Re: Twitter “poll”
Did I say Elon controlled the bots? My implication was that whoever does control them may have a vested interest in rigging opinion polls.
Posts by Elongated Muskrat
2812 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2022
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Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back
Monday 28th November 2022 11:25 GMT 
Re: twitters dead
My point was quite simple. Describing legitimate concern over climate change as "hysterics" is pretty fucking heavily biased.
Describing over-hyped and heavily biased hard-right rhetoric about immigration, such as that by our own home secretary using the word "invasion" as hysterical is objectively accurate.The language used is as important as the message it carries.
By simply using the word "hysterics" to describe concerns about climate change, you are betraying your own, pretty obvious, attitude towards the science. Trying to weasel out with "I never said that" arguments doesn't fool anyone.
Friday 25th November 2022 15:35 GMT
Re: twitters dead
I think you just proved my point about false equivalence, because climate change is a demonstrable fact, and the UK has always been a country of immigrants. One of these two things is a real threat to, if not the existence of the human race, at least our way of life, and the other is an irrelevance used to hype up hate from people who don't like to see people with other skin-tones or who speak the same language as them.
If you identify with people who espouse the second point of view, you're probably one of those English people who occasionally embarrasses themselves by loudly telling Welsh people to speak English, when in Wales.
I'm not arguing that the Grauniad's half-page banner abut climate change that pops up over articles isn't mildly annoying, but you can also press the little 'X' in the corner to make it goes away if it offends your sensibilities that much. If you're about to try to claim that climate change either is not real, or is not a big problem, or is a matter of opinion, then you are sorely lacking the skills to critically evaluate information.
Friday 25th November 2022 15:27 GMT
Re: “ Machiavelli thought the voice of the people tends towards insanity.”
My apologies if my recall of Italian history of the period is a little incorrect. It turns out that whole lot were indeed Florentine, and not Venetian. In this case, the esteemed Mr Musk would probably have had an "accident" involving a sword blow or two to the head during mass, a la Giuliano de' Medici, or some-such misfortune, given his attitudes towards his courtiers.
Friday 25th November 2022 15:15 GMT
Re: Twitter's old moderation policy
When you use the word "globalist", do you mean it in the sense of the opposite of insular-nationalist-protectionist (a la North Korea), or do you mean it in the anti-Semitic "Jews control the world" nutjob sense? Enquiring minds demand to know exactly which variety of idiot you are.
Friday 25th November 2022 13:49 GMT
Re: Very dramatic indeed, oh my
I'm genuinely curious to know how you would go about using a "hashtag" to post anything other than that "hashtag" itself? It's literally just an indexer. Are you suggesting that Twitter was being used to host CP, or link to sites hosting it? Because that would obviously be a criminal matter, and I honestly don't believe the former owners would not have jumped on this hard. If Musk has chosen to use his now much diminished staff to focus on this specifically, it does raise a number of questions, such as, metaphorically speaking, "who's flying the plane?"
So, I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit.
Friday 25th November 2022 13:20 GMT
Re: And so, Twitter died
If he wanted to do that, he could just liquidate the company. He owns it, he doesn't have to make it expensively and publicly fail.
The longer it goes on, the more he loses in operating costs, and moves like letting the hate-speechers back on just expose him to legal liability in multiple jurisdictions. That doesn't sound cost-effective to me.
Friday 25th November 2022 13:17 GMT
Re: Autocracy
Exactly, and it can fall without the consequences you'd get when a government falls.
If you've made your livelihood on the back of tweeting, and have no back-up plan / alternative platform, then I'm finding it hard to have a great deal of sympathy. I have to do actual work for a living.
Friday 25th November 2022 13:11 GMT
Re: twitters dead
If you want to equate established peer-reviewed climate science with hysterical rhetoric from racists, you go right ahead. "You do you" as the kids say. Don't get upset if others point out the false equivalence there though.
For what it's worth, one of those two publications is generally recognised as being much more reliable than the other, by any objective metric (for example, the number of corrections they are forced to publish, or whether they are regarded as an unreliable source by fact-checkers).
From an editorial stance, yes the Grauniad is a bit lefty-lefty, and some of the editorial is a bit unbalanced in that direction, but on the whole, the content is much more factually correct than that in the Heil.
If you can't establish this for yourself, then you need to go and take some classes on critical thinking.
Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech
Massive energy storage system goes online in UK
Thursday 24th November 2022 15:00 GMT
Wasn't the root of their problem that the failure mode of the reactor was to drop the moderator rods into the reactor, thus slowing down the fast neutrons enough to cause a runaway reaction? Exactly the same sort of fuck-up that happened with the "demon core" if I remember rightly. In this case, some smartarse plying with fire and using a pen to hold the moderator hemisphere above the core, and then accidentally dropping it and fatally irradiating himself in the split second it took him to pick it up again.
It's almost as if mid-century attitudes to safety around fissile materials were a bit lax. (The Chernobyl reactors were an old-fashioned design with no secondary containment or starters).
Thursday 24th November 2022 14:52 GMT
Re: spot price of electricity
I would expect that the effect, if this sort of thing becomes commonplace, would be to not only smooth out the power supply compared to demand and supply, but also to smooth out the variations in the spot price, especially if there are multiple operators competing with each other, and there's no cartel or monopoly pricing. That's probably going to bring the variation to well below 20% eventually. Early adopters will probably make a big profit if they get in fast enough though.
I also wonder where flow batteries fit in with this? How do their costs and efficiencies compare?
Japanese cubesat sends home pics from the far side of the Moon
JWST snaps first chemical profile of an exoplanet atmosphere
Thursday 24th November 2022 12:35 GMT
Re: Proof that Carbon emissions are good...
...I should add that stratospheric ozone is not man-made, and is produced by UV-C radiation splitting oxygen molecules (O2) in the upper atmosphere to form two oxygen radicals (O.), and then the oxygen radicals that are produced reacting with further molecular oxygen to produce ozone. If we stopped producing ground-level ozone tomorrow, this would have no impact whatsoever on the upper atmosphere, because mixing of atmospheric layers is prevented by the tropopause. It would, however, reduce smog, health, and environmental impacts. Which would be a good thing for everyone, except possibly those who would profit from producing ground-level ozone.
Thursday 24th November 2022 10:39 GMT
Re: Proof that Carbon emissions are good...
Ground-level ozone is toxic and causes photochemical smog. The ozone layer is in the stratosphere, where it has to be to block incoming ultraviolet light.
Ozone is also not produced by burning hydrocarbons, and ground-level sources actually tend to be caused by electrical emissions, as it takes quite a lot of energy to split oxygen to form (highly reactive) O3*.
Your comment displays not only the basic inability to seek out and read the wiki page about ozone (I've not read it either, but I can pretty much guarantee these facts are on there), but also demonstrates that your tin-foil hat is badly fitted and some of the stupid is leaking out.
*Hey mods, I know I changed my handle, but can I have my silver badge back, so I can use the <sub> tag again?
Wednesday 23rd November 2022 15:50 GMT
Re: exacting precision
Technically, the former (in infrared wavelengths at least) is Raman spectroscopy, and the latter is transmission spectrography. There's no reason both can't be used together. True, occlusion is the only real way to determine if there is a planet there, but once you've determined tha, the variations in the Raman spectrum of the star/planet system as the planet orbits its parent's star, although small, could theoretically provide a diagnostic spectrum, and do it over a longer timescale than the short period when the planet is between the star and us (the observer), which could be a very short window of opportunity if the orbit is eccentric and not nicely aligned with us, or has a long period.
If it's sensitive enough, and you can separate the useful information from the background noise (selectivity), Raman spectroscopy could be used to detect atmospheres on multiple orbiting planets, as they move in and out of the range of view (to see the reflected light, they would need to be behind, or perpendicular to the parent star compared to the observer). I don't know enough about the sensitivity and selectivity of the method to answer this myself, but I probably know people who do/can.
Locked out of Horizon Europe, UK commits half a billion to post-Brexit research
Tuesday 22nd November 2022 17:03 GMT
Re: "the UK remains open to association"
Oh, and if the "you lost get over it" argument had any weight, the "eurosceptics" would have fucked off 40 years ago.
It's nice to see that they have finally caused the Tory party to rot from the inside-out though, like a maggot-ridden apple. Maybe if John Major has had the balls to expel them from the party in the '90s, they might be back in power as a moderate and responsible centre-right party rather than a shambling mess with the lowest poll ratings they have had in history (even after their "new-leader bounce"). Thankfully, after the next election, they will be gone for a generation. Which, incidentally, is probably how long it will take the country to recover.
Tuesday 22nd November 2022 16:57 GMT
Re: "the UK remains open to association"
There are a number of reasons why it was far from "lost fairly", apart from the "sidesism" (we won, you lost mindset), because, as far as I can see, we all lost.
Let's start with the fact that the referendum was expliclty non-binding, and to be legally binding would have had to be based on a supermajority, then we can talk about the rule-breaking from Vote Leave that would have been a criminal matter if the referendum had been a binding one, such as over-spending, opaque funding, use of campaigning proxies, and so on. Dodgy Russian money is only one part of this, but it certainly was a part, as was the whole Cambridge Analytica targeted propaganda stuff.
All of this is moot, of course because our elected representatives chose to take us out of the EU, and that was done legally (eventually). The real lie here was that this was done because of the referendum, and that mandated it, because it did not. David Cameron saying "we will respect the result of the referendum" after it had already been agreed explicitly that it didn't bind anyone to any action; even himself, as it turns out, after he metaphorically turned round and ran off the day after the vote. Plenty of other lies followed, such as the one that we had voted to leave the CU/CM (leave campaigners had actually claimed that this was absolutely not on the cards), that we had to invoke Article 50 right away, before deciding what form of "brexit" we actually wanted, and so on.
The whole thing was a total clusterfuck by incompetent populists; you may have noticed how the country has basically gone to shit since 2016, even moreso than under the ideological Tory austerity of the previous years, which itself provided motivation for people to vote to leave the EU as a way out, because they had been sold the lie that Tory austerity was the fault of the EU and not of our own government.
Tuesday 22nd November 2022 16:00 GMT
Re: "the UK remains open to association"
You couldn't elect a government on such a flimsy majority
Take a quick look at what portion of the vote the Tories got at the last election (I think it as about 42% or so, certainly not a majority), and you'll see that we never elect a government on a flimsy majority. It's a minority, but the horrible FPTP system turns this into a massive majority of seats in the HoC, which in turn means a hideously unrepresentative government which can claim a false mandate for all sorts of shenanigans. This is the main argument or a change to a form of PR to elect our representatives, so they are, you know, representative.
Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home
Thursday 17th November 2022 13:31 GMT
Re: Tonight's Headline
Cases brought forward with no evidence other than that from what is known as a "hostile witness" tend to fall apart pretty quickly, so whilst in theory the CPS can prosecute a case that they may think is in the public interest, if the only witness they have doesn't want to give evidence, they can clam up in court, or just not turn up at all. This can in turn result in them being summonsed, but this can do nothing about them being mysteriously not at home when the police go to collect them, and whilst it is a civic and legal duty to go to court to give evidence, it is very rarely in the public interest to prosecute people for not doing so, especially within a justice system that has been pared to the bone by systemic underinvestment, austerity and decade-long pay freezes at a time of record inflation.
Thursday 17th November 2022 13:23 GMT
Re: Tonight's Headline
Whilst the Grauniad has made a fair few hilarious errors in its history, the narrative that it was somehow more prone to typos than any other publication was largely put about by the incumbents on Fleet Street, who didn't like the upstart over which they had little influence, and who were trying to draw an inference that because they had lots of money to employ proofreaders, that somehow made their journalism more trustworthy. That's fairly rich coming from the likes of the Daily Mail, which was pretty much founded as a rich-man's outlet for telling lies.
Wednesday 16th November 2022 18:58 GMT
Re: Tonight's Headline
There was I, thinking that "proofreading" was the act of reading proofs, a "proof reading" would imply some sort of act where everyone sits in a circle and reads proofs to each other, which sounds like the sort of thing any actual proofreaders would run a mile to avoid.
As it happens, no, I don't work for the BBC, yes I do know people who do (and who do work on some of its flagship nature documentaries), and yes, I have done plenty of work in the past where part of my job involved all parts of the print process from laying out to proofreading. It’s shitty, poorly paid, and highly skilled work, and, incidentally, requires a firm grasp of the English language.
Nobody reading proofs would ever utter a sentence such as "let's do some proof readings," except possibly ironically, in the voice of an animated advertising meerkat, because it's just not normal syntax.
Wednesday 16th November 2022 16:52 GMT
What a choice. Three months' pay, for no effort (and a fairly high chance that you'll be able to find another similarly paying job well within that timescale), or, over the next three months, earn the same amount by doing six months' worth of work for an arsehole megalomaniac, if the company you work for doesn't go bankrupt in that time, with your wages left unpaid.
A bit of an obvious choice, no? The only ones who are left aren't exactly going to be the "hardcore".
Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better
Wednesday 16th November 2022 12:46 GMT
Let's face it : the Republicans are no longer a political party, they're a religion.
The view from outside that mire, is that US politics and religion are so intertwined that they are effectively inseparable. Which is heavily ironic, given the nominal separation of church and state in the US. You can count the successful US politicians who haven't professed belief in some supernatural entity or another on the fingers of one foot.
FTX collapse prompts other cryptocurrency firms to suspend withdrawals
Wednesday 16th November 2022 12:15 GMT
Re: Has anyone seen my tulip bulbs? ASIDE
To be fair, all alliums, which include onions, garlic, shallots and leeks, contain quite a lot of sulphur*-containing compounds which make for the same digestive effects. Incidentally, ornamental alliums are one of the few flowering bulbs which are edible, although it's kind of missing the point of them.
*I refuse to use the IUPAC spelling, deal with it.
Tuesday 15th November 2022 18:18 GMT
Re: Consenting adults. (Consenting by default?).
If you put your entire pension into "high risk" units such as crypto investments, then you are asking for a fall. Most contributory pensions allow you to pick the funds you put your savings into, and if you're not stupid, you will spread them out over "safe" investments that aren't expected to move much, standard ones which might make or lose a bit, and one or two risky ones, if you're young (or desperate) enough to afford that risk.
Fund managers who just dump the entire investment pot into one high-risk investment are almost criminally stupid.
Tuesday 15th November 2022 16:07 GMT
Re: Has anyone seen my tulip bulbs? ASIDE
Yeah, don't eat tulips, or pretty much any bulb that isn't a species of onion or garlic*. Daffodils are similarly toxic, as are hyacinths and those big attractive amaryllis bulbs you see in the shops around this time of year
*edit - includes leeks and shallots
Tuesday 15th November 2022 16:04 GMT
Re: Consenting adults. (Consenting by default?).
Which is why wages are (checks notes...) lower in real terms than they were in 2007 in the UK, right? Because the BofE and our government did such a fine job of stimulating the economy with austerity, which incidentally is one of the defining features of neoliberal economic policy that caused the crash in the first place. Other central banks / governments, such as the ECB had similar policies with similar effects. Those effects, mainly, being transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich (in the case of the ECB, from poor countries such as Greece to rich ones such as Germany).
Whilst I'm a firm advocate of the EU, I'll be the first to admit that not all of its institutions are perfect, and the ECB stands out like a sore thumb to me. Ironically, in leaving, we became more like the bad bits, and less like the good bits. How's that for "taking back control"?
Tuesday 15th November 2022 15:57 GMT
Re: Consenting adults. (Consenting by default?).
NFTs track ownership of digital assets
Do they, though? The sense of "ownership" is very limited when it doesn't relate to anything physical or tangible, beyond "rights" to, for example, a jpeg of a cartoon monkey.
The NFT on a blockchain doesn't actually do anything to prevent copying, theft, or destruction of that data, it is purely an entry in a ledger.
Such ledgers may have their uses, but the value is probably vastly overinflated.
Musk tells of risk of Twitter bankruptcy as tweeters trash brands
Tuesday 15th November 2022 13:00 GMT
Re: As a non-union person we filled in to keep the company running during the strike
Those who downvoted that apparently don't realise that nurses are going on strike here in the UK for the first time since the formation of the NHS, over appalling pay and conditions. 40% of them have to rely on food banks, despite working in a highly skilled and regulated profession that requires a degree. They have had to tolerate a decade of real-terms pay cuts under a Tory government.
If you think these people are scum for striking, then I would advise you to reflect on what that makes you, because there are stronger words for those who would exploit people to this degree and then insult them for trying to improve their situation.