Posts by Elongated Muskrat 2812 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2022
They are also high in the polls because they don't do anything other than campaigning, whilst the sitting government doesn't typically campaign for an election until it has called one.
For comparison, at several points between elections in the 2010s and early 2020s, polls put Labour at a vast landslide win over the Tories. When push came to shove, they scraped in at the last election (with fewer total votes than Jeremy Corbyn had a landslide loss with), because polls that are made a long way from elections mean absolutely nothing.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't be alarmed at the dark money being pumped into Reform, or the links between its senior figures and other deeply dodgy politicians overseas, or indeed be concerned with the agitprop, and constant media coverage that a party with 5 sitting MPs gets, compared to say, the Green Party, or the Liberal Democrats. There's some deeply iffy media bias going on there, and it doesn't take a genius to follow the money back to people who are very much like-minded with "man of the people" Nigel.
I doubt that anyone in the government, especially those concerned with security in any way, has ever heard of Bruce Schneier, let alone taken the time to listen to the very sensible and well considered things he says. They're far too busy emulating that other grifter Pob Michael Gove, when he said something or other about how good little subjects shouldn't listen to experts and just do what they are told to by their betters.
He may be a right-wing dick, but he is not a Trump-level fascist.
He's an inhabitant of the same golden elevator (google it).
Trump, Farage, Bannon, Musk, Le Pen, Meloni, etc. etc. are all the same people. They are all linked by the same dark money, and they all have the same goals.
What you have, is a card that proves your identity, but which isn't used to access services, so can't be used (easily) to track your every move.
What this is, is a card that will be a requirement to access vital services (such as employment), so can and will be used to track you; if not by this government, than by future authoritarians. There are always more authoritarians waiting in the wings.
What this also is, is a central store of your personal information, something which is a very valuable target to hackers; not because it's your personal information, but because it is everybody's personal information. What's even worse is that it will a government IT system that is put out to public tender, so will be the usual job of giving it to the lowest bidder, who then runs up the bill to five or six times the original budget before delivering a bodged and unworkable system, if anything at all. Security for your data within this, if it exists at all, will be a tacked-on afterthought. Good luck getting new biometrics when the details of your fingerprints and high-resolution images for facial recognition get stolen.
French ID cards, as far as I am aware, don't do anything like that, and if the French had even half an inkling that their government was even thinking of such a thing, the protests would make the gilets jaunes look like a school outing. We would probably be able to smell the smoke from Dover.
People employing those who don't have the right to work here are already failing to do the checks that are already there and already mandatory. This will do nothing to change that. Gang masters, modern slavers, and people smugglers already aren't doing those checks, and won't be doing these ones either.
"Please engage with my far right talking points". Nope.
If you don't know why the things that he said were repellant, or, worse still, agree with his sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, then that is entirely on you.
It remains entirely off-topic, despite the OP's obviously provocative posting, which I can paraphrased as, "be nice, be kind, and don't disagree with my political opinion that has absolutely nothing to do with this article."
I guess you missed the bit where I quite obviously implied that talking about the dead fascist was a complete irrelevance, despite your obvious keen desire to talk about the dead fascist. What was it that first attracted you to the modern-day Horst Wessel? (rhetorical question, I honestly don't care)
I'm not sure what a dead fascist has to do with any of this, however, on the subject of Github:
I think a bigger problem than it being possible to post nasty comments there, is that a git repo can be used to host pretty much anything, not just code files.
I'm sure Microsoft has people actively working to remove illegal or inappropriate content in repositories, but a git repo can be used (or abused) as a file-sharing platform, ignoring the fact that it is designed to be a source control tool. I'm sure that some people have managed to upload things that are not suitable for anyone, let alone children, because the internet is full of vile people. Whether such a tool can ever be made "safe for children" is a whole other consideration, regardless of whether one might consider it to be "social media" or not.
And yes, I know that you personally are an antisocial shut-in and borderline sociopath who would be much happier if you didn't have to interact with other humans personally at all and, indeed, would be entirely satisfied if the rest of humanity ceased to exist, so the above paragraph does not apply to you.
People who spout this sort of thing are exactly why I find it a chore to deal with other humans, especially those who seem to have a pathological desire to sit in a big room with loads of other people all yattering away all day, or who like to strut up and down pretending to be important to stroke their own egos. Quite apart from anything else, it belies a remarkable lack of understanding of neurodiversity with the whole "me right, you wrong" attitude.
tl;dr: what you see as "group bonding" and "improved collaboration" is, to many people, absolutely horrific. Characterising those people as sociopathic seems a lot like projection on your part.
Sounds to me like you were the unfortunate sod whose phone number got given to the C-level exec, so you're the guy who gets called when he can't work out how to turn his monitor on.
Everyone else in the room was probably shaking in relief that their day hadn't got interrupted by having to sort out an issue for someone whose ego was bigger than his ability.
But hey, you go ahead and schmooze the big-wigs if it makes you feel important, the rest of us have real work to do.
What we're seeing is employers using the softer labor [sic] market to push for more face-to-face time, whether that's to encourage collaboration, rebuild office culture, or simply because they feel they can," said Jack Kennedy, Senior economist at Indeed.
Ah yes, those two, "collaboration", the thing that now happens entirely via tools such as Teams and Slack, and is not face-to-face, and "office culture" which is another term for the toxic workplace environment where bullying and stress thrive.
Neither of these things are tangible, measurable outcomes, and when they are brought out, it is always a clear proxy for what the bosses actually mean: presenteeism and employee surveillance, with just a hint of middle managers justifying their own existence and building their own little empires.
Here's a crazy thought: rather than dictating a one-size-fits-all policy and making up rationalisations for it, perhaps see what allows your employees to thrive, and what enables them to be the most productive. For some people, that is five days a week in the office, and for others, it is none. "Collaboration" and "office culture" are just meaningless shibboleths of the management class. In a rational world, employers would recognise that many employees do much better, and work much better, without a commute and forced presence in a hostile open plan disease-factory.
If it works, it works.
If it works, but nobody know how it works, so changes cannot be made when required, it is a problem.
If it appears to be working, but is wrong, and nobody notices, it's a problem.
If it works, but in doing so, creates a lot of work for people to maintain it, when simpler, easy-to-use solutions exist, it's a problem.
If it works, but creates a bottleneck where only one person can make changes at a time, in a multi-user environment, it's a problem.
These are all real-world problems I have seen and had to deal with. Excel can get in the bin.
I mean, you can write a website using nothing but Notepad, but anyone who claims it's the tool for the job "because it works" is either a sadist or a masochist, depending on whether they are making someone else do that, or doing it themselves.
The gooseberry wine I make, when fermented to completion, at around 14%, very much does need back sweetening, unless you like your wine very dry. Now, you can take the chance that you have racked and fined it for long enough, and that there's no trace of live yeast before you do so, or you can use a fermentation stopper after racking, to prevent it from taking off again when you sweeten it. A wine that can appear perfectly clear to the eye can still have live yeast cells in it. It doesn't take a lot of sugar to make a very sour wine palatable, and isn't exactly a controversial finishing step. Back-sweetening is also a very common step in commercial winemaking.
Addition of sorbate (and metabisulphite) is a common method to stop fermentation. There are other techniques (such as cold stabilisation or long racking times with fining agents) that will also do the trick. I'd not consider any of these techniques as "doing it wrong".
The alternative, of adding more sugar than the yeast can cope with, and letting it ferment to the point where the alcohol content kills the yeast, can also lead to a wine that doesn't make your gums recede into your jaw, but you run the risk of producing off flavours from the stressed yeast, and, depending on the strain of yeast you are using, a wine that is stronger than you may want. Lalvin EC-1118 can apparently go up to 18%, but that's not really an ABV I'd like in a table wine.
I struggle to feel sympathy for bad things happening to gambling operators. They're like the parasites that feed on other parasites, and they make ad-slingers like Google look ethical in comparison.
If they lost any of their victims' customers' data, then I hope their fines are heavy, and that they are ordered to pay hefty compensation, personally, to all of those people, whether they are insured against this or not. I also hope their insurance premiums increase substantially.
Of course, there are other criminals at play here, namely those who hacked their systems. Just because their victims are scumbags, doesn't mean that they should be let off lightly.
Bain's report asserts that to break out of "pilot mode" and get real returns from generative AI, firms must be radical and frame their roadmap as an AI-native reinvention of the software life cycle, integrating it seamlessly into every phase of development.
This sounds very much like a cult; "if you aren't seeing the promised rewards, you aren't trying hard enough." How long before developers are blamed for not praying to the Lord AI enough?
Yeah, it's almost as if it's in the interests of the Chinese state (who under Chinese law have at least part ownership of every business in China) to destabilise its political rivals by helping to install a completely unsuitable and dysfunctional government. See also: all that lovely Russian cash.
The problem isn't necessarily "space junk" in the pejorative sense of anything thrown up there to make money for Elon, it's "space junk" in the sense of a cloud of tens of thousands to fist-sized chunks of broken satellite if a collision occurs, each of which is moving at orbital velocities and has enough kinetic energy to turn another satellite into another cloud of such chunks if it hits one. In LEO, a lot of these will de-orbit in a relatively short timescale, because a collision is likely to spray them in multiple directions, around half of which are going to be "down", and another half or so will be "up", which is inevitably followed by "down". It's the ones in the middle that still retain an approximate orbital velocity that are problematic, especially if they can't be easily tracked, but in LEO, there is enough atmospheric drag to bring them down eventually (the Earth's atmosphere doesn't just stop at some "space boundary", it just gets thinner and thinner until it joins the solar wind, at some point defined by the magnetosphere). Elon's comm-sats are designed to have a limited lifespan before they come back down again, which so why he needs to keep launching more and more of them (and why, in the long term, once subsidies run out, they're probably not economical for him to run). There's a trade-off between launching them with enough fuel to manoeuvre and stay up there, and launch mass which limits the number that can be launched in one go, and the cost of doing so. There are also other things such as expected mean-time-to-failure of components that affect how long you can expect something in LEO to last, combined with effects such as atmospheric drag, micro-collisions, etc. Someone much smarter than Elon has worked out where the optimal point is. He's just the one who has worked out that he can spend a whole load of money to make a whole load more, or at least make the value of his shares go up, so he can take a dividend for himself.
I think I read that things in LEO aren't a massive problem for the Kessler Syndrome, simply because collision debris de-orbits in a relatively short time frame. Debris from a collision would likely have either a higher or lower speed than the thing that got smashed up (which in LEO, I think is typically in a powered orbit to keep it stable), so would either re-enter and burn up, or go into an elliptical trajectory which will go up, then come down and re-enter. Things in a higher (e.g. geostationary) orbit have a lot more leeway to stay up there for longer. That's not to say that you couldn't get a debris cloud in LEO causing a Kessler effect, just that it would probably only be a problem for a couple of years before it mostly burns up.
Yeah, depending on satellites in LEO might not seem like a great idea the next time we get a Carrington Event. To be fair, though, a lot of other systems are going to switch rapidly to "on fire" mode when that happens. At the moment, we don't have enough baseline data to know, directly, how frequent they are, but IIRC, ice cores can give a proxy, and I think we're overdue.
It's neither fascism nor extreme socialism; this is authoritarianism, which is completely orthogonal to the overused left/right political axis. As with everything, a sensible medium is the correct solution; the opposite of authoritarianism, is libertarianism, which inevitably leads to societal breakdown, as everyone does whatever they like, and damn the consequences for everybody else. Both are idiotic.
Yes, even the extremely stupid and bigoted have the fundamental right to life, even if they are so vile that they would advocate denying it to others. That does not, of course, make them good people when a nut-job shoots them, or worthy of an outpouring of grief, but equally, it doesn't make the actions of the nut-job right. I appreciate that the nuance of this position might be a bit much for someone of limited intelligence, but I think it's probably important that you stick with it, and try to grasp the underlying principles here.
"Is it illegal to kill terrorists"
What part of "extrajudicial killing is a criminal act" don't you understand?
Quite apart from the fact that the "T" word is so overused these days (for example, used as a convenient measure to ban politically difficult protest groups), and that drug smuggling, whilst arguably bad, isn't terrorism, it is an incredibly dangerous road to go down to say "once we designate some as a terrorist we can murder them with impunity". Invoking terrorism as an excuse to do whatever you want is the worst sort of example of a thought-terminating cliché. It is no excuse to abandon the rule of law; if someone is accused of committing a crime, no matter how heinous, they are owed a fair trial. Simply designating someone as a terrorist and murdering them (without any fair trial to determine whether they were actually doing the thing you've accused them of) is so obviously wrong, I really shouldn't have to point it out, even to you.
Extrajudicial killing is still a criminal act, even if the person you killed is a criminal, or engaging in a criminal act themselves. If it's done on someone else's sovereign territory, without their permission, it's arguably also an act of war, and ergo a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
tl;dr; you can't just murder people you don't like, even if they are criminals.
Exactly. Remember the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned some years ago. Do you think requiring you and I to have (and pay for, no doubt) ID cards would have stopped their gang-masters from smuggling them into the country, and exploiting them?
The people "working illegally" aren't the problem, it is the people who exploit the most vulnerable in society. It's not the people desperate enough to risk their lives on a dangerous channel crossing in an unsuitable vessel, it's the people who take their life savings and put them on those boats, it's the people who meet them when they get here and force them into modern slavery, it's the people who go after their family back home for more money for their "upkeep", or to punish if they manage to escape, and it's the billionaires who are stealing all of our money and using the people who are in this desperate situation in the first place as a distraction from this theft.
If anything, children not looking for porn are less likely to find it in the modern day, since it has overwhelmingly moved online, and "specialist" magazines left in hedges or in lay-bys and car parks have become much rarer.
See the current issue of Viz for a more in-depth discussion...
I have to wonder if the neutrino detections are directional? I can't remember if they carry momentum or not, so whether these just detect single scintillations, which would give no indication of the direction the particle came from.
I did read that they do detect things other than neutrinos, which leave different paths through the detection medium. This might be useful, but in order to get good resolution on a source, I think you'd need to triangulate, so you'd probably want multiple such detectors to get any sort of direction and range on a baryon source. Other detectors to do this are probably available at a much lower cost, however seawater is also a very good moderator, so nuclear submarines might not be so detectable this way anyway.
So I'm left wondering, do neutrino detectors detect the direction of travel of the neutrinos? Can anyone answer this? if they did, and you had multiple of these, then theoretically you could use them to track neutrino sources. I wonder if this is a proof-of-concept for this?
I was going to ask what this detector does that Super Kamiokande doesn't. I'm guessing it's just a matter of scale, and location, however I have to wonder if nuclear power plants really produce a noticeably higher level of neutrinos for study than the background stream from the sun. Perhaps ones produced nearer to the detector won't have had time to oscillate (flip from one of three types of neutrino to another) as much as solar neutrinos, so it will allow them to measure this phenomenon better?
Santokus are general purpose knives, so probably not the best for being all stabby. Yanagibas would probably be more effective, having a pointier end, typically being sharper, and giving a bit more range. I know I've managed to cut myself more on my yanagiba than on my santoku, and I use the santoku more often.
