11 new "corrections" to the Peggie judgment seeking to correct "clerical mistakes, errors or omissions". Snuck out just before Christmas. After a previous "correction". It is actually shocking. None of these "corrections", which include adding the word "trans" before "female" or replacing "male" with "female" make any difference to the judgment or the reasoning of course. No sirree.
I presume it still ignores those parts of FWS which say the exact opposite of what Kemp has sought to draw from it. Dear oh dear oh dear.
Speaking of which @DavidL, when may I expect a discussant contribution from you please? I have asked @turbotubbs to write one in case you can't, but he has also not produced anything. I'll rewrite the article on Xmas Day to have @kyf_100 on one side and @Cyclefree on the other, setting aside @Nigelb 's contribution until you or @turbotubbs submit something. If neither of you can I'll ask @fitalass to kick in: I'm pretty sure she'll get something to me.
For the avoidance of doubt this reply is not as sarky as it sounds and I genuinely do value your input in this matter. But the verdicts in GLP Vs EHRC and in Hampstead Ponds is due and I need the article to achieve some kind of shape soon: the next draft is the ninth and it's turning into "Answered Prayers"
I'm sorry @viewcode but the run up to Christmas has been absolutely full on and the time for a really considered reply to a detailed piece is just not there. Even when I have been on holiday I have been responding to various emails, meeting a complainer, preparing for a court hearing on the 30th and 2 commissions in early January. I simply have not had and will not have time to respond in detail to your piece. Apologies.
Not a problem sir. I appreciate the attempt regardless. Thank you for trying.
Just spent three (unexpected) days in hospital. On one hand I could not fault the dedication, empathy, desire to help and sheer hardwork of literally everyone I came into contact. On the other hand it was hard to conclude that, in this aging, overcrowded hospital at least (and accepting that the flu always hits hard this time of year), the system isn't just not working, it is on the brink of complete collapse. It was hard not to be aghast at some of the situations one was expected to tolerate in order to receive appropriate healthcare.
With over £200bn tax funding and over 2m employees you have a right to expect good treatment from the NHS.
11 new "corrections" to the Peggie judgment seeking to correct "clerical mistakes, errors or omissions". Snuck out just before Christmas. After a previous "correction". It is actually shocking. None of these "corrections", which include adding the word "trans" before "female" or replacing "male" with "female" make any difference to the judgment or the reasoning of course. No sirree.
I presume it still ignores those parts of FWS which say the exact opposite of what Kemp has sought to draw from it. Dear oh dear oh dear.
Speaking of which @DavidL, when may I expect a discussant contribution from you please? I have asked @turbotubbs to write one in case you can't, but he has also not produced anything. I'll rewrite the article on Xmas Day to have @kyf_100 on one side and @Cyclefree on the other, setting aside @Nigelb 's contribution until you or @turbotubbs submit something. If neither of you can I'll ask @fitalass to kick in: I'm pretty sure she'll get something to me.
For the avoidance of doubt this reply is not as sarky as it sounds and I genuinely do value your input in this matter. But the verdicts in GLP Vs EHRC and in Hampstead Ponds is due and I need the article to achieve some kind of shape soon: the next draft is the ninth and it's turning into "Answered Prayers"
Sorry - super busy. I have read and seen others comments.
I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.
I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.
Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.
I visited my mother recently, and it seems like she's lost all her money on this McCarthy & Stone leasehold retirement flat that she moved into a while ago, and she feels quite bitter about it.
One of the other residents left their flat to the Salvation Army, and it sounds like they're going to struggle not to lose money on the bequest.
People really like to pass money onto their kids once they don't need it anymore. It is a strong emotional thing.
Why is there low demand on resale for those retirement flats? Feels like it should have been a growth market over the last couple of decades such that even with charges leaseholders shouldn't come out too badly.
The experience of Covid for the residents of flats in that sort of managed block has really put off potential purchasers. Plus also the initial length of the lease was pretty short and so now needs extending. That entails a substantial one-off cost, and then generates a much-increased ongoing ground rent charge, which is payable in addition to the management charge.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
For far too long, ideologues in Washington have pursued coordinated efforts to obstruct renewable energy projects they oppose, using federal authority to suppress innovation, distort energy markets, and limit domestic energy supply. The European Union will no longer ignore these egregious acts of policy-driven obstructionism.
Today, EU institutions will take steps to formally challenge the United States’ prohibition of new wind projects, measures that raise prices for American consumers, weaken grid resilience, and increase U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources. These actions undermine climate commitments, economic competitiveness, and the foundations of transatlantic cooperation. We stand ready and willing to escalate our response should these restrictions not be reconsidered.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
For far too long, ideologues in Washington have pursued coordinated efforts to obstruct renewable energy projects they oppose, using federal authority to suppress innovation, distort energy markets, and limit domestic energy supply. The European Union will no longer ignore these egregious acts of policy-driven obstructionism.
Today, EU institutions will take steps to formally challenge the United States’ prohibition of new wind projects, measures that raise prices for American consumers, weaken grid resilience, and increase U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources. These actions undermine climate commitments, economic competitiveness, and the foundations of transatlantic cooperation. We stand ready and willing to escalate our response should these restrictions not be reconsidered.
Personally, I think that the Europeans, including us, should be backing Denmark and that all of us should send the US ambassadors packing until the sovereignty of Greenland is acknowledged. We let this bunch of morons away with so much it is hardly surprising that they conclude they can walk all over us whenever they want.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Europe (and us) are probably too censorious, but this just seems like yet another example of the Trump administration wanting to antagonise or even make enemies of it's allies, a la Denmark and Canada.
Even if you think they are being too cesnorious all the EU wants is for US social media platforms to deal with abuse and disinformation the same way that local media would have to. The US seems to have adopted a position that US companies need not comply with local laws, and should be free to act as the US alone sees fit. It's plainly nuts, and not something the US would tolerate as the TikTok debacle and others demonstrates.
I don't really see why anyone should be expected to 'deal with disinformation' on social media networks. It's an unfiltered jungle of opinion, and users should be aware of that and act accordingly. Caveat emptor.
Perhaps contradicting my own view, I think the accounts of Islamic State and similar organisations should be taken down with extreme prejudice. And any accounts publishing distressing, criminal footage should also be taken down.
I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.
I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.
Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.
I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.
The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..
Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.
A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.
I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.
There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.
But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.
Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.
The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.
So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?
And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?
No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.
Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.
Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.
No, the plight of the urban British poor was quite often highlighted in debates on slavery and what came after it. Dickens and Carlyle used it frequently.
But saying it was similar was left to creatures like Alex “Cornerstone” Stephens.
I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.
I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.
Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.
I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.
The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..
Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.
A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.
I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.
There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.
But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.
Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.
The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.
So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?
And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?
No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.
Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.
Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.
No, the plight of the urban British poor was quite often highlighted in debates on slavery and what came after it. Dickens and Carlyle used it frequently.
They did so as a rhetorical device. Dickens and Carlyle were both defenders of the Confederacy, and took up the argument that the treatment of the British and US working classes was no different to that of slaves. In fact, rates of mortality, diets, life expectancy were very different between those groups.
I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.
I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.
Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.
I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.
The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..
Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.
A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.
I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.
There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.
But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.
Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.
The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.
So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?
And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?
No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.
Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.
Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.
No, its simply asking if the ends justifies the means.
Clearly African-Americans are better off now than Guineans, clearly I am better off than my Scottish crofting ancestors and English copyholder ancestors, but does that justify the monumental wrongs done?
The reason that we have so many rich landowners is that they are descended from thieves who pushed their kinfolk off the land with no posessions to rural or urban poverty wages or emigration to the colonies.
I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.
I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.
Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.
I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.
The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..
Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.
A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.
I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.
There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.
But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.
Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.
The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.
So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?
And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?
No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.
Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.
Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.
No, the plight of the urban British poor was quite often highlighted in debates on slavery and what came after it. Dickens and Carlyle used it frequently.
But saying it was similar was left to creatures like Alex “Cornerstone” Stephens.
And Stephens was a moderate among the Confederates.
I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.
I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.
Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.
I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.
The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..
Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.
A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.
I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.
There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.
But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.
Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.
The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.
So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?
And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?
No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.
Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.
Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.
No, its simply asking if the ends justifies the means.
Clearly African-Americans are better off now than Guineans, clearly I am better off than my Scottish crofting ancestors and English copyholder ancestors, but does that justify the monumental wrongs done?
The reason that we have so many rich landowners is that they are descended from thieves who pushed their kinfolk off the land with no posessions to rural or urban poverty wages or emigration to the colonies.
You’re seeing pre-industrial rural life in rose-tinted terms.
Pre-industrial societies (including Scottish clans and English villages), were only ever extractive. The agricultural and industrial revolutions created a hitherto unprecedented level of wealth. They proved Malthus wrong.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
For far too long, ideologues in Washington have pursued coordinated efforts to obstruct renewable energy projects they oppose, using federal authority to suppress innovation, distort energy markets, and limit domestic energy supply. The European Union will no longer ignore these egregious acts of policy-driven obstructionism.
Today, EU institutions will take steps to formally challenge the United States’ prohibition of new wind projects, measures that raise prices for American consumers, weaken grid resilience, and increase U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources. These actions undermine climate commitments, economic competitiveness, and the foundations of transatlantic cooperation. We stand ready and willing to escalate our response should these restrictions not be reconsidered.
Personally, I think that the Europeans, including us, should be backing Denmark and that all of us should send the US ambassadors packing until the sovereignty of Greenland is acknowledged. We let this bunch of morons away with so much it is hardly surprising that they conclude they can walk all over us whenever they want.
That would require Europe's leaders to stand up to both American politicians and their own welfare dependents.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
It is interesting that some of Trump nominees are actually less servile and slavishly 'loyal' than the likes of the laughably corrupt Thomas.
On the redactions - “export to PDF”, kids.
That seems to be the problem. They redacted the documents using Adobe Acrobat apparently
Government by technobros.
We need a squillion dollars for AI and space and shit. Also we don't know how Adobe Acrobat works...
The only real redaction is rasterize, redact, convert back to PDF. Having said that, if your country demands accessible PDF/UA by legislation, you can't do that. You would at the very least have to OCR it. And possibly even that might be inadequate for the legislative standards.
It’s fairly trivial to create a “flat” pdf with no meta data. If you vaguely know what you are doing.
Most outfits that release documents regularly have this setup as a default.
Not long ago, I wrote a pdf generator for certain customer letters. A nice chap in the bank tested the output to prove that it had no “extra” information in it.
Just the other day I received a 'redacted' pdf where I was able to copy and paste the text hidden behind black rectangles into a Word document.
Several years ago I had the same with a company's 'secret' chemical formulation.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
My children have just arrived home for Christmas (I have been told by my wife to stop calling them children at 30 and 25).
I have just been told by my son that they have a hedgehog on top of their tree. After numerous questions I am none the wiser as to why.
One branch of our offsprung is descending on us tomorrow with their now adult offsprogs, and I think I may have hit on a whizzo scheme to deal with all the Xmas gifts, which has usually been a headache catering for their various tastes and interests. –– I got Amazon to send me 7 books which *I* might be interested to read. I'll wrap them up and put them in a bag to be taken out as lucky dips with the requirement that each book when read or rejected gets swapped for one of someone else's, including self and wife, and that the process continues till all books have gone through each of us and the last person to get any particular book keeps it.
I don't really see why anyone should be expected to 'deal with disinformation' on social media networks. It's an unfiltered jungle of opinion, and users should be aware of that and act accordingly. Caveat emptor.
That would be fine if people were competent to deal with things themselves or even aware of what is happening, but many people either aren't aware or if they are aware they can't manage the issue. The idea that the internet can simply remain a self-governing "Wild West" is no longer realistic, it doesn't work, and the stakes are too high. A national government or a body like the EU has the right to enforce some basic standards of conduct, the US doesn't not have the right to demand that US companies are exempt from the rules. If the US doesn't want US companies to obey EU rules they shouldn't operate in the EU.
What next for the US? US companies shouldn't have to obey EU safety rules? Or EU pollution rules?
I don't really see why anyone should be expected to 'deal with disinformation' on social media networks. It's an unfiltered jungle of opinion, and users should be aware of that and act accordingly. Caveat emptor.
That would be fine if people were competent to deal with things themselves or even aware of what is happening, but many people either aren't aware or if they are aware they can't manage the issue. The idea that the internet can simply remain a self-governing "Wild West" is no longer realistic, it doesn't work, and the stakes are too high. A national government or a body like the EU has the right to enforce some basic standards of conduct, the US doesn't not have the right to demand that US companies are exempt from the rules. If the US doesn't want US companies to obey EU rules they shouldn't operate in the EU.
What next for the US? US companies shouldn't have to obey EU safety rules? Or EU pollution rules?
I don't agree. Social Media networks should not have the status of being publishers of news - it conders a legitimacy that isn't warranted. We also know that when they do censor (as Facebook does) they often censor the wrong thing, wrongly. Social media is just a conversation. People should just understand that and grow up.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
For far too long, ideologues in Washington have pursued coordinated efforts to obstruct renewable energy projects they oppose, using federal authority to suppress innovation, distort energy markets, and limit domestic energy supply. The European Union will no longer ignore these egregious acts of policy-driven obstructionism.
Today, EU institutions will take steps to formally challenge the United States’ prohibition of new wind projects, measures that raise prices for American consumers, weaken grid resilience, and increase U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources. These actions undermine climate commitments, economic competitiveness, and the foundations of transatlantic cooperation. We stand ready and willing to escalate our response should these restrictions not be reconsidered.
Personally, I think that the Europeans, including us, should be backing Denmark and that all of us should send the US ambassadors packing until the sovereignty of Greenland is acknowledged. We let this bunch of morons away with so much it is hardly surprising that they conclude they can walk all over us whenever they want.
I suppose an Article 5 action against the United States might be challenging.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
Matt Ridley in a recent Speccie article (worth a read), suggesting that the bottom has fallen out of the climate change market:
A top climate scientist is warning climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,’ tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018. Five years later she deleted her tweet and shortly after decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.
The truth is 2025 is setting more records for warmth in the UK and worldwide. The UK's warmth record set in 2022 is going to be broken and most people remember the summer of 2022 for those exceptional few days of heat when we broke 40c in London.
We know Ridley is a denier and to be fair some of the proponents of claimate change have done themselves no favours with some of their hyperbolic prognostications but a rapidly warming world (whether caused by human intervention or not) is going to cause a lot of problems.
I'm more worried that scientists are deliberately downplaying the outputs of their models so as to appear more credible. Some of the tipping point stuff looks seriously nasty. Massive uncertainty, of course.
Yes, this is a much unexplored set of risks. Not least because of the way the climate models are developed and tested they're much more likely to be too conservative rather than exaggerated.
What are we to make of Gail's opening ten of its London bakeries on Christmas Day?
Clearly, all the LD voters (the only ones who use Gail's according to some on here) need somewhere to avoid the family and the Christmas nonsense.
On an unrelated, the Alexandra in Wimbledon opens on Christmas Day providing a free Christmas lunch for those who are alone. It's a wonderful touch and I wish it happened more as it's all too easy to forget the many people for whom Christmas is a lonely purgatory.
Never been in a Gail’s, but noticed one has opened in Salisbury when we went there on Thursday. This part of the world is Reeve the Baker country, so will be interesting to see how they fair.
Gail's are expanding and can now be found in non-Lib Dem held constituencies - there's one in Epping which will please @HYUFD.
They are insanely popular - their coffee is okay and the bready comestibles are pricey but decent and that's where they score because what you have with your decaf macchiato is part of the experience.
OTOH it may be the prelude to Epping Forest switching to the Lib Dems.
I don't agree. Social Media networks should not have the status of being publishers of news - it conders a legitimacy that isn't warranted. We also know that when they do censor (as Facebook does) they often censor the wrong thing, wrongly. Social media is just a conversation. People should just understand that and grow up.
But people don't understand that. Some people do not make a clear distinction any more between fact and fiction. So when they see something on social media that is plainly nonsense, they judge it's truth by the popularity or authority of the source, not the content. Such people are susceptible to manipulation by bad actors. It's not unreasonable for a body like the EU to ask Twitter to do something about the issue. And it's no longer "mischief makers" that we have to worry about, but hostile states trying to shape public opinion, influence elections, and cause social unrest. Stopping such acts is an entirely legitimate thing for a state to do. If you leave it to self-regulation you are simply allowing our actual enemies to harm our society.
I sometimes wonder if the fact I have zero chance of inheriting any assets affects my ability to get very worked up about the principle of inheritance taxation.
I think it is more a "feels" thing. I'll probably inherit a significant amount (to a normal person (and myself...), perhaps crumbs to some of the pb elite)), and think it weird that it would be taxed less strictly than me working hard.
Maybe if it was from a family business rather than well paid professional jobs I might think differently as that would create more attachment between the money, bequestors and the future so I can see where the farmers are coming from, but ultimately we are skint, and someone has to be taxed more and very few of the candidates for that will like it either.
I think that many of our freehold family farms only came into existence due to death duties on large aristocratic estates, with land sold to tenant farmers to pay the tax. At the end of enclosures there were a lot of tenant farmers, a lot of very large landholdings and a relatively small number of small freeholders.
The history of landholding in this country is not one of freehold family farms, it is mostly of turning peasants with traditional rights into a landless working class, and consolidating land ownership amongst the aristocracy. It was only Death Duties (and more recently IHT) that had reversed things..
Conversely, I would say that life as a peasant was (for the majority), always pretty rough, and when people got the opportunity to obtain better-paid work in cities, and the new industrial towns, they availed themselves of it.
A typical village had a Big Man, and several better off peasants, but the large majority were always dependent on the former, whether or not they owned their small holdings.
I am not particularly agitating for reparations from the landholders in compensation for the loss of traditional lands in the Highland Clearances and the equivalent English Enclosures, but it would be nice if they acknowledged how they came by their lands. It was theft, albeit historic theft.
There is something massively appealing to the very idea of running a farm, supporting a family from your own produce, and turning a profit from it.
But, I don’t think that was ever available to more than 20-25% of the village population (the hoplite class in classical Greece, the yeomen of late medieval England). The rest depended on the wages they got as labourers and servants, to the better off peasants and the Big Man, in addition to produce from their small plots.
Frontier societies came closest to this ideal, but usually at the expense of defeated peoples, being pushed off the land.
The powerful were always trying to grab more land. It was fortunate that in late 18th century England, this coincided with the demand for labour in new industries. For the rural poor, leaving the land was a blessing.
So similar to the slaves exported from Guinea to Virginia, it was worth it for the long term benefit?
And should be grateful to those Liverpool ship owners?
No. Being a chattel slave rarely represented an improvement in one’s life. Working in new industries often did.
Interesting that someone is trying to sell the “being a factory worker = slavery” thing.
Only the most extreme Southern Fireaters tried that pitch, back in the day.
No, its simply asking if the ends justifies the means.
Clearly African-Americans are better off now than Guineans, clearly I am better off than my Scottish crofting ancestors and English copyholder ancestors, but does that justify the monumental wrongs done?
The reason that we have so many rich landowners is that they are descended from thieves who pushed their kinfolk off the land with no posessions to rural or urban poverty wages or emigration to the colonies.
You’re seeing pre-industrial rural life in rose-tinted terms.
Pre-industrial societies (including Scottish clans and English villages), were only ever extractive. The agricultural and industrial revolutions created a hitherto unprecedented level of wealth. They proved Malthus wrong.
The agriucultural and industrial revolutions were highly extractive, though. Coal, iron, water, metal ores ...
Even maintaining productivity for farming needed vastly increased input of external assets. Peruvian guano, for instance, features in the novel Johnnie Gibb of Gushetneuk set in 1840s Scotland.
When the BBC News tells me that the US growth rate last month was at an "annual rate of 4.3%", I'm pretty sure this means an *annualised* rate = (X(t)/X(t-1))^12 - 1, not what we would normally understand by annual rate = X(t)/X(t-12) - 1. There is a big difference between the two – the former is wildly variable compared with the latter
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
It is interesting that some of Trump nominees are actually less servile and slavishly 'loyal' than the likes of the laughably corrupt Thomas.
On the redactions - “export to PDF”, kids.
That seems to be the problem. They redacted the documents using Adobe Acrobat apparently
Government by technobros.
We need a squillion dollars for AI and space and shit. Also we don't know how Adobe Acrobat works...
I saw the other day that there is a world championships of Excell spreadheeting (is that a word?). The geeks shall inherit the earth.
Ca I would rather have Lotus 123.
That’s more DuraAce’s area of expertise.
I have always yearned for an Esprit S2 to do a K swap on. I occasionally look at them on Autotrader/Car and Classic, then I remember that I would rather guide Andy Street's pulsating cock into Michael Fabricant's twitching arsehole with my bare right hand than endure the Lotus Ownership Experience.
This one's nice. Not very original but a sympathetic resto.
I don't really see why anyone should be expected to 'deal with disinformation' on social media networks. It's an unfiltered jungle of opinion, and users should be aware of that and act accordingly. Caveat emptor.
That would be fine if people were competent to deal with things themselves or even aware of what is happening, but many people either aren't aware or if they are aware they can't manage the issue. The idea that the internet can simply remain a self-governing "Wild West" is no longer realistic, it doesn't work, and the stakes are too high. A national government or a body like the EU has the right to enforce some basic standards of conduct, the US doesn't not have the right to demand that US companies are exempt from the rules. If the US doesn't want US companies to obey EU rules they shouldn't operate in the EU.
What next for the US? US companies shouldn't have to obey EU safety rules? Or EU pollution rules?
The direction of travel is that governments, including the US, should obey the broligarchs.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
Includes the gem that Trump is searchable (and appears 600 times) if you add a space at the end
We are no better. I did a foi sometime ago of a Govt department. I got a hard copy and pdfs. If I put the cursor over the redacted email addresses on the pdfs they get shown.
Why don't people check this sort of thing before they send it out?
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
Includes the gem that Trump is searchable (and appears 600 times) if you add a space at the end
We are no better. I did a foi sometime ago of a Govt department. I got a hard copy and pdfs. If I put the cursor over the redacted email addresses on the pdfs they get shown.
Why don't people check this sort of thing before they send it out?
Whilst not forgivable it is slightly more understandable in relatively mundane requests being handled in bulk by pretty junior people, cutting corners on final double checks. For one of the most high profile and politically sensitive topics of the day, even with the vast amounts of material, you'd think the A team would be on it.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
For far too long, ideologues in Washington have pursued coordinated efforts to obstruct renewable energy projects they oppose, using federal authority to suppress innovation, distort energy markets, and limit domestic energy supply. The European Union will no longer ignore these egregious acts of policy-driven obstructionism.
Today, EU institutions will take steps to formally challenge the United States’ prohibition of new wind projects, measures that raise prices for American consumers, weaken grid resilience, and increase U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources. These actions undermine climate commitments, economic competitiveness, and the foundations of transatlantic cooperation. We stand ready and willing to escalate our response should these restrictions not be reconsidered.
Personally, I think that the Europeans, including us, should be backing Denmark and that all of us should send the US ambassadors packing until the sovereignty of Greenland is acknowledged. We let this bunch of morons away with so much it is hardly surprising that they conclude they can walk all over us whenever they want.
Aren't the Greenlanders one of those peoples who make very waterproof coats from thick animal hides. Perhaps they could flatter Trump by making him a gift of his envoy.
Just spent three (unexpected) days in hospital. On one hand I could not fault the dedication, empathy, desire to help and sheer hardwork of literally everyone I came into contact. On the other hand it was hard to conclude that, in this aging, overcrowded hospital at least (and accepting that the flu always hits hard this time of year), the system isn't just not working, it is on the brink of complete collapse. It was hard not to be aghast at some of the situations one was expected to tolerate in order to receive appropriate healthcare.
One reason for low productivity in the NHS is that capital spend has been far too low for years, hence antiquated IT, archaic buildings, delays getting investigations etc etc. For years capital, training and maintenence budgets have been raided to prop up front line services.
No other developed country keeps patients on trolleys as an overflow and very few don't look after patients in single siderooms.
I hope you are well enough to enjoy the holidays.
Ireland's HSE is, I think, still worse than the NHS in this respect. Lots of patients on trolleys.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
Includes the gem that Trump is searchable (and appears 600 times) if you add a space at the end
We are no better. I did a foi sometime ago of a Govt department. I got a hard copy and pdfs. If I put the cursor over the redacted email addresses on the pdfs they get shown.
Why don't people check this sort of thing before they send it out?
Whilst not forgivable it is slightly more understandable in relatively mundane requests being handled in bulk by pretty junior people. For one of the most high profile and politically sensitive topics of the day, even with the vast amounts of material, you'd think the A team would be on it.
Trump's A Team of lawyers included Rudy Giuliani and Alina Habba.
Oh, and Aileen Cannon and Thomas Clarence, but they were sort of fellow travellers.
Just spent three (unexpected) days in hospital. On one hand I could not fault the dedication, empathy, desire to help and sheer hardwork of literally everyone I came into contact. On the other hand it was hard to conclude that, in this aging, overcrowded hospital at least (and accepting that the flu always hits hard this time of year), the system isn't just not working, it is on the brink of complete collapse. It was hard not to be aghast at some of the situations one was expected to tolerate in order to receive appropriate healthcare.
One reason for low productivity in the NHS is that capital spend has been far too low for years, hence antiquated IT, archaic buildings, delays getting investigations etc etc. For years capital, training and maintenence budgets have been raided to prop up front line services.
No other developed country keeps patients on trolleys as an overflow and very few don't look after patients in single siderooms.
I hope you are well enough to enjoy the holidays.
Ireland's HSEis, I think, still worse than the NHS in this respect.
Not sure that will replace the overused refrain about the NHS being world beating.
11 new "corrections" to the Peggie judgment seeking to correct "clerical mistakes, errors or omissions". Snuck out just before Christmas. After a previous "correction". It is actually shocking. None of these "corrections", which include adding the word "trans" before "female" or replacing "male" with "female" make any difference to the judgment or the reasoning of course. No sirree.
I presume it still ignores those parts of FWS which say the exact opposite of what Kemp has sought to draw from it. Dear oh dear oh dear.
But apparently making judges accountable is a step too far. When did we become a country that is unable to tell rogue judges to get fucked with their shit judgements and then remove them from the bench?
Several hundred years ago and for very good reasons. It is really important that Judges can, with impunity, criticise and hold to account what would in any normal relationship be their employers. Judicial independence is critical to a working democracy and the rule of law and arrant stupidity, bias and wrong headedness in an individual case cannot be allowed to undermine that principle. It is frustrating though. I am struggling to see any way forward with this mess other than to start again under a different Tribunal.
Maybe, but there seems to be no way to put these rogue judges on performance review and get rid of them even after they make multiple judgements that get overturned on appeal. It's clear that they have an agenda that isn't just upholding the law, so many of those completely ridiculous immigration verdicts get overturned on appeal and yet those same judges making those idiotic judgements just continue to do so with impunity.
All of that costs time and money, cases get constantly delayed due to endless appeals. In this case it's clearly justice denied because the judge decided they knew better than the supreme court and now this will need to go back blocking a different case from being heard.
There needs to be a mechanism by which judges who's judgements get constantly overturned are sacked.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
That is the oldest trick in the book (of tricks around redacted documents). That is such a beginner mistake.
I don't really see why anyone should be expected to 'deal with disinformation' on social media networks. It's an unfiltered jungle of opinion, and users should be aware of that and act accordingly. Caveat emptor.
That would be fine if people were competent to deal with things themselves or even aware of what is happening, but many people either aren't aware or if they are aware they can't manage the issue. The idea that the internet can simply remain a self-governing "Wild West" is no longer realistic, it doesn't work, and the stakes are too high. A national government or a body like the EU has the right to enforce some basic standards of conduct, the US doesn't not have the right to demand that US companies are exempt from the rules. If the US doesn't want US companies to obey EU rules they shouldn't operate in the EU.
What next for the US? US companies shouldn't have to obey EU safety rules? Or EU pollution rules?
The US has long objected to higher EU standards on safety, etc, seeing them as anti-competitive trade barriers.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
It is interesting that some of Trump nominees are actually less servile and slavishly 'loyal' than the likes of the laughably corrupt Thomas.
On the redactions - “export to PDF”, kids.
That seems to be the problem. They redacted the documents using Adobe Acrobat apparently
Government by technobros.
We need a squillion dollars for AI and space and shit. Also we don't know how Adobe Acrobat works...
I saw the other day that there is a world championships of Excell spreadheeting (is that a word?). The geeks shall inherit the earth.
Ca I would rather have Lotus 123.
That’s more DuraAce’s area of expertise.
I have always yearned for an Esprit S2 to do a K swap on. I occasionally look at them on Autotrader/Car and Classic, then I remember that I would rather guide Andy Street's pulsating cock into Michael Fabricant's twitching arsehole with my bare right hand than endure the Lotus Ownership Experience.
This one's nice. Not very original but a sympathetic resto.
Circa 1992 I was sitting in my Sierra Estate filling in paperwork to post to the office. I'd just been to Edwards Bros Waste Paper (successful classic rally competitors using Volvo 122s and 144s) at Bitton between Bristol and Bath when a stunningly restored canary yellow Lotus Elite (the one from the late seventies not the nice one from 1959) passed at speed. About 20 minutes later I saw a fire appliance heading in the same direction as the Lotus. A little later I passed the entrance to the field where the fire brigade were dousing down a melting Lotus. Lucas electrics and fibreglass would be quite a heady cocktail. A sad but a cursory warning to Colin Chapman fans.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
For anyone who finds Christmas Day mornings a tedium to endure, there's a guy going to be live streaming from a muddy embankment next to the runways at Manchester Airport from 8 until 12.
Better than the proof of life video from the church near Sandringham.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Europe (and us) are probably too censorious, but this just seems like yet another example of the Trump administration wanting to antagonise or even make enemies of it's allies, a la Denmark and Canada.
Even if you think they are being too cesnorious all the EU wants is for US social media platforms to deal with abuse and disinformation the same way that local media would have to. The US seems to have adopted a position that US companies need not comply with local laws, and should be free to act as the US alone sees fit. It's plainly nuts, and not something the US would tolerate as the TikTok debacle and others demonstrates.
I don't really see why anyone should be expected to 'deal with disinformation' on social media networks. It's an unfiltered jungle of opinion, and users should be aware of that and act accordingly. Caveat emptor.
Except it's not unfiltered. It's delivered by very particular algorithms.
The US attitude is that they get to skew the marketplace for opinions, and no one else should be allowed to interfere with that.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
Includes the gem that Trump is searchable (and appears 600 times) if you add a space at the end
We are no better. I did a foi sometime ago of a Govt department. I got a hard copy and pdfs. If I put the cursor over the redacted email addresses on the pdfs they get shown.
Why don't people check this sort of thing before they send it out?
Whilst not forgivable it is slightly more understandable in relatively mundane requests being handled in bulk by pretty junior people, cutting corners on final double checks. For one of the most high profile and politically sensitive topics of the day, even with the vast amounts of material, you'd think the A team would be on it.
I've been thinking about this recently on the "Would I delegate this to an LLM?" line of late. I keep encountering people who compare the even mid-level LLMs against some sort of Platonic ideal form where zero mistakes would have have been made, the language would have been perfect, everyone would have applauded.
"If I asked a new member of staff to do this in my vague ill-defined terms - it would have been perfect!"
There was a recent paper from (afaikr) Stanford exploring the raw economics of 'quality vs. time vs. cost' and it wasn't very jolly.
Stanford/CMU. For a shorter overview from the theoretical physicist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPYjWmJz_bA . He has a quite good turn of phrase, if you're interested in the underlying performance/maths of this stuff.
I don't agree. Social Media networks should not have the status of being publishers of news - it conders a legitimacy that isn't warranted. We also know that when they do censor (as Facebook does) they often censor the wrong thing, wrongly. Social media is just a conversation. People should just understand that and grow up.
But people don't understand that. Some people do not make a clear distinction any more between fact and fiction. So when they see something on social media that is plainly nonsense, they judge it's truth by the popularity or authority of the source, not the content. Such people are susceptible to manipulation by bad actors. It's not unreasonable for a body like the EU to ask Twitter to do something about the issue. And it's no longer "mischief makers" that we have to worry about, but hostile states trying to shape public opinion, influence elections, and cause social unrest. Stopping such acts is an entirely legitimate thing for a state to do. If you leave it to self-regulation you are simply allowing our actual enemies to harm our society.
As one commenter on this site put it - “I believe what I read online. It’s easier than questioning everything.”
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
Includes the gem that Trump is searchable (and appears 600 times) if you add a space at the end
We are no better. I did a foi sometime ago of a Govt department. I got a hard copy and pdfs. If I put the cursor over the redacted email addresses on the pdfs they get shown.
Why don't people check this sort of thing before they send it out?
Whilst not forgivable it is slightly more understandable in relatively mundane requests being handled in bulk by pretty junior people, cutting corners on final double checks. For one of the most high profile and politically sensitive topics of the day, even with the vast amounts of material, you'd think the A team would be on it.
Evening all. It's easy to be concerned by all the fascist shit Trump is trying to pull in the US, but the good news is they are so laughably, horribly bad at it.
Not content with uploading the entire unedited 60 minutes they wanted to censor, it turns out all the 'redacted' Epstein files can be read by copying and pasting the 'redacted' text into any other document...
I recall the Ministry of Defence did the same thing once (probably more than once). That's pretty incompetent given the ease of proper redaction now.
NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent.
It is interesting that some of Trump nominees are actually less servile and slavishly 'loyal' than the likes of the laughably corrupt Thomas.
On the redactions - “export to PDF”, kids.
That seems to be the problem. They redacted the documents using Adobe Acrobat apparently
Government by technobros.
We need a squillion dollars for AI and space and shit. Also we don't know how Adobe Acrobat works...
I saw the other day that there is a world championships of Excell spreadheeting (is that a word?). The geeks shall inherit the earth.
Ca I would rather have Lotus 123.
That’s more DuraAce’s area of expertise.
I have always yearned for an Esprit S2 to do a K swap on. I occasionally look at them on Autotrader/Car and Classic, then I remember that I would rather guide Andy Street's pulsating cock into Michael Fabricant's twitching arsehole with my bare right hand than endure the Lotus Ownership Experience.
This one's nice. Not very original but a sympathetic resto.
Circa 1992 I was sitting in my Sierra Estate filling in paperwork to post to the office. I'd just been to Edwards Bros Waste Paper (successful classic rally competitors using Volvo 122s and 144s) at Bitton between Bristol and Bath when a stunningly restored canary yellow Lotus Elite (the one from the late seventies not the nice one from 1959) passed at speed. About 20 minutes later I saw a fire appliance heading in the same direction as the Lotus. A little later I passed the entrance to the field where the fire brigade were dousing down a melting Lotus. Lucas electrics and fibreglass would be quite a heady cocktail. A sad but a cursory warning to Colin Chapman fans.
Magna, who’s used to,work for, used to have a place at Bitton. Visited a couple of times, it was a nice little place
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
And no such sanctions on Chinese officials who ban US social media outright.
Banning US social media outright doesn't have the extraterritorial dimension of the EU with its pretensions of being a global 'regulatory superpower'.
Whilst I'm no fan of blocking everything, nor of the EU particularly, what is extraterritorial about demanding a service provided in the EU meets EU law?
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
In general all significant Western corporations implement the US sanctions regime. But if they do that here they will likely put themselves in breach of EU and other national European laws. The US government is creating a huge headache for its own corporations.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
The Lib Dems even get a special mention in that rant.
"None of those sanctioned is a current UK or EU official—however, we know that foreign government officials are actively targeting the United States. This week, the UK’s Liberal Democrats claimed President’s Trump National Security Strategy amounts to “foreign interference” by a “hostile foreign state” because it correctly identifies mass migration and decaying national sovereignty as existential European security concerns."
Is that the first time the Lib Dems have been noticed by the US government? Ed should have the tweet printed and framed.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
The Lib Dems even get a special mention in that rant.
"None of those sanctioned is a current UK or EU official—however, we know that foreign government officials are actively targeting the United States. This week, the UK’s Liberal Democrats claimed President’s Trump National Security Strategy amounts to “foreign interference” by a “hostile foreign state” because it correctly identifies mass migration and decaying national sovereignty as existential European security concerns."
Is that the first time the Lib Dems have been noticed by the US government? Ed should have the tweet printed and framed.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
The Lib Dems even get a special mention in that rant.
"None of those sanctioned is a current UK or EU official—however, we know that foreign government officials are actively targeting the United States. This week, the UK’s Liberal Democrats claimed President’s Trump National Security Strategy amounts to “foreign interference” by a “hostile foreign state” because it correctly identifies mass migration and decaying national sovereignty as existential European security concerns."
Is that the first time the Lib Dems have been noticed by the US government? Ed should have the tweet printed and framed.
Good to know the Liberal Democrats are now “foreign government officials”.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
The Lib Dems even get a special mention in that rant.
"None of those sanctioned is a current UK or EU official—however, we know that foreign government officials are actively targeting the United States. This week, the UK’s Liberal Democrats claimed President’s Trump National Security Strategy amounts to “foreign interference” by a “hostile foreign state” because it correctly identifies mass migration and decaying national sovereignty as existential European security concerns."
Is that the first time the Lib Dems have been noticed by the US government? Ed should have the tweet printed and framed.
No one is really complaining about the administrations bizarre beliefs regarding Europe expressed in the absurd but worrying national security document. It's the fact that (for example) the administration expresses an explicit intention to interfere in our elections.
What do these sanctions effectively mean. Will it be the same as the sanctions applied to the UN person, Francesca Albanese, effectively making it very hard for them to live in the modern world, or is it just token.
What do these sanctions effectively mean. Will it be the same as the sanctions applied to the UN person, Francesca Albanese, effectively making it very hard for them to live in the modern world, or is it just token.
This is the best Christmas present me, my family and my friends could have had. I can now safely sleep at night, that is how bad it has been. Especially for those older than me with serious health issues. Bad news for agricultural valuers of course who would have made a fortune over the arguing the toss over the values of farms. It takes my estate out of the danger zone and so we can now look forwards to building the shed which we have needed for many years.
I had expected this to become a jockeying point when the new Labour leader was selected or else it to be put off for a year, and a year and a year.
They pointed the shotgun at the whole farming industry. We stood up to them and they have blinked. But we won't forget, no we won't forget ...
That is the whole point
The farmers will not forgive or vote labour because of this
They also voted en masse for Brexit and then realised they had screwed themselves. They are the ultimate selfish opportunists who believe the world owes them a living. Of course they won't vote labour.
British farmers do appear to be cretinous, as a class. Brexit is exhibit 1.
However, if you care about land use and food quality, then you need to care about farmers.
Reeves’s problem is she actively hates much of the country, including farmers.
The amount of political capital burnt in this thing is incredible. Ultimately, the correct decision, tax should be targeted at investors and companies buying land. The vast majority of farm estates will now be exempt, providing they make use of the £5m spouse allowance
The people benefiting from this change are those sitting on a highly tax efficient asset worth many millions who quite sincerely and genuinely want to keep it that way and don't see why they should pay the same tax as say someone running a productive business.
We have to concede an extremely effective lobbying exercise by wealthy landowners but we don't really need to agree with the principle of it. It's far more egregious than WFA for example.
Those who are genuinely worried about family farming would be far better off looking at *incomes* - for instance, supermarket buying practices - and food security.
But this lobbying has been all about protecting capital investment.
It's like houses - those who have houses are treated far better than those without when it comes to IHT. No wonder the values are distorted.
IHT is theft!
Property is theft comrade.
Your family member dies, you're bereaved, and you're left with a massive bill to Haitch-MRC - how does that work?
A family member dies and you're left a massive unearned pot of gold. How is that fair?
Because your family member worked hard all their life and should be allowed to dispose of their savings as they see fit?
Just be grateful and pay the tax.
Let’s say someone has a big success and gets paid a £1m bonus on April 1. They pay income tax on it under PAYE.
They then die on April 8.
And you think the government should have the right to double dip on that income simply because the individual concerned has died?
Well yes, because there is effectively a tax on dying.
The person who earned it, after all, has no further use for the money.
But we don't live and work just for ourselves. We live and work for our families. People with children sacrifice much (if necessary) for their wellbeing. Others do the same for other close relations or even friends.
Why should the State take what they have earned and which they wish to pass on to those they care about?
But that applies to income tax too.
And the answer is the same: because the State provides so much that allows us to earn and pass on to those we care about. And we have to pay for the State somehow.
False equivalence. In the case of the bonus cited earlier, income tax would already havve been paid so the Government is double dipping.
What do these sanctions effectively mean. Will it be the same as the sanctions applied to the UN person, Francesca Albanese, effectively making it very hard for them to live in the modern world, or is it just token.
I think it's just a travel ban to the US.
who in their right mind would travel to the US now anyway?
Just in case 60 Minutes tries to do any more real journalism..
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced that they will be hiring a "bias monitor" at CBS "who would report directly to the President." State run TV is officially here. https://x.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/2003581504321175672
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Is this a threat to the existence of PB.com?
They’ve announced sanctions on Thierry Breton and others
The Lib Dems even get a special mention in that rant.
"None of those sanctioned is a current UK or EU official—however, we know that foreign government officials are actively targeting the United States. This week, the UK’s Liberal Democrats claimed President’s Trump National Security Strategy amounts to “foreign interference” by a “hostile foreign state” because it correctly identifies mass migration and decaying national sovereignty as existential European security concerns."
Is that the first time the Lib Dems have been noticed by the US government? Ed should have the tweet printed and framed.
No one is really complaining about the administrations bizarre beliefs regarding Europe expressed in the absurd but worrying national security document. It's the fact that (for example) the administration expresses an explicit intention to interfere in our elections.
Perhaps it wasn't the wisest idea for the Labour party to interfere in the last US elections.
For anyone who finds Christmas Day mornings a tedium to endure, there's a guy going to be live streaming from a muddy embankment next to the runways at Manchester Airport from 8 until 12.
Better than the proof of life video from the church near Sandringham.
Or you could come here and have a go at the annual St John Christmas Crossword. It’s a cracker! With a link to an online option for filling in the answers this year and an explanation of the clues and answers. Please have a go! 😀
For anyone who finds Christmas Day mornings a tedium to endure, there's a guy going to be live streaming from a muddy embankment next to the runways at Manchester Airport from 8 until 12.
Better than the proof of life video from the church near Sandringham.
Or you could come here and have a go at the annual St John Christmas Crossword. It’s a cracker! With a link to an online option for filling in the answers this year and an explanation of the clues and answers. Please have a go! 😀
Just in case 60 Minutes tries to do any more real journalism..
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced that they will be hiring a "bias monitor" at CBS "who would report directly to the President." State run TV is officially here. https://x.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/2003581504321175672
Presumably they will have similar bias monitors at Fox News, Newsmax and One America News?
What are we to make of Gail's opening ten of its London bakeries on Christmas Day?
Clearly, all the LD voters (the only ones who use Gail's according to some on here) need somewhere to avoid the family and the Christmas nonsense.
On an unrelated, the Alexandra in Wimbledon opens on Christmas Day providing a free Christmas lunch for those who are alone. It's a wonderful touch and I wish it happened more as it's all too easy to forget the many people for whom Christmas is a lonely purgatory.
Never been in a Gail’s, but noticed one has opened in Salisbury when we went there on Thursday. This part of the world is Reeve the Baker country, so will be interesting to see how they fair.
Gail's are expanding and can now be found in non-Lib Dem held constituencies - there's one in Epping which will please @HYUFD.
They are insanely popular - their coffee is okay and the bready comestibles are pricey but decent and that's where they score because what you have with your decaf macchiato is part of the experience.
OTOH it may be the prelude to Epping Forest switching to the Lib Dems.
Epping already has mainly LD councillors at district level and more LD than Tory councillors at town level too. The county councillor is Tory but that seat includes Theydon Bois.
Most Epping Forest councillors overall though are Conservative though Reform have won Parish council by elections in Ongar and Buckhurst Hill
Just in case 60 Minutes tries to do any more real journalism..
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced that they will be hiring a "bias monitor" at CBS "who would report directly to the President." State run TV is officially here. https://x.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/2003581504321175672
Presumably they will have similar bias monitors at Fox News, Newsmax and One America News?
Unnecessary expense. We all know that Fox is fair and balanced. They tell us so themselves
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
What do these sanctions effectively mean. Will it be the same as the sanctions applied to the UN person, Francesca Albanese, effectively making it very hard for them to live in the modern world, or is it just token.
I don't know, but they're not known for doing token stuff these days...
"After 48 and 49 days, Qesser Zuhrah and Amu Gib have paused their hunger strike.
Their bravery has laid bare the cruelty of a Labour government wanting them to die. They refused to give them that — and will resume in the new year."
I cannot parse this paragraph. What is she buggering on about?
They ate something. They didn't like the whole not-eating thing so they ate something. They will recommence the not-eating in 2026, but until then there's Xmas lunch and stuff. They were really hungry so they have worked up quite the appetite.
"After 48 and 49 days, Qesser Zuhrah and Amu Gib have paused their hunger strike.
Their bravery has laid bare the cruelty of a Labour government wanting them to die. They refused to give them that — and will resume in the new year."
I cannot parse this paragraph. What is she buggering on about?
They ate something. They didn't like the whole not-eating thing so they ate something. They will recommence the not-eating in 2026, but until then there's Xmas lunch and stuff. They were really hungry so they have worked up quite the appetite.
Who can resist All The Trimmings? Not a hunger striker...
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Europe (and us) are probably too censorious, but this just seems like yet another example of the Trump administration wanting to antagonise or even make enemies of it's allies, a la Denmark and Canada.
Even if you think they are being too cesnorious all the EU wants is for US social media platforms to deal with abuse and disinformation the same way that local media would have to. The US seems to have adopted a position that US companies need not comply with local laws, and should be free to act as the US alone sees fit. It's plainly nuts, and not something the US would tolerate as the TikTok debacle and others demonstrates.
I don't really see why anyone should be expected to 'deal with disinformation' on social media networks. It's an unfiltered jungle of opinion, and users should be aware of that and act accordingly. Caveat emptor.
Perhaps contradicting my own view, I think the accounts of Islamic State and similar organisations should be taken down with extreme prejudice. And any accounts publishing distressing, criminal footage should also be taken down.
Farming Today is always worth listening to when it is about actual farming, as unavoidably it was today. Truly it was a festival of disingenuity.
There was Emma Reynolds presenting the 180 U Turn as a development of policy and all the crap about always listening but not bothered about the protests.
There was the President of the NFU professing this was his and the NFU's great achievement and the Farmers for Action were just tossers who had been disregarded.
There was the presenter saying how impartial the Beeb had been throughout.
But there was no-one from Farmers for Action to demonstrate how absurd the NFU's claims were.
There was no-one from ANY Opposition Party to give an opposition view, not even the Lib Dems who are really hand in glove with Labour regardless of what their genuine MP Tim Farron says.
There was no-one to say the Beeb ceased to be impartial on agricultural matters when they sacked Dan Cherrington in the 1990s.
I think some credit to Emma Reynolds, I do think she has been listening. I think that proves all the more how vile Steve Reed was and how unsuitable he was for any cabinet post.
I do not think the NFU should be allowed to get away with claiming this as their victory. The protests have been effective, the NFU was ignored throughout.
So why the change in policy ? Keir Starmer is facing the end of his sordid little career. Fighting a leadership challenge with a policy to cripple family farms and do even more harm to one and two man family trade businesses was always going to be sub-optimal and presumably difficult to defend on the leadership hustings.
Dale Campbell Savours has said "What the Fuck are you doing withdrawing the whip from my son ?"
Marcus Campbell Savours could well be the stalking horse challenger against Starmer. That presents everyone with a problem because, like his father he is socialist and intelligent. There must be a risk that he would beat ALL the challengers who are self evidently less able than him.
I wonder when someone is going to tell the first and last "Female Chancellor" that her flagship Social-Marxist policy to destroy has been dropped ? I bet she did not hear about it before it was on the Beeb yesterday.
Will the threshold include livestock or will they be discounted as at present ?
Will the threshold be updated annually ?
What about farmers who live with their partner but never married ?
What about farmers in same sex relationships ?
What about farmers who are in relationships but don't actually live on the same farm - this is quite common when you think about it but probably not something those outside the industry are aware of ?
What about siblings who inherited the farm from parents and just live together ? I can think of MF, MM, MFF situations in this parish.
The last time a similar policy was tried in 1910 it took 15 years for the tax to raise enough for drawing the maps needed, the 1910 Finance Act.
How many extra staff will the policy require to implement, how will they be paid for. Then calculate their wages and on-costs.
Just in case 60 Minutes tries to do any more real journalism..
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced that they will be hiring a "bias monitor" at CBS "who would report directly to the President." State run TV is officially here. https://x.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/2003581504321175672
Presumably they will have similar bias monitors at Fox News, Newsmax and One America News?
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.
Europe (and us) are probably too censorious, but this just seems like yet another example of the Trump administration wanting to antagonise or even make enemies of it's allies, a la Denmark and Canada.
Even if you think they are being too cesnorious all the EU wants is for US social media platforms to deal with abuse and disinformation the same way that local media would have to. The US seems to have adopted a position that US companies need not comply with local laws, and should be free to act as the US alone sees fit. It's plainly nuts, and not something the US would tolerate as the TikTok debacle and others demonstrates.
I don't really see why anyone should be expected to 'deal with disinformation' on social media networks. It's an unfiltered jungle of opinion, and users should be aware of that and act accordingly. Caveat emptor.
Perhaps contradicting my own view, I think the accounts of Islamic State and similar organisations should be taken down with extreme prejudice. And any accounts publishing distressing, criminal footage should also be taken down.
Lector!
You bastard, I was saving that for the next time there was a less/fewer correction on here!
Comments
I have just been told by my son that they have a hedgehog on top of their tree. After numerous questions I am none the wiser as to why.
Perhaps contradicting my own view, I think the accounts of Islamic State and similar organisations should be taken down with extreme prejudice. And any accounts publishing distressing, criminal footage should also be taken down.
Clearly African-Americans are better off now than Guineans, clearly I am better off than my Scottish crofting ancestors and English copyholder ancestors, but does that justify the monumental wrongs done?
The reason that we have so many rich landowners is that they are descended from thieves who pushed their kinfolk off the land with no posessions to rural or urban poverty wages or emigration to the colonies.
Pre-industrial societies (including Scottish clans and English villages), were only ever extractive. The agricultural and industrial revolutions created a hitherto unprecedented level of wealth. They proved Malthus wrong.
Several years ago I had the same with a company's 'secret' chemical formulation.
What next for the US? US companies shouldn't have to obey EU safety rules? Or EU pollution rules?
Reform: nc
Labour: -6
Conservative: -3
Lib Dem: +1
Green: +7
The main move then Labour to Green and perhaps not as much change this year as we sometimes think.
Even maintaining productivity for farming needed vastly increased input of external assets. Peruvian guano, for instance, features in the novel Johnnie Gibb of Gushetneuk set in 1840s Scotland.
This one's nice. Not very original but a sympathetic resto.
https://www.carandclassic.com/car/C1758818
Oh, and Aileen Cannon and Thomas Clarence, but they were sort of fellow travellers.
All of that costs time and money, cases get constantly delayed due to endless appeals. In this case it's clearly justice denied because the judge decided they knew better than the supreme court and now this will need to go back blocking a different case from being heard.
There needs to be a mechanism by which judges who's judgements get constantly overturned are sacked.
https://x.com/undersecpd/status/2003567947403657399
Better than the proof of life video from the church near Sandringham.
It's delivered by very particular algorithms.
The US attitude is that they get to skew the marketplace for opinions, and no one else should be allowed to interfere with that.
"If I asked a new member of staff to do this in my vague ill-defined terms - it would have been perfect!"
There was a recent paper from (afaikr) Stanford exploring the raw economics of 'quality vs. time vs. cost' and it wasn't very jolly.
Having done a quick bookmark search :
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22780
Stanford/CMU. For a shorter overview from the theoretical physicist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPYjWmJz_bA . He has a quite good turn of phrase, if you're interested in the underlying performance/maths of this stuff.
"None of those sanctioned is a current UK or EU official—however, we know that foreign government officials are actively targeting the United States. This week, the UK’s Liberal Democrats claimed President’s Trump National Security Strategy amounts to “foreign interference” by a “hostile foreign state” because it correctly identifies mass migration and decaying national sovereignty as existential European security concerns."
Is that the first time the Lib Dems have been noticed by the US government? Ed should have the tweet printed and framed.
And make the EU's censorship look light handed by comparison.
It's the fact that (for example) the administration expresses an explicit intention to interfere in our elections.
https://bamfstyle.com/2020/12/17/die-hard-takagi/
Try again.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced that they will be hiring a "bias monitor" at CBS "who would report directly to the President." State run TV is officially here.
https://x.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/2003581504321175672
https://x.com/zarahsultana/status/2003585357095526815
Most Epping Forest councillors overall though are Conservative though Reform have won Parish council by elections in Ongar and Buckhurst Hill
What mugs.
Their bravery has laid bare the cruelty of a Labour government wanting them to die. They refused to give them that — and will resume in the new year."
I cannot parse this paragraph. What is she buggering on about?
It's all a bit Ford Prefect.
Farming Today is always worth listening to when it is about actual farming, as unavoidably it was today. Truly it was a festival of disingenuity.
There was Emma Reynolds presenting the 180 U Turn as a development of policy and all the crap about always listening but not bothered about the protests.
There was the President of the NFU professing this was his and the NFU's great achievement and the Farmers for Action were just tossers who had been disregarded.
There was the presenter saying how impartial the Beeb had been throughout.
But there was no-one from Farmers for Action to demonstrate how absurd the NFU's claims were.
There was no-one from ANY Opposition Party to give an opposition view, not even the Lib Dems who are really hand in glove with Labour regardless of what their genuine MP Tim Farron says.
There was no-one to say the Beeb ceased to be impartial on agricultural matters when they sacked Dan Cherrington in the 1990s.
I think some credit to Emma Reynolds, I do think she has been listening. I think that proves all the more how vile Steve Reed was and how unsuitable he was for any cabinet post.
I do not think the NFU should be allowed to get away with claiming this as their victory. The protests have been effective, the NFU was ignored throughout.
So why the change in policy ? Keir Starmer is facing the end of his sordid little career. Fighting a leadership challenge with a policy to cripple family farms and do even more harm to one and two man family trade businesses was always going to be sub-optimal and presumably difficult to defend on the leadership hustings.
Dale Campbell Savours has said "What the Fuck are you doing withdrawing the whip from my son ?"
Marcus Campbell Savours could well be the stalking horse challenger against Starmer. That presents everyone with a problem because, like his father he is socialist and intelligent. There must be a risk that he would beat ALL the challengers who are self evidently less able than him.
I wonder when someone is going to tell the first and last "Female Chancellor" that her flagship Social-Marxist policy to destroy has been dropped ? I bet she did not hear about it before it was on the Beeb yesterday.
Questions to ask in the Commons.
Will the threshold include livestock or will they be discounted as at present ?
Will the threshold be updated annually ?
What about farmers who live with their partner but never married ?
What about farmers in same sex relationships ?
What about farmers who are in relationships but don't actually live on the same farm - this is quite common when you think about it but probably not something those outside the industry are aware of ?
What about siblings who inherited the farm from parents and just live together ? I can think of MF, MM, MFF situations in this parish.
The last time a similar policy was tried in 1910 it took 15 years for the tax to raise enough for drawing the maps needed, the 1910 Finance Act.
How many extra staff will the policy require to implement, how will they be paid for. Then calculate their wages and on-costs.
OTOH, they are serving sherry.
NEW THREAD