stanley is the most obvious one, shot while carrying a chair leg - if the police have a belief that you may be armed then you have to do everything right to avoid being shot.
This is not much different to the situation in the US, except that the prevalence and use of guns is so much greater that the police there have a belief that everyone they interact with may be armed, and so people have to do everything right in every interaction with police to avoid being shot.
In the UK, the really tragic cases are those where an entirely innocent person has no reason to suspect that police may believe they are armed, react entirely naturally, and then get shot. But that doesn't feel like the situation with this recent case.
It feels quite offensive to those victims of police shootings - like Harry Stanley - to be lumped in by the media with this case. There have been awful cases of people dying in British police custody after being inappropriately restrained, there was the PC rightly jailed for killing Dalian Atkinson with a taser. I think there's been progress on making sure that the police are not above the law.
The reporting of this case has been abysmal, and I think the CPS have wasted court time. There's no way this case should have been treated as a cause célèbre.
The shooting of the unarmed Brazilian man (without googling, i think it was charles de menzies?) on the tube was awful, and then the off the record briefings about his immigration status by the Met as if that somehow gave them cover for a dreadful mistake.
It would a good job the person responsible for overseeing such a disastrous operation wasn't promoted up the chain......ohhh...
Given that person's willingness to obstruct investigations into the Met, you could conspiracy theorize that subsequent promotion was "because" rather than "despite".
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Don't get me started on those Highway Code changes of a couple of years ago.
I'm still hoping they are revised - reversed ideally.
They are really good changes that were poorly communicated. They are standard in most other countries, to the extent you can turn through a green man in Australia, as long as you give way to peds and cyclists.
But you can't cross a street in Sydney when it is safe to do so.
Or at least that was what the Oz copper told me when she had a go.
Anyone who votes for Trump knows who he is. They have agency and they are happy to overlook his racism, his criminality, his opposition to democracy and the rule of law, his support for Putin and so on. But the Democrats messed up by failing to understand just how many Americans really don't mind voting for such a candidate if they do not like the alternative. If it wasn't for the harm a Trump presidency will do the UK, I would be watching all this with detached interest. But the forthcoming betrayal of Ukraine and trans-Atlantic trade war are going to be very bad for us. It's worrying.
People vote for fascists, again and again, despite the lessons from history.
We assume that Hitler was an aberration, but it appears a lot of Americans don't see it that way.
Trump isn't Hitler. He is more like Peron, or Boulanger.
Trump is Trump. But the pattern of dehumanising an “enemy within” and the proposed ‘strong man’ approach to fix a supposed security risk is too familiar and very concerning, whether the better model is Hitler, Perón or Boulanger.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. We live in a country where the deputy Prime Minister calls political opponents 'scum'.
That’s not remotely comparable. Calling your political opponents “scum” once and apologising for it does not compare with repeatedly calling immigrants “animals” and less than human, and when challenged on the matter, doubling down on the comments. Or indeed threatening using the military against your political opponents.
Also, I made those attacks on Trumps. I am not Angela Rayner. I did not vote for and do no support Rayner’s party. Rayner does not speak for me. So, this is a pretty desperate attempt at whataboutery to bring Rayner’s comments into the discussion.
"Calling your political opponents “scum” once and apologising for it"
Point 1 - I doubt she's only done it once. Point 2 - she almost certainly believes it (and that's up to her) Point 3 - the apology was rather dragged out of her, like you get from a five year old. I don't believe she meant it
Point 3 - it's crystal clear Rayner didn't mean her apology, as she:
- took more than a month to apologise - only apologised when she was verbally abused herself - spent most of her apology justifying what she had said - apologised for the word used, not for the sentiments behind her statement.
I'm amazed she got away with it but lazy journalists hear what they expect to hear, rather than what politicians actually say.
Also add: only apologised after a fellow MP (Amess) was murdered.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Don't get me started on those Highway Code changes of a couple of years ago.
I'm still hoping they are revised - reversed ideally.
They are really good changes that were poorly communicated. They are standard in most other countries, to the extent you can turn through a green man in Australia, as long as you give way to peds and cyclists.
But you can't cross a street in Sydney when it is safe to do so.
Or at least that was what the Oz copper told me when she had a go.
Hmm, as long as you're a certain distance away from a crossing it's fine, I believe.
I'm in two minds about whether politicians should force out obviously fake apologies for their language etc. On the one hand it is often very apparent when it is so fake and so would be more honest and refreshing if they just did not bother. On the other when you remove even the expectation of base level civility and encourage politicians to never back down, ever, no matter how offensive or wrong they are, you get the USA.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. Tesla was a failing company when he basically did a hostile takeover and booted out the original owners. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people. I know somebody who had to deal with Jobs very closely back in the day and the guy was an absolute dick at times.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
Jobs had an intuitive understanding of branding, product and markets that I would put close to genius - he knew what he wanted and who would be able to get him there. The technology and design aggregation that the iPhone involved was extraordinary. as was the leap of imagination. It seems obvious now but it really didn't back in 2007:
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. Tesla was a failing company when he basically did a hostile takeover and booted out the original owners. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people. I know somebody who had to deal with Jobs very closely back in the day and the guy was an absolute dick at times.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
Apart from its potential to impact people in this very election, I don't really see what he would get out of the twitter purchase (which admittedly he tried to back out of).
He doesn't believe in free speech absolutism like he claimed so it wasn't some moral mission, and it takes up a lot of time and energy (including his personal attention spent believing anything he reads on there), which he could surely spend more productively on some of his other worthy businesses.
He wants to be world king. Within the next 50 years a handful of these billionaires will become more important than even big influential countries. The most aggressive and reckless may well come out on top. We are too frit to hold them accountable.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
To round out your last paragraph - they shot someone driving a car linked to three recent shootings and thus they had a strong belief that the driver, whoever he was, would be armed.
Like with some previous police shootings - Harry Stanley is the most obvious one, shot while carrying a chair leg - if the police have a belief that you may be armed then you have to do everything right to avoid being shot.
This is not much different to the situation in the US, except that the prevalence and use of guns is so much greater that the police there have a belief that everyone they interact with may be armed, and so people have to do everything right in every interaction with police to avoid being shot.
In the UK, the really tragic cases are those where an entirely innocent person has no reason to suspect that police may believe they are armed, react entirely naturally, and then get shot. But that doesn't feel like the situation with this recent case.
It feels quite offensive to those victims of police shootings - like Harry Stanley - to be lumped in by the media with this case. There have been awful cases of people dying in British police custody after being inappropriately restrained, there was the PC rightly jailed for killing Dalian Atkinson with a taser. I think there's been progress on making sure that the police are not above the law.
The reporting of this case has been abysmal, and I think the CPS have wasted court time. There's no way this case should have been treated as a cause célèbre.
The shooting of the unarmed Brazilian man (without googling, i think it was charles de menzies?) on the tube was awful, and then the off the record briefings about his immigration status by the Met as if that somehow gave them cover for a dreadful mistake.
It would a good job the person responsible for overseeing such a disastrous operation wasn't promoted up the chain......ohhh...
Given that person's willingness to obstruct investigations into the Met, you could conspiracy theorize that subsequent promotion was "because" rather than "despite".
That isn' conspiracy. She is a known, documented "safe pair of hands", a "team player" who "balances the needs of the stakeholders"
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. Tesla was a failing company when he basically did a hostile takeover and booted out the original owners. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people. I know somebody who had to deal with Jobs very closely back in the day and the guy was an absolute dick at times.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
Apart from its potential to impact people in this very election, I don't really see what he would get out of the twitter purchase (which admittedly he tried to back out of).
He doesn't believe in free speech absolutism like he claimed so it wasn't some moral mission, and it takes up a lot of time and energy (including his personal attention spent believing anything he reads on there), which he could surely spend more productively on some of his other worthy businesses.
We have seen in the past with Musk, he often has a secondary play e.g. Tesla superchargers network have grabbed the prime real estate, starlink solves the problem of internet for planes.
Now, one possible take is this, is he sees twitter as data mine if nothing else. Maybe he thought he could get the price down and other people would pay a big chunk of that anyway. And that backfired on him.
Also, twitter financially was never profitable (yes 2 years it made money, but that was mostly accounting trickery), maybe he thought if nothing else that he could make it much more lean and turn that around...The leaning part was definitely true, it had doubled its workforce during the pandemic with no obvious improvement in anything. Telegram runs with very low number of staff, WhatsApp managed it. Maybe he thought well I can do the same and spending a lot of moderation, bugger that. Financially twitter was worse than first thought and he clearly misjudged the advertisers willingness to reduce spend given the lack of moderation.
It should be noted, he has just built a 100,000 GPU cluster....I am sure there is some thinking behind that.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Don't get me started on those Highway Code changes of a couple of years ago.
I'm still hoping they are revised - reversed ideally.
They are really good changes that were poorly communicated. They are standard in most other countries, to the extent you can turn through a green man in Australia, as long as you give way to peds and cyclists.
But you can't cross a street in Sydney when it is safe to do so.
Or at least that was what the Oz copper told me when she had a go.
Hmm, as long as you're a certain distance away from a crossing it's fine, I believe.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
He didn't get any contracts until SpaceX was well underway. The NASA contract that saved the company was a way down the road. As was a DOD contract.
That's rather undermined by what Musk has said himself about ?2008? and his annus horribilis, when both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went under. He did not get the money from NASA until objectives were reached; but the promise of the money from NASA (especially in the CRS project, awarded in 2008) allowed him to attract in other investors. Money which saved SpaceX.
Yeah - 2008 hit just as he was looking for another funding round. SpaceX was found in 2002 and by 2008 was launching (attempting to, anyway) Falcon 1.
Yes, and that was pretty much the point many other space launch companies went tits-up. Especially as Musk decided that the F1 was a dead-end so he went onto the much bigger F9, which did not launch for another couple of years.
CRS saved SpaceX. The timing was blooming lucky for Musk. Ditto Tesla and subsidies: Obama gave Tesla a $465 million loan.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
(Oh I see the TansportXtra piece is by Vincent Stops. Quite. When I asked him for data to support his case he just blocked me. He has a weird downer on separating modes of travel to reduce conflict.
He says that improvement in the UK, and he argues the opposite in NL is to do with us 'not going Dutch' and their 'going Dutch' failing. He leaves out that increases in cycle mileage in the UK (so reducing per mile casualties) are exactly where we *are* going Dutch such as in Central London or Manchester, and the in recent years trend (eg in traffic island design) in NL has been *away* from safer designs.)
Zebra crossings on mobility tracks have the same status as one on the carriageway, except that AFAIK the only difference is that on a mobility track the use of belisha beacons is an optional feature (saves the need to run a power supply with no indication it causes a problem). It is defined in Statutory Regulations or possibly TSRGD 2016.
We've had motor vehicles driving up and down bus stop bypasses all over London for nearly a century, but apparently this has never been a problem. It's mainly about local Councils (eg outer boroughs) not having followed design guidance, and adaptation taking time, with a small side helping of failure to control some poor behaviour. I think this Govt may fix all of those over time.
Zebra crossings on mobility tracks have the same status as one on the carriageway, except that AFAIK the only difference is that on a mobility track the use of belisha beacons is an optional feature (saves the need to run a power supply with no indication it causes a problem). It is defined in Statutory Regulations or possibly TSRGD 2016.
I've spent some time trying to find this.
Anyone care to have a go? Would really like to find it and put a link on the local chat boards.
Oh I see, we are still doing this...it seems clear some in the media really want(ed) this to be the UK George Floyd.
Chris Kaba verdict leaves community traumatised
Black communities in south London are "really traumatised" and feel they have been "denied justice" after a police officer was cleared of murdering Chris Kaba, community leaders have said.
How much worse would Kaba's record have to be to make you think it was the correct decision? I mean he was only the prime suspect (in that car) of 3 shootings in the months leading up to the stop alone.
Few will shed tears for Chris Kaba. Most will be sympathetic to a police officer who had to decide in an instant whether to shoot.
The point is that Kaba's record should be irrelevant. The police shot dead an unarmed Black man. That Kaba was armed the day and week before, and would have been armed the week afterwards, is not justification for killing him. And aiui the police did not know it was Kaba in the car anyway.
He was not unarmed. He was armed with a car. Furthermore, the reason armed police had been deployed is that the car had been involved in a firearms incident the day before.
They did not know who was driving. They did not know if they were armed or not.
Millions of armed folk roaming the streets every day! Scary stuff..
Some irony that a tightening up of the law in regard to vehicular violence might come about because a police officer shot someone.
We cyclists have been trying to tell you lot for ages! Indeed, a recent alleged murder in Paris involved a SUV driver running over a cyclist.
Funnily enough, British drivers kill fewer cyclists than in the Netherlands, often taken as the pinnacle of cycle-friendly design. And of the British cyclists who are killed, most die on country roads, not in the towns where people campaign for cycle lanes and LTNs.
But that’s presumably because there are more Dutch cyclists.
You would need to check that. They've only around a third of our population.
"According to figures from the Dutch Central Office of Statistics (the CBS), the number of cyclists killed in the Netherlands has remained pretty stable over the last few years (2004: 180 / 2005: 181 / 2006: 216 / 2007: 189 / 2008: 181 / 2009: 185). Department for Transport figures show that in the UK it has fallen steadily (2004: 134 / 2005: 148 / 2006: 146 / 2007: 136 / 2008: 115 / 2009: 104), although the wider group of cyclists killed and seriously injured has risen slightly.
"Of course, these statistics don't tell the whole story, as cycling is much more prevalent in the Netherlands than in the UK. The Dutch cycled 14.9 billion kilometres in 2009 against the UK’s 5bn, from a population about a quarter the size, living in a country one sixth the size. With so many more cyclists on the road, more accidents are inevitable."
Typically the average mileage cycled by a person in Holland is around 800% of that cycled in the UK.
That's why per pop figures are misleading.
I have watched the Minister a decade ago using stats like this to dodge questions from a Commons committee during the coalition.
Wider than that the "but our total road deaths are relatively low" means little. It does not address sub-populations, nor does it work when put forward to defend behaviour where the consequences are suffered by others.
But we still can't really compare until we have as much cycling as the Netherlands as the mix is very likely quite different.
Also worth noting that is an article by a notorious anti-cycling lobbyist who must have been taking a break from astroturfing as a blind lobbyist to prevent cycle lanes running behind built-out bus boarding points (the global best practice standard that's somehow become a culture war issue in the UK).
A remarkable statistic is that over half of Dutch cycling fatalities are pensioners, whereas in the UK it's received wisdom that "older people can't cycling" and any attempt to deprioritise the private motor car is ageist discrimination (one of the factors in people continuing to drive long after they should have stopped doing so for everyone's safety).
The last big ITF study attempting to estimate the denominator was I think 2021 so data for the first half of the 2010s, and concluded that deaths per 100m km cycled were 2.1 in the UK and 0.8 in the Netherlands. If the recent increase is genuine and sustained it might take them to around 1.3 - cause unclear, one hypothesis is that they're going faster because of high take-up of ebikes.
As a matter of interest - on bus islands, has anyone actually worked out the status of the crossings from the pavement to the island? Round here, they have been painted with stripes, like a zebra crossing. But they have no lights, and no formal status, I believe.
So the polite cyclists stop and the thug eBikers (generally delivery people) zoom through, often yelling at anyone who impeded their progress.
It's worth noting that all Zebra crossings are actually legally meaningless, a total fiction if you read the highway code correctly. Vehicles are only required to stop if the people on them are already crossing, but the highway code hierarchy means that vehicles should do that anyway even if the people are, in American terms, "jaywalking". Pedestrians are above cyclists so if pedestrians are crossing the cyclists (and electric moped riders posing as cyclists) should stop, paint or no paint.
Given the number of drivers who dream abuse at people on zebra crossings....
The thing is that Zebra crossings are an agreed idea.
The crossings we have to the bus islands are in a no-mans-land where people believe different things about them. I think that is dangerous.
Agreed, and I was abused by a driver for crossing too slowly to a bus island. Only once but I do remember it.
Jobs had an intuitive understanding of branding, product and markets that I would put close to genius - he knew what he wanted and who would be able to get him there. The technology and design aggregation that the iPhone involved was extraordinary. as was the leap of imagination. It seems obvious now but it really didn't back in 2007:
When they were creating the Mac, Jobs complained about the design of the calculator app.
The radius of the corners wasn't right
After some iterations, the engineer coding it created a tool to allow Jobs to adjust it himself until he judged it was 'right'
That may have been his only engineering contribution to the project, but it survived all the way through system 9
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. Tesla was a failing company when he basically did a hostile takeover and booted out the original owners. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people. I know somebody who had to deal with Jobs very closely back in the day and the guy was an absolute dick at times.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
Jobs had an intuitive understanding of branding, product and markets that I would put close to genius - he knew what he wanted and who would be able to get him there. The technology and design aggregation that the iPhone involved was extraordinary. as was the leap of imagination. It seems obvious now but it really didn't back in 2007:
I'd say Musk's understanding of engineering is similar. It is genius level.
Jobs could be an absolute arsehole, by all accounts, but I don't think he had the very deep personal insecurities that Musk seems to have.
Many of these outliers have personal flaws. We know Musk can't keep it in his pants, but neither could Bill Gates. Somebody like Andrew Carnegie not exactly the known as the world's nicest man.
Most normal people who build a business, sell it and ride off into the sunset, or perhaps employ people to run it all and harvest the income with lesser day to day involvement. That is the logical thing to do. Some might take that wealth and do some investing. Few are keep juggling all these different risky businesses with a significant personal level of involvement or are constantly innovating generational products, they are just wired differently.
Harris has just announced she’s holding a news conference from her residence at 6 pm UK time . Last night several right wing commentators suggested that something might come out about Trump and said ignore if it does as it’s a deep fake AI .
It might be nothing at all and Harris is just trying to get a bit more media attention !
We're often told young people cannot watch films or even tv shows due to lack of attention, it would not be a surprise if some claimed not to be able to read books either, though I'll watch the video to see what the claimed reason is for it.
It is weird with the former examples that people would just enable kids in that behaviour rather than point out that 95% absolutely can do it because kids have not suddenly and drastically become more stupid or unable to focus even with device distractions, but I do know from my brother that it can be a struggle.
I don't like watching videos, and it annoys me when people give you a YouTube video to watch instead of putting their arguments in writing. I think it is easier to read non-linearly, you can skip the guff, gloss over things you already know and/or agree with, spend time on the important stuff, go back and re-read anything you didn't quite understand
I'm in two minds about whether politicians should force out obviously fake apologies for their language etc. On the one hand it is often very apparent when it is so fake and so would be more honest and refreshing if they just did not bother. On the other when you remove even the expectation of base level civility and encourage politicians to never back down, ever, no matter how offensive or wrong they are, you get the USA.
There does seem to be a superficiality to the angst over Rayner's comments. Plenty of politicians have said similar about their rivals.
Besides she's seen the effects of Conservative policy. The choice of squeezing the most vulnerable with the least social power was made by the Conservative party. They chose to cripple sure start or redirect funds from the inner cites or sanction the disabled into Maximus's pseudo fit to work checks. Austerity was targeted to hit constituencies like Rayner's the hardest.
Why are they absolved from their votes? They made those choices, why don't they deserve the epithet.
Harris has just announced she’s holding a news conference from her residence at 6 pm UK time . Last night several right wing commentators suggested that something might come out about Trump and said ignore if it does as it’s a deep fake AI .
It might be nothing at all and Harris is just trying to get a bit more media attention !
We’ll know soon ....
Not good. I think it's a "Hail Mary" play in the same way that Cameron gave a speech a few days prior to BrexitRef which said nothing new.
Harris has just announced she’s holding a news conference from her residence at 6 pm UK time . Last night several right wing commentators suggested that something might come out about Trump and said ignore if it does as it’s a deep fake AI .
It might be nothing at all and Harris is just trying to get a bit more media attention !
We’ll know soon ....
She's going to hit back against claims of British interference by alleging that Trump is an agent of the House of Windsor.
Flowers/donations can be sent to the Musk Derangement Syndrome Research Institute, which does vital work helping those afflicted with this sad mental virus, albeit too late for our esteemed friend from Devon
Leon being vile to and with several directly aimed profanities at Southam is fine for you but my response (I wasn't joking) to Leon's smug attempt at genuinely unfunny comedy caused you palpitations.
Harris has just announced she’s holding a news conference from her residence at 6 pm UK time . Last night several right wing commentators suggested that something might come out about Trump and said ignore if it does as it’s a deep fake AI .
It might be nothing at all and Harris is just trying to get a bit more media attention !
We’ll know soon ....
Not good. I think it's a "Hail Mary" play in the same way that Cameron gave a speech a few days prior to BrexitRef which said nothing new.
She doesn’t need a Hail Mary at this point . It’s been an okay day pollwise so far . Normally though something is leaked to the tv media and it’s not normally the candidate delivering any major drama . She announced this presser at short notice so that’s what seems a little strange .
Re Gisèle Pelicot: she's a heroine. One of the men who raped her did so on the day his wife gave birth to their daughter. Imagine having such a man as a father. Or a husband. And this -
The site used was not closed down for a number of years and was used by many others. Its name - A Son Insu - meant "Without Her Knowledge" so they all knew what they were doing and there will have been many other victims and perpetrators. And not one of them ever reported any of this. Not one - out of all these ordinary apparently respectable men.
One of them was a nurse who protested his decency! Imagine being a woman being treated by him in hospital.
A man here has just been convicted or orally raping to death an unconscious woman to death on a park bench.
There are no words for these men and all men like them.
As for Madame Pelicot - I hope she finds some peace after all this.
Twitter is the American town square. Foreigners trying to kill it is basically an act of war.
Twitter is Musk's plaything. Musk is an anti-British Putinist. It's an act of patriotism to seek to destabilise him and reduce his influence.
Oh shut the fuck up
When you land a rocket into a giant pair of metal chopsticks thereby paving the way to mankind living on Mars do get back to us
Being a brilliant engineer does not give you carte blanche to do whatever you like to subvert democracy and destabilise other countries.
It doesn’t. However, we’re talking about Musk. He isn’t even a brilliant engineer. He didn’t design the engineering at SpaceX. People at SpaceX even talked about how great it was that he was distracted by Twitter and they could get on with doing better work! https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-employees-elon-musk-focus-twitter-ceo-2023-1
I don't know much about Musk but it strikes me that he must be good at something - he has made himself phenomenally wealthy somehow.
I recall my engineering colleagues appraisal of Dyson. Dyson made many many intermediate designs when trying to make his bagless vacuum cleaner. To an engineer this is poor practice - a better approach would be to learn from the mistakes and get there in far fewer iterations.
And yet Dyson is fabulously wealthy.
Musk started with a lot more money than most of us! But he did make a lot more money, yes. He made most of his money from being an early investor in PayPal and then Tesla, so if he’s good at doing things, it’s making investment choices. Other people are primarily responsible for the engineering breakthroughs at PayPal and Tesla. He did not design or build the SpaceX technology that has thrilled viewers in recent weeks.
Its more than that though...there are plenty of people who invest and do very well. That is what venture capital industry is all about and there are many who are billionaires off the back of getting in early at various tech companie.
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. Tesla was a failing company when he basically did a hostile takeover and booted out the original owners. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people. I know somebody who had to deal with Jobs very closely back in the day and the guy was an absolute dick at times.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
Apart from its potential to impact people in this very election, I don't really see what he would get out of the twitter purchase (which admittedly he tried to back out of).
He doesn't believe in free speech absolutism like he claimed so it wasn't some moral mission, and it takes up a lot of time and energy (including his personal attention spent believing anything he reads on there), which he could surely spend more productively on some of his other worthy businesses.
We have seen in the past with Musk, he often has a secondary play e.g. Tesla superchargers network have grabbed the prime real estate, starlink solves the problem of internet for planes.
Now, one possible take is this, is he sees twitter as data mine if nothing else. Maybe he thought he could get the price down and other people would pay a big chunk of that anyway. And that backfired on him.
Also, twitter financially was never profitable (yes 2 years it made money, but that was mostly accounting trickery), maybe he thought if nothing else that he could make it much more lean and turn that around...The leaning part was definitely true, it had doubled its workforce during the pandemic with no obvious improvement in anything. Telegram runs with very low number of staff, WhatsApp managed it. Maybe he thought well I can do the same and spending a lot of moderation, bugger that. Financially twitter was worse than first thought and he clearly misjudged the advertisers willingness to reduce spend given the lack of moderation.
It should be noted, he has just built a 100,000 GPU cluster....I am sure there is some thinking behind that.
Twitter was certainly closer to breaking even than it is now. I don't believe Musk cares about the company as a concern. For him it's an unfiltered Musk amplifier. From his phone to the globe and he can't be ignored.
Flowers/donations can be sent to the Musk Derangement Syndrome Research Institute, which does vital work helping those afflicted with this sad mental virus, albeit too late for our esteemed friend from Devon
Leon being vile to and with several directly aimed profanities at Southam is fine for you but my response (I wasn't joking) to Leon's smug attempt at genuinely unfunny comedy caused you palpitations.
I didn't read the tread do you are wrong in your unfounded allegation
I and by the way, palpations is not a joking matter in my family nor should it be for you if you have followed my medical journey this last year
Comments
#New General election Tracking poll
🔵 Harris 49% (+2)
🔴 Trump 47%
Oct 19 - 🔴 Trump +2
Tipp #A+ - 1294 LV - 10/22
https://x.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1849035344366141551
Xi will do what a geosrtatrlegic adversary and competing, distant bureaucratic apparatus can ; military and espionage activity, subversion, use of tiktok.
But what makes Musk a much more pressing issue to deal with is that U.S daily life, culture, economy and military are far more intertwined
wifh ours This is also precisely why he was able to so quickly and effectively interfere, at street-level, in August, in a language.people understand.
If we assemble just enough data, enough smart people looking at the problem, then we can design a product perfectly.
If nothing else, we are about 50 years away from the computational capability required to simulate reality at a deep enough level to do that.
This was one reason that early Dyson products consisted of multiple pieces of plastic clipped/screwed together. Partly it was to do with small sizes for injection moulding and partly because each piece had been optimised by iterative design.
Total ballots returned = 515,318 (10.4%) of 4,957,807 active registered voters
challenged (no sig or sig mismatch, etc.) = 4,262 (0.8% of ballots returned)
https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/data-research/election-data-and-maps/ballot-return-statistics
Note that
> voter registration will nudge upward, as inactive voters apply for ballots plus new registrations up to and including Election Day.
> aside from some military/overseas, ballots were mailed to voters starting Wednesday of last week.
> last night was first ballot returns posting by WA Secretary of State.
> voters 65 and older account for 46.0% of all returns so far.
> compared with ED-14 four years ago in 2020, when total returns = 19.0%, current returns are lagging to put it mildly; HOWEVER reckon this may be mainly due to 4 major statewide initiative measures at the top of statewide ballots.
> as for challenged ballots, many will be "cured" by voters submitting required signatures or other info, in time to be counted for this election.
Russians, Kurds, Syrians, Libyans, IS and not including plenty of groups and their sub-groups that have been the target of Turkish weapons. So no not Armenia.
As to his engineering contribution - It depends who you talk to. Tom Mueller tells a different story.
Frequently, the myths lack a great deal of nuance, or are outright fabrications. Made worse nowadays by fanbois who cannot stand to hear anything negative about their hero.
The alternatives were landing on the launch mount and landing legs on the booster.
It would be hard to destroy everything, but very easy to destroy machines that are essentially irreplaceable, especially with the stronger sanctions that would probably come from the west against China. Nearly all the machines to make chips come from the west.
Destroying the machines would smash a chunk of the Chinese economy (not to mention the Western economy). It would be quite likely, in the following chaos, that the Chinese export miracle would cease in a large part.
Threatening to destroy them would also be a powerful incentive for the rest of the world to stop China from invading Taiwan.
Why would the Taiwanese *not* threaten to do this?
But invariably the chips have bugs in them. They often don't perform as well as the simulations suggested, or they consume more power. The design has to be revised and gets another 'stepping', with the accompanying large bill to make more chips.
Even then serious issues can still creep through (see Intel's recent problems with its i7 and i9 chips as an example).
Not sure that is appropriate even if as a joke !!
Anyway need to make tea
The thing is that Zebra crossings are an agreed idea.
The crossings we have to the bus islands are in a no-mans-land where people believe different things about them. I think that is dangerous.
https://www.ft.com/content/3d16f2fe-c833-44c1-b99f-1b542cef2750
But Jobs wasn't making the iPhone, Sam Altman isn't coding up ChatGPT....normally when you look at all the famous figureheads they have a quieter partner who was the doer. But those people need vision and drive, the ability to coordinate all of this and Musk has done this now with multiple companies with is a serious achievement. Tesla was a failing company when he basically did a hostile takeover and booted out the original owners. He got the SpaceX contract in the first place because he pitched a much cheaper of way of doing launches, then he employed people to make it happen.
Yes he over-hypes things, so did Jobs, yes he has flown by the seat of his pants at times, same again with lots of these people. I know somebody who had to deal with Jobs very closely back in the day and the guy was an absolute dick at times.
He isn't the messiah, he is often a very naughty boy, he is by his own admission autistic and leads to some very odd interactions. I think this midlife crisis tw@ttering is bad, he would be far better off limiting his use on there.
They did a number of redesigns, but....
What they actually did was - Make the huge chips. Then, by blowing "fuses" between sections, deactivate the bad parts. Since the GPU chips performance was determined by the number of sections in action, the chips with most defects became low end graphics card chips. The perfect ones (at the start a single digit percentage) were sold at vast prices for doing computation on.
I'm still hoping they are revised - reversed ideally.
https://www.driving.org/dia-calls-for-review-of-highway-code-changes-and-better-communications-on-all-road-users-risks-and-responsibilities/
He is a visionary and a businessman; that combination is not that common. It would be expected that he has some mighty failures in between the various significant projects.
As a minor example, Ashlee Vance wrote a hagiography of Musk a decade ago; and Musk blacklisted him for years because there were a couple of bits that were not hagiographic enough.
I came across this article essentially arguing that the POTUS market is being manipulated by a trump "whale" backer.
Duchess of York
O, let me speak!
Richard III (Duke of Gloucester)
Do then: but I'll not hear.
Duchess of York
I will be mild and gentle in my speech.
Richard III
And brief, good mother; for I am in haste.
Duchess of York
Art thou so hasty? I have stay'd for thee,
God knows, in anguish, pain and agony.
Richard III
And came I not at last to comfort you?
Duchess of York
No, by the holy rood, thou know'st it well,
Thou camest on earth to make the earth my hell.
A grievous burthen was thy birth to me;
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;
Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious,
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous,
Thy age confirm'd, proud, subdued, bloody,
treacherous,
More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred:
What comfortable hour canst thou name,
That ever graced me in thy company?
https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=richard3&Act=4&Scene=4&Scope=scene
(SSI - For "Richard III" substitute "Donald Trump" for "Duchess of York" sub Liz Cheney & fellow Cheney-Bushers)
I don't think I've ever seen a driver screaming abuse at people on zebra crossings though. The odd driver screaming abuse at a lollipop lady, mind you, yes.
But you were doing okay, until daft enough to mention the LibDems sister parties. Oh dear. This has produced hysterical scenes in the past, as UK liberals stand next to anyone, such as Russian fascists, who have liberal in the name of their party. Is it the word “liberal” that defines its a sister party, and your friends? Lenin was in the Liberal Democrat’s. There’s another friend of LibDems.
If not, what> Shared values, culture and ethics? What makes Labour Party managers think the Democrats are their sister Party in values, culture and ethics? Does Bill “capital punishment” Clinton represent the values of the UK Labour Party? In PB parlance, Bill is from a bizarre alien planet - he went to Oxford. 😄
Sister parties are a fantasy. All that sister parties amount to is finding 2 aliens on the Planet Zarg, and preferring one to the other - a choice most likely based not on liking one, but disliking the other option. It’s fake and naive sisterhood. THEY ARE ALIENS IN IT FOR THEMSELVES. Pet them at your peril.
And you completely sidestepped the damage TrumpGate is now doing to the UK Labour Party, and the interests of the UK too. As Max succinctly put it - Trump wins, bad news for Labour and the UK, Kam wins, no benefit whatever, as she defends US interest over the UK’s, every time it comes to the crunch.
https://x.com/ProfTimBale/status/1849106971225362563
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/farage-aims-for-2029-youthquake-as-teenage-boys-fall-for-reform-x08xc86c2
At the ped crossings on cycle lanes here, most pedestrians stop for cyclists, leading to a protracted back and forth as I try to give way. It's easier to communicate than if you're in a car - "off you go", or a hand gesture. Eye contact is another benefit you don't get with a driver- *I have seen you*, and a cessation of pedalling is enough communication for most.
People are really nice. My morning commute is a series of thank yous and smiles.
CRS saved SpaceX. The timing was blooming lucky for Musk. Ditto Tesla and subsidies: Obama gave Tesla a $465 million loan.
Now, thankfully, fully converted to a pelican crossing.
I think it was Foch, of whom a journalist asked if he was responsible for wining The Battle of the Marne. The general thought for a moment, then said that he was quite certain he would have been blamed for a defeat.
- took more than a month to apologise
- only apologised when she was verbally abused herself
- spent most of her apology justifying what she had said
- apologised for the word used, not for the sentiments behind her statement.
I'm amazed she got away with it but lazy journalists hear what they expect to hear, rather than what politicians actually say.
Jared Henderson"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3wJcF0t0bQ
It is weird with the former examples that people would just enable kids in that behaviour rather than point out that 95% absolutely can do it because kids have not suddenly and drastically become more stupid or unable to focus even with device distractions, but I do know from my brother that it can be a struggle.
He says that improvement in the UK, and he argues the opposite in NL is to do with us 'not going Dutch' and their 'going Dutch' failing. He leaves out that increases in cycle mileage in the UK (so reducing per mile casualties) are exactly where we *are* going Dutch such as in Central London or Manchester, and the in recent years trend (eg in traffic island design) in NL has been *away* from safer designs.)
Zebra crossings on mobility tracks have the same status as one on the carriageway, except that AFAIK the only difference is that on a mobility track the use of belisha beacons is an optional feature (saves the need to run a power supply with no indication it causes a problem). It is defined in Statutory Regulations or possibly TSRGD 2016.
We've had motor vehicles driving up and down bus stop bypasses all over London for nearly a century, but apparently this has never been a problem. It's mainly about local Councils (eg outer boroughs) not having followed design guidance, and adaptation taking time, with a small side helping of failure to control some poor behaviour. I think this Govt may fix all of those over time.
He doesn't believe in free speech absolutism like he claimed so it wasn't some moral mission, and it takes up a lot of time and energy (including his personal attention spent believing anything he reads on there), which he could surely spend more productively on some of his other worthy businesses.
Or at least that was what the Oz copper told me when she had a go.
https://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U
I'd say Musk's understanding of engineering is similar. It is genius level.
Jobs could be an absolute arsehole, by all accounts, but I don't think he had the very deep personal insecurities that Musk seems to have.
NU10K
Now, one possible take is this, is he sees twitter as data mine if nothing else. Maybe he thought he could get the price down and other people would pay a big chunk of that anyway. And that backfired on him.
Also, twitter financially was never profitable (yes 2 years it made money, but that was mostly accounting trickery), maybe he thought if nothing else that he could make it much more lean and turn that around...The leaning part was definitely true, it had doubled its workforce during the pandemic with no obvious improvement in anything. Telegram runs with very low number of staff, WhatsApp managed it. Maybe he thought well I can do the same and spending a lot of moderation, bugger that. Financially twitter was worse than first thought and he clearly misjudged the advertisers willingness to reduce spend given the lack of moderation.
It should be noted, he has just built a 100,000 GPU cluster....I am sure there is some thinking behind that.
Oz is completely nuts
Zebra crossings on mobility tracks have the same status as one on the carriageway, except that AFAIK the only difference is that on a mobility track the use of belisha beacons is an optional feature (saves the need to run a power supply with no indication it causes a problem). It is defined in Statutory Regulations or possibly TSRGD 2016.
I've spent some time trying to find this.
Anyone care to have a go? Would really like to find it and put a link on the local chat boards.
The radius of the corners wasn't right
After some iterations, the engineer coding it created a tool to allow Jobs to adjust it himself until he judged it was 'right'
That may have been his only engineering contribution to the project, but it survived all the way through system 9
Most normal people who build a business, sell it and ride off into the sunset, or perhaps employ people to run it all and harvest the income with lesser day to day involvement. That is the logical thing to do. Some might take that wealth and do some investing. Few are keep juggling all these different risky businesses with a significant personal level of involvement or are constantly innovating generational products, they are just wired differently.
Harris has just announced she’s holding a news conference from her residence at 6 pm UK time . Last night several right wing commentators suggested that something might come out about Trump and said ignore if it does as it’s a deep fake AI .
It might be nothing at all and Harris is just trying to get a bit more media attention !
We’ll know soon ....
Besides she's seen the effects of Conservative policy. The choice of squeezing the most vulnerable with the least social power was made by the Conservative party. They chose to cripple sure start or redirect funds from the inner cites or sanction the disabled into Maximus's pseudo fit to work checks. Austerity was targeted to hit constituencies like Rayner's the hardest.
Why are they absolved from their votes? They made those choices, why don't they deserve the epithet.
NEW THREAD
Leon being vile to and with several directly aimed profanities at Southam is fine for you but my response (I wasn't joking) to Leon's smug attempt at genuinely unfunny comedy caused you palpitations.
The site used was not closed down for a number of years and was used by many others. Its name - A Son Insu - meant "Without Her Knowledge" so they all knew what they were doing and there will have been many other victims and perpetrators. And not one of them ever reported any of this. Not one - out of all these ordinary apparently respectable men.
One of them was a nurse who protested his decency! Imagine being a woman being treated by him in hospital.
A man here has just been convicted or orally raping to death an unconscious woman to death on a park bench.
There are no words for these men and all men like them.
As for Madame Pelicot - I hope she finds some peace after all this.
I and by the way, palpations is not a joking matter in my family nor should it be for you if you have followed my medical journey this last year