Posts by Steve Button 1193 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007
I'm with you brother! (on the Tesla thing)
I also won't buy a Tesla, but my reasons are mortgage, heating bills and ski holidays, which are far more important than a stupid go cart (and the "cheap" ones don't even look very good - a more shite Mondeo anyone?)
I won't be closing my Twitter account any time soon, it's far too entertaining. (and no more toxic than it was 2 months ago really)
Many of us were saying what a terrible idea these lockdowns were after the first few weeks, because it was pretty obvious what the collateral damage would be. Only Sweden seemed to stick with what I would call a sensible policy (focused protection and encourage people to stay apart) without shutting down everything. I can see that this would have been a very difficult sell, but I think that was largely due to the fact that anyone who argued against it was pretty much suppressed. This was a deliberate move by the likes of Fauci, who wanted to quash the idea of the Great Barrington Declaration. He was asking social media companies why certain people are still allowed on there. This is the whole thing against free speech.
OECD data including Sweden.
https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676
Perhaps it would have been more obvious to more people, if it was allowed to be discussed openly. Big tech companies were deliberately suppressing it. If you searched for "great barrington declaration" on Google you would first be offered several sites critical of the idea before the actual site. This is deliberate manipulation of search results. Perhaps if more voices were allowed to question "the narrative", then the BBC and The Guardian would not have been such proponents of lockdown, as public opinion would probably have shifted.
Perhaps we could have avoided the 2nd and 3rd lockdowns at that point, when it was really really obvious to some that it was such a monumentously bad idea.
And don't forget The Guardian and the BBC were calling for a 4th lockdown last Christmas, and Boris (remember him?) resisted and we were pretty much fine (or the wave was probably no worse than it would have otherwise been). However some prominent scientists were screaming for another lockdown, and saying how irresponsible we were being, and things like "blood on your hands".
I think some (America?) are STILL clinging to this narrative, and are masking children and insisting that foreign visitors have to be vaccinated. This is patently crazy. Perhaps they don't realise that much of the West have moved on.
Regarding vaccine damage, I'm not just going by my personal knowledge, but the number of VAERS and Yellow Card reports (which is widely recognised as being historically hugely underreported by 10x - 100x). Perhaps the excess deaths we're seeing right now are something else? It's worth investigating. Could be cancer / suicide / alcohol / who knows?. It's probably not climate change.
It does appear they are trying to cover it up though...
https://rtmag.co.il/english/breaking-the-israeli-ministry-of-health-has-been-warned-it-might-open-itself-to-lawsuits-for-encouraging-the-public-to-get-vaccinated-while-claiming-that-the-covid-19-vaccine-is-safe,-and-that-side-effects-are-mild-and-transient
which is hardly surprising to me, given Pfizer's history. But seems surprising to many. And YES this is a conspiracy theory (and sometimes - often even - there are real conspiracies. But you don't usually get to hear about them for a couple of decades)
Anyway, my point was just about free speech. We should be allowed to discuss these things. But we weren't. And any voices loud enough to matter were suppressed, particularly on Twitter.
This statement "Regardless of who fired it, it was a Russian built missile so the reporting was correct." is pretty moronic, for the reasons I gave above. It's not because they disagree with me that they are a moron, it's because they gave a thumbs up to a moronic thing that was said.
"In total, your 769 public posts have been upvoted 6678 times and downvoted 2955 times."
I can live with that. Sometimes I say things which are a bit controversial, but I'm not constantly downvoted.
Wow you are making some pretty amazing mental leaps with what you think is going on in my mind.
I don't think the world's scientists all colluded. Many thousands of them put forward the idea that we should use focused protection, and the damage caused by lockdowns is going to be at least as bad as the harm reduction. This is proving to be true, surely you can see that now? Those scientists were shouted down and smeared. You do realise the "cost of living" crisis is largely "cost of lockdown", or perhaps you think China's zero covid approach is the way to go, because that's really not working out so well. The problem with lockdowns is they cause lots of smaller problems, compared to a disease which is one big problem so it's had to compare them.
No I don't believe masks do very much to stop an airbourne virus, and if they did Scotland would have had a much better time of it when they carried on enforcing them when England stopped (and most people pretty quickly stopped wearing them). I do believe that Covid was a dangerous disease for some, although with Omicron not so much. However for most people under a certain age it was never really that dangerous.
"Lockdowns were there to limit the spread"... but they really didn't make that much difference. You know which country has the lowest excess mortality in the West in the last couple of years? It's Sweden. Let that sink in.
Who said anything about climate change denying? I'm simply saying it's not likely as an explanation for the current excess deaths we're seeing right now. More people die from being cold than from heat.
I don't have a problem with 5G, or with the earth being spherical.
Regarding vaccine damage, I was told it was "safe and effective", and so I took two shots. Since then the AZ one I took has been withdrawn quietly because of the risk of blood clots. You don't think it's been withdrawn? Try getting an AZ shot now, you can't. So, it's not "safe". It's also not very effective, as it seems to wear off after a few months. I feel like I've been mis sold. I also know several people who suffered pretty nasty side effects in my immediate close family (wife, father-in-law) and friends, so it does feel like the effects are being down played. Why would they do that though? Because money. Lots and lots of money.
You seem to trust the government and the media, but you realise they lied to us in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s? If you don't realise this, you really have not been paying attention to history. If you think they aren't lying to us now, you are pretty naive.
I really don't know why you got so many thumbs up for such a ridiculous statement. I also don't know why I'm bothering to engage with an Anonymous Coward, but I guess I'm just a masochist. Also, I must remember that half the people are below average intelligence, and they are the ones who have clicked thumbs up without engaging their brain cell.
If you saw a headline "British missiles hit Yemen" it would be pretty misleading, as those missiles are fired by Saudi Arabia, but it would be still technically true as they are manufactured and sold by Britain, and this is happening all the time. Although strangely it doesn't get the coverage that Ukraine does.
"The narrative" I'm talking about are :-
That lockdowns were a wholly good thing,
The virus came from a wet market and not a lab leak.
The non Covid excess deaths we're seeing right now are caused by climate change, and not by the hangover from lockdown combined with vaccine damage.
If you disagreed with the first two in 2020 you would get your account suspended on many platforms, or just get your post taken down. The last one seems to be what is being peddled right now.
I would just like to be allowed to discuss these things openly.
It was only last night that the BBC reported that a "russian missile" had hit Poland. Not sure where they got that "news" from, but to be fair pretty much all the newspapers also reported the same thing, before rapidly rowing back today. Last night was all talk of invoking article 4, but that seems to have gone quiet now that it looks like it was the "good guy" who fucked up. Why would the same rules not apply to a different non nato country attacking Poland?
I've given up defending the guy. I used to be hopeful that he would allow free speech on the platform and not suppress voices which go against "the narrative", even though he's a bit of knob. (a lot actually).
Now it seems he deserves to fail, as he expects everyone to work as hard as he does (but without getting the monies).
I really hope the next person is hot on free speech (that doesn't mean consequence free / hate speech) and we can be allowed to have an open and honest debate about certain things (mostly things since 2020) on a large enough platform.
I won't be holding my breath though, and I suppose many will simply move to Parler / Gettr / Mastodon / Rumble, and will end up in their own smaller filter bubbles, which will make discussions a much more pointless exercise.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
"Fortunately Twitter is not that important if the organizations can just switch to other channels like Mastodon."
This is a parody, right?
Mastodon has a tiny fraction of the users that Twitter does, it's just not relevant right now. Perhaps that will change, but as things stand right now Twitter is still important.
It's a bit like saying someone lost their column in The Times, but fortunately they can "just" switch to the East Anglian Daily Times.
I assume you mean suppressed and not surpassed?
Interesting because depending on which news story they suppressed you'll get large amounts of thumbs ups, or thumbs downs.
Me? I don't think they should be suppressing any news stories, unless they have credible evidence that it's misinformation. And even then I'm not so sure, because I think once people see misinformation enough times, they start to distrust the outlets that are peddling it.
Twitter has been doing that openly for about 3 years now, but I never heard many people in the media make a fuss about it until it was Musk doing the banning. I mean, it was happening ALL THE TIME to people who said things that went against the mainstream narrative, same thing on FB, LinkedIN, YouTube, etc.
I hate to defend the man, as I think he's a total wanker and was just in the right place at the right time (Paypal) and he's got a really nasty steak (pedo guy), however it would be nice to see a little BALANCE in the reporting. Why do you (all the media pretty much*) ignore the banning of accounts by Big Tech, except when it's Elon doing that banning (and really he's only banning parody accounts, to deter them from abusing the blue tick scheme).
*apart from a few.
Interesting.
Seems to me you'll be able to say MORE outlandish things on Mastodon, unless the individual fiefdom (server) that you join has strict policies.
It's already a real bloody mess as to who gets to decide what's misinformation, and what's "truth", and having thousands of servers to choose from will only make it harder.
But it's an interesting concept, although a lot more like anarchy which the Blue Tick crew will really hate.
I agree it's probably best to dump the useless platform, but "freedom is dead" ?
Freedom on this useless platform meant saying things that libtards agreed with. Anything that didn't match the narrative was shadowbanned, or simply banned. That's not freedom of speech either, so it was already a bit shite before Musk came along.
Hopefully once things have settled down, it will become a place where a sensible discussion can be had.
(but I won't be holding my breath).
And you couldn't all get together using Teams / Zoom / Slack / whatever, and looking at a shared screen?
I'm not sure "brainstorming" works any better using a whiteboard compared to a Teams call.
I think with WFH set to continue, people are going to have to adapt. Even if it's only 10% of the workforce who choose to WFH most of the time, you'll still need to collaborate with those 10%, so a whiteboard session will just not cut it any more.
Also, it's easier to record a "virtual" meeting.
I remember once having to do a very complicated install, and the expert flew out from the US to show me how to do it. He then sat a few desks away in the same office in Cambridge and talked me through the install by using a screen share... which was BETTER than having to pitch up next to his desk, and look over his shoulder.
So much wrong with this study. Like you say 24 samples, also what is a "sysadmin"? I rarely see adverts for that any more, as most orgs have moved to DevOps / SRE model for well over 5 years. Also, it wasn't COVID that changed anything, it was lockdowns. It's important to get that straight.
Also, it seems like this has come from academia where they probably still do "sysadmin". I remember working for an academic entity in 2012 and trying to convince them to adopt a DevOps approach, to which the team leader asked "If we automate all this stuff, what will my team do?"
:facepalm:
(of course they would be able to do MORE stuff, like better security, automated deployments and look after more systems - there's always work - but perhaps not for the DBA any more, who have all but disappeared)
Why "Good"?
Because you are just generally fed up with the cesspit that Twitter has become, or because that same cesspit is now owned by Musk? Nothing has really changed yet, it *might* actually end up better if he gets rid of the bots.
And if you thumbs down my comment, I'll KNOW you are a bot. (What, you think The Reg doesn't have its share of fake accounts too?)
2 members of my close family had fairly serious side effects. I personally had nothing, but I also had nothing much when I caught Covid.
Why would I want "further protection", every year (or 5 months?) when I barely noticed I had it. I might be a bit worse without it (assuming I happen to catch it next time within 2 or 3 months of having the vaccine - because by month 4 or 5 it's essentially down to zero benefit)
If I was over 70 or had other comorbidities, I would probably take it. But right now I'm fit and healthy.
Also, it seriously feels like the adverse reactions are being ignored or attributed to other things. I'm sceptical about Big Money influencing politicians to quietly ignore adverse reactions.
I also feel like I'm being coerced into taking it, which makes me want to have it even less.
It feels like Pfizer profits (and other big pharma) have too much influence. History has taught me that much. They don't have the best track record.
Who exactly is going to pay for that peer reviewed study?
The WHO initially sent Peter Daszak to investigate and he found no evidence of a lab leak. He didn't visit the lab. He works for Eco Health Alliance who had applied for funding to carry out research on bat coronaviruses, but were rejected because dangers of gain of function.
They sent the poacher to check the pheasants are OK.
He then had close ties with the lab in Wuhan, doing what we don't know exactly.
The database from that lab went offline in late 2019, never to return (because it was hacked).
The furin cleavage site makes it look man made.
They were known to be carrying out bat coronavirus experiments at Wuhan.
This is all from the top of my head.
From all the swabs taken at the wet market on animals, no Covid was found.
The list goes on, if you can be bothered to look.
It COULD still be just co-incidence, but I'm suggesting some further digging might be a good idea, considering what's at stake and all.
If we get this wrong, it could happen again. It might even be worse next time. Wouldn't it be worth the time or a few dozen independent scientists to go and properly check? Considering the millions that have died.
Or we should just move on, because there isn't a peer reviewed study.
So yeah, I'm "just asking questions". Seems perfectly reasonable thing to ask questions about. Why would you not?
I don't think your post will age well AC.
I'm not sure exactly what you think is "mildly unhinged nonsense"? They really aren't vaccines, they are non sterilising. If you get a polio vaccine it stops you getting it and it stops you passing it on. Without this there is no basis for mandating it, which has now been proven in law in New York where they have had to re-instate workers with back pay.
It seems like what you call "mildly unhinged nonsense" is just things you don't agree with, without giving any actual argument.
My point is the original poster was getting annoyed by conspiracy theories, but many of them have turned out to be true (or at least plausible).
What's your alternative to a "weakly-moderated social platform"? Who gets to decide what is truth? Fact checkers who are funded by pharma companies? That's all very well, until you have an opinion which gets fact checked.
I feel the same way, and I've changed my password to something that I've since forgotten, to give me enough friction to stay off (for a while at least).
I'm not sure what you mean about "conspiracy", as it seems a lot of what was called conspiracy in 2020 has turned out to be true. Things like the lab leak theory as now considered plausible, which would make them an actual conspiracy if true. A whole bunch of people who simply wanted kids to stay in school, because they felt the cons outweighed the pros, have been deplatformed / re-platformed at various points.
You talk about anti-vaxxers, and I assume you are referring to Covid (even though it's not technically a vaccine). Something that is never going to give herd immunity, because it doesn't stop the spread. And it seems that any benefit seems to wear off to zero after about 5 months. Having had two doses, it does feel like I've been mis-sold, and I won't be risking any more (of this particular therapy), although I'll still take others as required if they give a benefit. Does that make me one of the "anti-vaxxers" that you are referring to, or are you talking about the magnets / 5G lot?
Going back to the lab leak, it's really important to find out if that's what happened, as they are up to it again doing gain-of-function research on Omicron to make it more deadly (WHY!?). Although Boston Uni say that's not gain-of-function, I'm not sure how they figure that one!?
I guess if they had made the films Snatch or Lock Stock and tailored for a non UK audience, they would have taken out all the British parts and made... I don't know... Oceans Eleven instead. I credit the USA readers and the rest of the world with enough intelligence to appreciate our unique quirkiness and humour and traditions, and still enjoy the content we make*. If you try to please all the people, you end up pleasing none of the people.
Happy holidays.
* and if they don't appreciate it, they must be wankers anyway, so they can fuck right off.
So what next? They'll start saying "Now the weather is warming up"... in November. For our antipodean readers.
I'm not Christian, but I still celebrate Christmas (by eating nice food and having a few days off, and generally trying to avoid trudging around the whole fucking family to drop off presents - but not succeeding). You don't have to cater for every single user of your site, and should not completely lose your roots! I'd quite happily read a mainly Hindu blog, based in India if it was actually interesting. If they said Happy Diwali, it would not offend or bother me. I'd join in, as I do with my Indian colleagues. (even though I'm not actually religious) But I'm happy to respect their celebration.
The Reg used to be a UK blog, but seems to have bigger aspirations now. They want to be global, which means watering down the brand even more. I scan the headlines every day using Feedly (for how much longer though?), but very rarely find anything even mildly interesting any more. They have put so much water in the ale, that's it's hard to tell it apart from just water any more. No flavour. (and why, oh why is my spell checker telling me it should be flavor).
BITE THE HAND. You are getting boring.
I agree with this. And I know it's deeply unpopular with many people, but it seems that if you force the rich to pay higher rates of tax the more they earn, they will simply find ways of avoiding it. Surely it's much better to tax them at a lower rate for their higher earnings? You'll still get shed loads of money out of them, but they will be more likely to actually domicile themselves here.
Yeah, but good luck trying to get that back if you are a small charity or organisation.
You might win it back in the end, if you have the legal funds to be able to fight it, or it could be a significant proportion of your funds and you just have to shut up shop and pack it in (which is what almost happened to UsForThem - who are a bunch of volunteer mums mostly)
Of course it's not legal, but the article seems to play it down with "lets the lawyers write a ‘legal’ document without realizing it’s also a marketing document", as if this is a theoretical situation.
A couple of weeks ago PayPal shut down the account of UsForThem, which is an organisation which seeks to keep children in schools for the benefit of their mental health (anti-lockdown?). They never explained why, but they froze the account and held onto thousands of pounds in funds, saying they will keep it for 180 days while they investigate. At which point they make remove "damages" from the funds.
After a public outcry they reversed that decision.
They also did the same thing, ironically, with the Free Speech Union. And again backtracked after a few days of public outcry.
The worrying thing is that banks could easily start doing the same thing, and freeze your account if you said something they didn't like. Think this couldn't happen in a western liberal democracy? Well, last year it happened in Canada.
Most people don't seem to know (or care?) about this.
Myself, I have shut my PayPal account and thinking about using anonymous cryptocurrency. Not that I'd be able to use it to pay for food shopping!? But a scary thought that I could be frozen out of my own money, for saying something the government or some company doesn't agree with (and I have a very big mouth, and tend to say what I think).
Am I being a bit tin-foil-hat here, or was this just a one off due to Covid craziness in Canada? (and other places)
Yeah, I take your point. I'm probably going to struggle to replace the battery in my Pixel in 3 years.
However the choice is not between a Pixel 7 and an iPhone 6S, it's between a Pixel 7 and an iPhone 14... and the iPhone 14 is going to cost a LOT more than €60 to replace the battery.
So, the choice for me right now is do I slap down £800 for a Pixel 7 XL or £ 949 for an iPhone 14 which is probably going to be just as unrepairable, plus they threw in a Pixel watch. There's no way I'll have this phone in 7 years, probably by then one of my kids will be done with it.
Still, a bit more than 5 years of support would have been nice.
Be interested to know how your battery is holding up after 7 years!?
I see it's a 35 minute "moderate" difficulty swap out on iFixit on the 6s, whereas the iPhone 14 is a 2-3 hour operation (also "moderate").
With my old Nokia it used to take 10 seconds. That's progress.
Ordered yesterday.
I was already in the market for a new phone, and this one ticked all the boxes. (apart from headphone jack, but I'll just need dongles - already have one for Pixel 4, which now goes to child #3)
As for 7 years of support, there's no way the battery will be any good after that long, and they aren't easily swappable. It will be interesting to see what the iFixit score is.
This is a LOT cheaper than the equivalent iPhone.
The only situation where you would attempt this is if you are on Mars, the CO2 scrubbers have stopped working and this is the only cable available to watch the video which has the repair instructions. It's not "impossible" but hardly something you'd attempt under normal circumstances.
What do you think the Evil Tories are going to do here, exactly? Invent a new standard which is not USB C and insist all british electronics use it? Clearly what Europe does here will be the standard for pretty much the rest of the world, but definitely the US and the UK. So the tories don't have to actually do anything, and we still win. So them being experts at "not doing anything" is just fine in this case.
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