Posts by Justthefacts

TETRA radio comms used by emergency heroes easily cracked, say experts

Re: Spectacularly irresponsible.

Do you want to assign blame for past IT mistakes…. or do you want people to die in pain waiting for an ambulance that will never come because script kiddies? That’s literally the choice they made. They chose: assigning blame, feeling smug superiority, and many innocent people in forty countries who have not even heard of Tetra will end up dead. Security by obscurity *did* work, for thirty years, right until yesterday. If I had to design a new system any time in the past twenty years, I wouldn’t do it that way.

As somebody else has said, there is no scenario of “[NSA bogeyman] able to listen in on all the confidential conversations”, because military radios don’t use Tetra unencrypted. Only ambulances, fire services, police do. Quite probably someone had *plans* to do something naughty in 1990, but that world no longer exists.

Re: Really need to fast track a NIST style open radio design competition

Tetra is, in the modern world, a boondoggle. However, the world it was released into, 1994, it was leading edge and no practical alternatives. It was an excellent solution for a real specific need. And that’s why dozens of countries, not just the U.K., plumbed it into the critical services. Today, the problem is there is no stepwise way for a radical change of whole emergency service equipments to some of the more obvious alternatives.

As to the whole “open source the radio/crypto” crowd. Had we listened to that in *1994* when Tetra was released, it would have been cracked *almost immediately*. DES being cracked was still four years in the future. GSM algorithms being cracked were a decade in the future. None of the “secure by design” algorithms for streaming data (as in - not RSA4096) have lasted 30+ years, *only* the secure-by-obscurity. Until today. Had we listened to that crowd *thirty years ago*, we would already be living in a hell scape, free fire death zone ruled by splatterpunks a decade ago. Of course, *now* yes we should use NIST-style crypto standard, although it would be pure folly to run a new competition. Pick the 5G NEA standard and you’re done.

Spectacularly irresponsible.

Certainly we may criticise security by obscurity. But in this case, that decision was hard-coded when it was spec’d and rolled out thirty years ago. It’s done, no point crying about it. If it’s insecure, the *only* security was that the implementation engineers who signed the paperwork to keep the encryption spec confidential, kept their word. These guys reverse engineered that, they effectively released secret key material for every emergency service in Europe, in one fell swoop.

There are no real mitigations - the claim “oh they will just have to do encryption over the top” is nonsense. Europes police and fire services are not going to all just retrofit an extra scrambler on all their radios. Budgets aren’t magically going to be increased to provide a complete replacement of all their radio equipment with Tetra Upgrade or whatever. This is not just downloading an extra app. Ok, the encryption may be insecure in theory, but there just weren’t any exploits out there in the wild in practice…..until these guys did it.

The police, fire and ambulance services weren’t at risk, until this was released. Now they are.

Releasing these CVEs without viable mitigation is just totally unethical however long they waited. Really badly done, sir, badly done.

Amazon sets up shop at Kennedy Space Center to prep Kuiper broadband satellites

Re: Licensed Falcons

Doubling the cadence using Falcon9 would mean doubling the size of the company in many areas That’s the bottleneck: SpaceX has nearly 10,000 employees, in a company that employed just 160 fifteen years ago. They really don’t want to grow the organisation further. They would just become the same slow blob that all the other companies have become. SpaceX will want to be a focused engineering org that can still innovate and operate like it did seven or eight years ago, and it’s already 5x the size it really wants to be.

The ideal would be to focus, such that they could launch the same total mass with Starship, with only maybe 1/4 the infrastructure, ie 1/4 the standing army. They do *not* want to be a running a large complex logistics organisation.

“Ariane Space would probably derail any attempt to allow access to a competitor.” EU payloads are already being launched on Falcon9. If Ariane6 maiden launch fails (a coin-flip, just a reality of new launchers), Ariane are going to be under real pressure. Their customers will launch on Falcon9 vehicles, whoever makes it. They rebadged Soyuz as Ariane. Ariane could be literally forced to accept to manufacture Falcon9 under license as a risk reduction.

Re: Will fail...

Airbus Space has a satellite factory in the USA now. Why shouldn’t Ariane? Ariane were more than happy to rebadge the Soyuz as Ariane, until they got caught out by the war. If the first Ariane 6 launch in [Q2 2024?] fails, their customers such as EU Commission will be forced to launch on Falcon9. The only choice Ariane would have is whether to restructure to manufacture it under license, or let SpaceX take the business.

Whether Ariane6 maiden launch will succeed or not, is a coin-flip. No aspersions on quality, that’s just the reality of a new design.

Re: Will fail...

Broadly agree, except for one thought: “SpaceX do not have the cadence”. That’s true, but Musk doesn’t think like normal companies. I genuinely think he doesn’t worry about profit (stay with me) he just wants to determine the future of the world. That opens up a crazy left-field option. Why not license out Falcon-9, and let another company build them?

He is known for his contempt for IP: “if you copy us, all you’ve done is ensure that you’re several years behind us, Starship will be so much better”. Licensing income would effectively be free money for SpaceX, if demand exceeds supply.

But most importantly, he removes the incentive to invest in competitor launcher design. “Licensed Falcon9 builder” would be the second-most valuable space company in the world, plus meet the “sovereign access to space” requirements of several countries, because 95% of the “ jobs” remain in-house. In fact, once Starship finally works, offering the Falcon9 license for free (with strings) is exactly the sort of crazy shit he would pull.

Always on the Horizon, UK must wait for megabucks EU science deal

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

I agree with you. I think it’s a shocking disgrace that the “Lesson Learned” inquiry seems to focus on finding whose fault it was. Rather than immediately (as in, a year ago) kicking off all the R&D and actions that are clearly required, for the next time this happens. And it will happen again, in twenty years if we’re lucky, and five years if we’re not. Because it really isn’t hard to identify at least half a dozen big-ticket multi-billion items that we will really regret not having done.

mRNA research is one. But also, a standing army test-kit factory capability, and vaccine manufacturing capability is another. We spend more on mothballed Barbie doll manufacturing than mothballed vaccine factories. Figuring out how to run vaccine trials even quicker is another: a year seemed completely implausibly fast until 2020…..right, what has to happen to make it 3-4 months? That transmission model was BS, so how about a major effort to identify where it was wrong, etc. Where’s our new PPE plan, not just for Covid but for the other possibilities?

Having agreed with you… Can I point out that *no country* is doing this? U.K. isn’t doing it…but neither is Germany. Nor any EU initiative. Neither is the USA even though they no longer have a denier in charge. W.T.A.F.

Look at Horizon allocated funding lines, related to vaccines:

https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/research-area/health/coronavirus/vaccines_en

VACCELERATE: €12M two years ago. Yes, the decimal point is in the right place.

Click on some of the links in the EU page. Half of the links are dead. Commission have not updated their response or initiated any new funding actions in a year. That’s how bad this is. “The pandemic is over, everyone back to farming the budgets.”

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

Ok, so what you are saying is this: you want money allocation to prioritise R&D. And you want a *constitutional* fix for a *policy decision* problem. Because you perceive U.K. gov consistently under-allocates R&D relative to its other funding demands, compared to what EU Commission current policy is.

Let’s be concrete: U.K. spending priorities include - paying minimum-wage carers to stay the right number of minutes to change the diapers of an 80yr old with dementia; keeping a functioning military, which Germany chooses not to do. Sorry to be blunt like that, but until you acknowledge these are the choices on the table, one can’t talk sensibly. And BTW it’s a defensible opinion that the long-term dementia research has more impact than the short-term care….but you are going to have to be explicit, look those people in the face, tell them what they can’t have, how *you* have taken the choice away from their vote, and put it 1500 miles away.

This just isn’t Ok. If you want to make a policy change in a democracy, fine go persuade the electorate, and you may well be right policy-wise in this case. But changing the system to prioritise your beliefs is just not OK.

More than that, I urge you to take a step back, and realise that constitutional change from national government is not in your interest either. Policy is temporary, but constitution is forever. At some point, a different set of people will be in power in Brussels, and they will have different policies. Maybe they prioritise infrastructure building. Same amount of money, just it’s jobs for sparks and metal monkeys instead. Why do you think Commission care? You are completely dispensable. Then Horizon just…..stops. Commission don’t answer to anybody. Look it up, they don’t have to ask European Parliament for permission not to renew Horizon. The reverse is true: they do have to ask Member States permission to allocate Horizon budget, but if they decide to ask for different priorities, then Member States have no role to force them to ask for Horizon instead.

Re: becoming a global science superpower

Did you actually read what you wrote, and think? Arguably “wanting to become a global military superpower and then abolishing the Navy and the Air Force.” has been historically the exact correct strategy for some countries.

For maybe 50 years, it has just not been *possible* to compete militarily with the USA. You can “want” all you like, but if you do it, you’d end up poor and broken, which doesn’t seem like a good outcome for “politics by other means”. Crucially both Japan and Germany were de-militarised post-WW2. Maybe not voluntarily, but saving 2% GDP annually on military really adds up. It definitely contributed to the economic outperformance of those two nations, and continues to do so. Arguably, they “won” WW2 in terms of true outcomes for citizens significantly more than the U.K. did, although the USA did better than any. It’s been a winning strategy for Germany to have a military so weak that in the past few years they could barely field five working fighter aircraft at a time. Security paid for by the USA, with consequences, because all choices have consequences.

Maybe not on topic, but it does show that you and your supporters need to think a lot more, and talk a lot less, to have any grasp whatsoever of the issues.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

Oh, so it’s nine years since they gave a billion euros to a charlatan who said he could fully simulate a human brain in silico by 2017.

And that makes it Ok then? They’ve learned from their mistake? They’ve published a full mea culpa of how they got led up the garden path, with hundreds of people telling them there was a problem beforehand? And now they would never allow that again?

In that case, they definitely won’t have let €50M project at the end of last year, promising to implement full brain uploading by 2027. Oh wait, they did? Oh. Well there goes that then.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

Blue Brain was otherwise known as the Human Brain Project (HBP), and was one of two Flagship billion-euro projects initiated by EU Commission under FP7 funding. It later transitioned to Horizon 2020 funding. The other project was Graphene.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12291

https://cordis.europa.eu/search?q=contenttype%3D%27project%27%20AND%20%2Fproject%2Frelations%2Fassociations%2FrelatedSubCall%2Fcall%2Fidentifier%3D%27FP7-ICT-2013-FET-F%27&p=1&num=10&srt=Relevance:decreasing

It failed *badly*, culminating in shouting matches at conferences, actual demonstrations by neuroscientists outside EU Commish HQ. Markram is a charlatan, and obviously so even when the project was initiated. He claimed that he was going to be able to simulate a human brain in silico by 2017, for a billion euro of EU money, and they bought it. That was his claim, and don’t let any articles since pretending that the goals were set lower, fool you. It doesn’t surprise me at all, that he is still running his scam on the Swiss government, after the roof fell in on HBP. But several hundred million euros of EU money had been spent by the time the plug was pulled.

However, I will correct you on one thing. You seem to assume that because the project is now executing in Switzerland, at EPFL, and Switzerland isn’t part of the EU, that it couldn’t be supported by Horizon. This is absolutely false. Horizon money supports many project work teams outside the EU, not just in Switzerland, but in for example, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia (awarded in February 2023), Canada. They just don’t make it common knowledge.

Re: Alethiometer

Could you please explain how international collaboration works between EU universities, and the worlds largest R&D country, the United States?

Or is it that international collaboration works the same way it has always worked? There are centres of excellence scattered around the world in various fields. The entities that are top of tree talk to others that are also top of tree. Links are made at conferences, and global recruitment. If your group isn’t top of tree, nobody is very interested in what you have to offer. That’s a harsh reality, but getting a grant doesn’t change it.

As to top scientists “definitely not all UK citizens”, no shit Sherlock. Citizens of Turkey, Iran, Russia, USA, India, China, Korea. All of whom run top-ranking groups here in the U.K.

What is about the new Head of Cavendish lab in the U.K. that you disapprove of? Professor Mete Atatüre. Graduated from Bilkent in Turkey, went to Boston, then ETH Zurich, then Cambridge U.K. That’s a pretty normal CV for a top ranker. Notice how precisely none of Turkey, USA, Switzerland are in the EU.

Show me a university department with *only* EU or U.K. citizen professors and staff on it, that isn’t just…...mediocre. Not terrible. Just, not even in the same city block as a leading department in the field.

Re: The ECJ (and to a lesser extent ECHR) are the issue

Have you thought through the implications of why that is *relevant*? If the ECJ were impartially ajudicating the *law* as passed by Parliament, nobody should care whether the justices were hyper-intelligent giraffes from Mars. Or impartial *professional* judges, with prior decades of practising at the Bar, which is the same thing.

Of course, everybody understands that they are not, that they are political appointees, mere tools intended to apply pressure on competitor European states. You know that, I know that, everybody knows that. They do not *apply* law, they are another layer of unvoted, invisible influence. Nationally representative? They are located in Luxembourg, and to all intents and purposes represent Benelux. They have a leader, the President, of which there have been 11 in total. Two of them have been Belgian, one from Netherlands, one from Luxembourg. Hardly representative. The current one is Belgian, his predecessor was Greek, and during the Greek period the Vice President was, you guessed it, Belgian. It’s just a coincidence.

So let’s look at the professional background of the current President of ECJ, shall we? Koen Lenaerts. Loads of top legal qualifications, until 1983, at which point he immediately became *professor of law*. Not a practising lawyer. He has literally never actually held any professional practicising post, advocate or otherwise, outside the ECJ. Never. He is not a lawyer who made it up through the ranks. And his total experience of being an advocate lawyer *even in the ECJ* is three years back in 1986. Three years. He is a professor, always has been, and then they made him king without the slightest bit of professional experience of law.

This is a charade.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

https://www.science.org/content/article/updated-european-neuroscientists-revolt-against-eus-human-brain-project

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

I agree it is a feedback loop, but it can be a virtuous circle rather than a vicious one.

We do actually know how to make university research effective, we’ve known for at least a century. Make a centre of excellence that people want to come to, from around the world. Give them money, and let them decide on priorities. Leave them to it. That’s it. It literally always works. External validation of priorities does not add even one cent of value, it just doesn’t. The places that aren’t Camelot wither; it’s “unfair” but just the way life is.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

Your comment “And, indeed, there are companies who specialize in bidding for EU money….Bidding processes are big and complex, as is the management afterwards. So you get specialists.”

You have Stockholm syndrome. Believe me, I saw it for so many years in my career. People are stuck in the system, they think it’s all normal, they think there’s no other way to be. There’s nothing normal about this. It is *not* normal in the world to spend 10% of the entire working hours for the project on the bid phase. You think it is, but it really isn’t.

But it isn’t even about the bid process. It’s about the very concept of “for EU money”. This is insanity. Measuring by how much money you have spent is just insanity. If the outcome is *companies that employ some people to do some things so long as you continue to pay them*, then the complete process is pointless, and needs to stop.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

Try the Blue Brain project

https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/

There’s a billion euros of perfectly good neuroscientists being forced to work on utter shite, right there.

In that case, they literally revolted standing up in the conferences, writing open letters to newspapers, and brought the whole project down in flames, so badly was it misconceived.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

If Cambridge researchers bid, then I am ashamed of them. My knowledge stems from the early 2010s, when any of the top researchers I talked to would rather have resigned than taken some of those projects.

Please name some Horizon projects that you claim are good science. Then let’s pick up the published papers from them, the journals published, and follow the H-factors of the researchers. It’s all very well saying “there is good science” and ignoring white elephants in the room like the billion-euro Blue Brain Project. Reputations of whole departments were destroyed by that *and rightly so*. Anyone who agreed to work on that is so flawed, ethically and scientifically, that they should never be let near a lab again. There’s worse.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

“What are your metrics for producing good science"

Not my metrics. The same standard metrics used by academia, to assess which are the top-performing universities and in turn the best scientists. H-index. It depends on the number of publications, the impact factor of the journals in which they were published, and how many citations. And once you have a metric per scientist, you can slice the data further. Go here for more information how academia does it. It’s not perfect, but whatever else it is, it is not subjective.

https://www.adscientificindex.com/

Cambridge, for example, ranks #14 out 16271 universities in the world, by having 1967 scientists of whom 1300 are in the top 50% of scientists, and 182 in the top 2%. Note how skewed that is. Almost all work of scientific importance comes from the top few % of scientists. The rest show up, write some moderately interesting papers, but achieve little of value. It’s not nice to hear, but it is the reality, and it is important we accept that. I got my PhD but realised that academia was not my way: neither I *nor over 70% of postdocs* even make it onto that long list of rather ineffective researchers.

If Horizon were a University, it’s H index would place it somewhere in the 11000’s out of 16271 global research institutions. It’s impact factor would put it….see Manchester Metropolitan University? That’s #827. See Wipro Ltd, Bengaluru purveyor of bums-on-seats…That’s #8011. Horizon research total impact factor ranks it alongside Federal University Kashere Gombe State, Nigeria. Yup. Now there are a couple reasons for it being quite that low. But that is where Horizon ranks.

It’s so far below the lowest European institution that accepts students, for really two reasons: it effectively self-selects only researchers that aren’t in the top half. Because of the extremely skew distribution this smashes it’s score. And secondly, it’s simply not research, by academic standards. If you are a genuine professor, you are looking at the newest ideas and working in that area. Horizon prevents this by design. For a project to be Horizon funded, the idea must be sufficiently in the public domain that it can be read and understood by *lobby groups* who propose it to the Commission, who then ask governments whether it’s the sort of thing they would like to fund in the *next* 5-yr funding round, then it goes round internal political negotiations to allocate it to countries, then the RFP needs to be published which takes the Commission more years, then the academics have to bid on that. There’s just no way, no way at all, you can be less than 10-15 years behind leading edge.

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

And you’ve immediately gone for the deliberate mis-reading of what I wrote. I have not slagged off “publically funded science”? I’m in general a *supporter* of larger government spending, and spending on research, both blue skies, and applied goal-directed. It’s *Horizon* research specifically, and EU Commission funded research more generally, that is very low quality. Government funded bodies like Fraunhofer Institute, Paris-Saclay, Freiburg, Leiden, Barcelona, Cambridge, Imperial, are all excellent and productive. But they largely avoid taking Horizon money, the truth-that-dare-not-speak-it’s-name is that it is the kiss of death.

I have extensive professional experience in dealing with both Horizon grant bids, and nationally funded grant bids. There are so many intrinsic problems with Horizon, which lead to it being very hard to produce actual science with it. It’s money for documents, not for science. Principal Investigators are desperate for grants, so they can’t afford to slag it off, but it is a Faustian bargain.

#1: Horizon is very *prescriptive*. They tell you exactly what work they want you to do, broken into work packages, and the results you will produce. It really isn’t too far off the EU Technical Officer pretending to be a scientist for a month and saying “I have a hunch on some new Science in this area. I’ve written it all down for you in microscopic detail, now go prove me right!”. This has exactly the integrity and success rate you would expect

#2 everything is divided into 5-10 Work Packages for different institutions. It’s based on country. You can’t just say “We’re investigating this, Ana found a thing so she’s pursuing it”. It’s all micro-sliced from day 1. If you hit the barrier of the work division, you must *stop and hand it over*. People who don’t stop *get sanctioned*, it’s a very real threat and deployed really quite often. On more than one occasion I’ve seen a postdoc who doesn’t understand the game ends up with a written warning for doing work that is supposed to be reserved for another institution. This is insanely toxic.

#3 The truth is, a lot of EU science funding doesn’t even have the *goal* of producing scientific results. And I’m not saying that to be snide, it literally isn’t the purpose, for good or bad. Roughly a third of the funding is there just to provide a “framework” for the training of early career people, and do so trans-nationally. Someone doing a PhD in Grenoble is funded to do a postdoc project in Leiden. The purpose is that they should see the benefit of freedom of movement, to form networks with people in other EU member states, and to further their career. Again, I’m not being snide, this is literally *written down* as the first paragraph of funding requirements. Any scientific output is seen as pure positive side-effect.

#4 A lot of Horizon funding goes to non-university entities. There are, I’m afraid, a lot of companies whose *only reason for existing* is to bid for, and execute these “R&Ds”. They produce the documents required, get paid, and that’s the end of it. Actual science is not involved. I can name at least a dozen “companies” along the M4 corridor that were “experts” in “future electronics”. In over 15 years, none of them ever had a single non-EU contract, nor attempted to release a product, nor even went to a trade show not attended by their EU Technical Officers. Each of them got paid maybe £20-30M annually from Horizon funding, employed maybe 20 people, and immediately Horizon funding stopped vacated their premises and listed as Dormant on Companies House. Not fraudulent as such….but really, what is the point of this?

Re: And the haemorrhaging continues

Is this a bad thing? No, seriously, stop and think for a minute. Research teams *working on current Horizon priorities* will move. Ok. So they should, they will follow the money. That’s the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is: are Horizon priorities, good scientific directions? Is it *effective*.

I’m not going to answer this for you, there’s plenty of evidence that Horizon is very poor at direction-finding, and produces low-quality research, but you can come to your own view. But it still isn’t the point. The point is: why do we never see this question asked in the debate? Why can’t you, off the top of your head, tell me ten important scientific discoveries that came from Horizon funding, and ten “next big things” from the upcoming decade roadmap? Because you should be able to. Horizon spends more resources than the whole of U.K. university research in the first half of the 20th century. Where are it’s Nobel prizes?

It’s really the *only* important question. Not “how much money”, but is it *well-directed* and *effectively managed*. As a Brexiteer, if there were evidence that Horizon were well-directed and producing good science, I would regard this as positive evidence for the EU *even if they didn’t spend a single penny in the UK*. Measure outputs, not inputs.

If Horizon funding had, for example, turned out to be in the right place right time, to have contributed to a Covid vaccine when needed. I don’t care whether it’s Oxford AstraZeneca, or BioNTech leading to Pfizer. And neither should you. But it *didn’t*. BioNTech vaccine discoveries may have been invented within an EU country….but did not arise from any Horizon funding. Horizon funding was in the wrong direction. Horizon funding priorities depend on the judgement of the people allocating, and their judgement turns out to be *not scientifically useful* based on history.

If I were to pick one major recent discovery that has the potential to change the world, I’d pick the potential replacement for Haber process to produce ammonia, hence fertiliser, at low temperatures and energy input. Discovered at Monash University. In Australia. Where? Exactly. Funding level? Too little to measure.

You make Horizon funding as effective and well-directed as Australian R&D, maybe we will listen.

Re: Good old Brexit

No. Brexit just helps us *stop and think* whether we actually want to partner up for R&D in a very broken system. One which produces only about a quarter the results per £ spent as any of the other government science grants. As measured by H-index.

“Become a global science superpower.” Umm, let me have a think. NO. Because this is entirely the wrong way to think about and do science, which is why, as above, it is very bad at doing so. You do *not* do science to put a “leadership badge” on. You do science, focusing on subjects which are either interesting (“oh that’s weird, I wasn’t expecting that”) or useful. If you try to “become a leader in climate science” all you ever achieve is propaganda not truth. Propaganda may happen to fall on the side of truth, but only by coincidence.

US adds Euro spyware makers to export naughty list

Re: Literal insanity

Hungary, together with the large majority of EU countries, are huge net recipients of EU largesse, outside the normal channels of EU spending oversight. There’s words, and then there’s actions.

Here’s an action: Russia (Rosatom) is right now expanding its build of Hungary’s nuclear reactor which produces 50% of Hungarys electricity. And France, specifically Macron in person, has been in direct talks with Putin to ensure that French companies are in on the action. Not a conspiracy theory, nor anti-French rhetoric, this is in Le Monde.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/04/28/in-hungary-paris-is-willing-to-help-build-russian-led-nuclear-reactor_6024637_4.html

Everybody knows. This is not a secret. The so-called “support for Ukraine” is entirely fake. All that “geo-political independence of aggressive foreign powers” is pure horseshit, apart from the hate for USA influence, which is real. Everybody knows.

Literal insanity

“US is the largest global human rights abuser.”

The article is about a spyware provider located in *Hungary*. Do you think this is an accident? Hungary’s President is Viktor Orban, a literal fascist. Already for many years, he removed all Jews from positions of public employment, and has made it all but impossible for them to have bank accounts. LGBT people fear him sufficiently that I know several Hungarian refugees who are gay, here in the U.K, alongside maybe a couple dozen Jewish Hungarian refugees. Yes, refugees, for that is what they are.

And next year, Orban takes up the presidency of the EU. That is what you are supporting. There are only two possible positions for you: aware and ashamed but “can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”; or a fascist yourself, who sees nothing wrong with Orban, and thoroughly approves of the global direction of the EU.

Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI

Re: How far do you take it?

This code-section isn’t copyrightable anyway. It’s far too generic and obvious. So it doesn’t matter if it was actually copied or not, or from where.

Its really important to understand that “derivative work” is not a statement that the work is “derived from”. The actual copying history doesn’t matter. People usually don’t appreciate that. “Derivative work” is a statement about three things: similarity (determined from a comparison of the outputs), “distinctiveness and novelty”, “substantial part”.it

If I take fifty copyright works each of 50 lines and munge them together, to make a working output that does something different, then the output is *not copyright*. The output work simply isn’t very similar to “an individual input work”. There’s no “class action” here. That is a statement about copyright law. The terms of any “open source” licenses simply do not come into play until copyright is accepted. You can’t legally assert control over the use of text, until you show you own it in the first place.

This is fundamentally different from how things stand for music, or performances. Peoples expectations have been shaped by the use of sampling in music, but the written word is a very different branch of copyright case law. And it’s got nothing to do with software or not, it’s the fact it’s written word. It may surprise you to know that this has all been thrashed out before in history, well before the advent of software. As far back as the 1920s in fact, when Dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp used found objects, and Picasso was using collages of snippets from newspapers. The newspapers tried to assert copyright ownership, to get a slice of the sales price of the art, and got their ass handed to them in court. The exact example I gave above, taking fifty works and slicing a phrase or sentence out of each, to produce a new piece, was so common in sixties counterculture it was a trope. It was tested in court, multiple times, and found not in breach. I remember someone took sentences sliced from government propaganda, and produced an anti-Vietnam piece published in NYT.

Modern “legal” advice on collages, usually comes from university legal departments who just can’t be arsed to defend any of this stuff in court and advise artists to avoid using copyrighted items. But every single time it has come to court, in every country, collages, found objects, and sliced text have been deemed firmly not in breach, even and up to reproducing entire newspaper pages including advertisements.

Viasat says latest broadband satellite failed to fully deploy antenna

Re: Yet more space litter

No it isn’t. The spacecraft bus itself is completely functional and has plenty of fuel. If the payload turns out to be useless, the whole thing can be moved to a graveyard orbit. Orbital slots in geostationary are very valuable, and Viasat itself will want to put something else there. No way would they leave it clogged up.

Re: Why No In-Orbit Satellite Techs?

Also, for decades, we’ve been building spacecraft as one-offs, or in batches of three (for geo-stationary). Testing on-ground is particularly difficult for deployment, because the actual deployment occurs in zero-g, and the large structures are usually not self-supporting on-ground. And then it’s got to work after being whacked around with a seven-g launch for several minutes. And everything has been heated and then flash-cooled, and all the lubricants out gas. It’s really hard to do this, if you’ve only got one chance.

If it were small and cheap, you’d launch several hundred, the first five would each fail in embarrassing ways, and you’d fix those failure modes, and then it would work. Starlink, basically. I think the industry is just starting to learn that “expensive high-quality with onboard redundancy, built by the satellite primes”, is much less reliable in practice than launching small, cheap redundant constellations.

Finally, it’s not obvious that the large geo comms satellites will continue to be a thing. This year seems to have been the breakpoint. Only a single large Geo ordered this year, normally it would be 12-15 annually. Not only are Leo cheaper to launch, the failure mode on Viasat3 was the huge reflector. Also massive solar panels. Fly it at 300km instead of 30,000km, and the reflector only needs to be 1/100th size, and you don’t need so much power. The whole point of Geo is three things: you don’t need steerable ground terminal (electronically steerable is now available), for limited global traffic you only need three spacecraft (traffic is now high), it’s a great fit for satellite TV (a dying market). My punt is that we are seeing the end of the large Geo anyway.

Very shady dealing

Viasat knew this in April, soon after launch. Nevertheless, they told nobody and continued with their acquisition of Inmarsat, where most of the purchase price to Inmarsat owners consisted of Viasat shares. The deal completed on May 30th….and six weeks later they admitted it, and their shares plunged 36%. That’s 36% of the combined company, which effectively writes down the value of Viasat-only by nearly 60%. That’s because the failure might affect not just this satellite, but the other two it’s about to launch.

Without the Viasat 3’s, there is almost no Viasat. They own only 4 satellites, Wildblue is small, AnikF2 is 19 years old well past end-of-life could fail any minute, Viasat 1 is also old about 80% through Iife. Their only major asset really was Viasat2, and the broadband customers. Whereas Inmarsat, the company they “bought” has 12 satellites.

Basically, there’s little or no value in the original company, and they kept the charade up just long enough to exchange a Nothing for the whole of a large successful operator. Very sharp practice at best….and quite probably shading into outright fraud. Inmarsat owners are definitely going to sue them, this is going to be a long time in the courts.

Bosch goes all-in on hydrogen with €2.5B investment by 2026

Re: Not about efficiency

Nonsense. I’m not disputing we need to transition from fossil fuel. But that has absolutely zero relationship to the working fluid of vehicles - synthetic hexane or LPG is not a fossil fuel. The vehicle engine technology is a complete red herring. Whether it’s batteries, or fuel cells or anything else is completely orthogonal from a CO2 Global Warming Perspective.

If you want to stop emitting net CO2, your *first* priority is to bootstrap the Renewable -> Synthetic Hydrocarbon industry at the power plant. That is sufficient to achieve Net Zero, on its own. Nothing else is required. If you have time, and R&D money left over (here’s a clue: you don’t have either), have a *second* priority to improve the efficiency of the vehicle. That’s fine, it’s always a laudable aim. But it’s nothing to do with Net Zero.

The vehicle efficiency could be improved by changing Internal Combustion to hydrocarbon fuel cell without a massive rip-and-replace of infrastructure, and can be done piecewise. Or, if you fancy, make them battery-driven, I don’t care. That might be nice too. You know what? One promising battery technology that can be recharged in under a minute, with high energy density, is called a “flow battery”. Look it up. When you’re done, tell me how a “flow battery” differs from synthetic hydrocarbon tank + fuel cell, other than semantics.

But, we’ve spent hundreds of billions on the vehicle tech, via vehicle subsidies, and none at all on the Renewable->Infrastructure tech, which is the only bit in the equation that actually changes the Net CO2.

Re: Again?

There is absolutely no technology reason that fuel-cells for hydrocarbons need to use stainless steel. Nor run at high temperature. Because, the mitochondria in your body and in every living thing, are fuel cells that run on hydrocarbons. QED.

Re: Again?

This is chop-logic:

Here is Technology A: Currently it’s inefficient, expensive, and thermodynamics says the theoretical best is still a relatively crap engineering solution. However, I like it, it’s pretty. Please subsidise me tens of billions to improve it a bit

Here is Technology B: Currently it’s operating in the market at good efficiency, it’s well-understood. Engineers have a long track record of improving efficiency at a few % per decade. However, Imhate.mits ugly. Please stop investing in it, it’s the Past. And if you don’t do what I say, I’ll vandalise your stuff and superglue myself to bridges.

“Solid Oxide Fuelcells capable of running on methane, LNG…….struggle around 30% efficiency, and tend to be very heavy, high temperatures tend to require the use of a lot of stainless steel”

I have a Proof of Concept that fuel-cell oxidation of hydrocarbons, to electron flow, can reach near thermodynamic theoretical limit. At room temperature. Without the use of heavy stainless steel, in fact with very low cost using no rare metals or elements. It’s a coffee cup stood in front of me, growing mould.

Oh *now* “Mature hydrogen fuel cells exist today. the infrastructure for re-fueling has been developed.” Is that right? That’s pure hydrogen subsidy shilling. If hydrogen is so great, I assume you agree that hydrogen needs no (more) subsidy, and the free market car industry can sort it out on its own? Making a massive profit on the way? Right?

Re: Again?

*Not even* if you compare by mass. The mass you’ve got to drag around, compared to battery-electric, is “hydrogen + tank + fuel cell”. To have an apples-to-apples comparison of “the point where the electricity comes out, to go into the electric motors”.We have one actually operating practical example: a Toyota Mirai, is a perfectly ok hydrogen car example. 5kg hydrogen + 88kg tank + 50 kg fuel cell. The “energy density” of hydrogen is only 3.5% of the value it’s proponents like to quote. It gets a little better at truck scale, but only a little. Hyundai truck is 33kg hydrogen + 300kg + 120kg fuel cell, ie 7% energy density.

Hydrogen is just the worst working-fluid for a fuel-cell drive you could pick. I like to look at hydrogen as the special case of the hydrocarbon which happens to have zero carbons, and draw the graph of efficiency/cost against number of carbons. Synthetic methane is much lower cost/mass than hydrogen, ethane is better again, propane (LPG) better still. Yes, you know where this is going. If you had to pick the most optimal synthetic alkane, it’s anything around 4-10 carbons. Petrol, basically. Pick hexane if you want a single pure compound, but there’s really no need to, a fuel cell can work just fine on the mixture present in standard petrol. The only thing actually required for the Green economy, is to make synthetic hydrocarbon off-site using renewable energy. The fuel working fluid is a total red herring.

Obscure internet boutique Amazon sues EU for calling it a Very Large Online Platform

Re: Platform vs Shop

“[Amazon] get IIRC 10-15% of any sale depending on the goods”. Yes, it’s about that, and as you say another 5-10% for Amazon warehousing. Total maybe 20%.

Whereas conventional shop economics on low-end commodities, is usually assumed to be 25-30% margin for the retail shop. Back-of-the-envelope, the wholesaler hands over 5-10% more of the final price to Shop than Platform. There are other considerations, which is why both Amazon and supplier prefer Platform. But if you add policing costs for 2.5million third party sellers on Amazon, none of which Amazon *control*, no I’m afraid Amazon would be *forced* to go Shop, and take a larger slice of the value-chain pie with it.

“the cost of them to have a supplier list some goods on Amazon is the marginal cost of data storage + compute that it takes”

Absolutely not, that’s not the economics of this. When you go on Amazon and search for “mens Nike Revolution trainers” you are almost certainly going to buy them from some seller. But there are 78 sellers, Amazon don’t care which one you buy from. The marginal cost per supplier in that situation is near zero - Amazon lose nothing by letting any seller list them, neither is there an advantage other than letting the Suppliers cut each other’s throats to put money in Amazons pocket.

But if Amazon has to spend $10k per 3rd party to send somebody to another warehouse to inspect the goods…..There are over 2 million sellers!.No. One selected supplier only, like Shops do.

The “middle way” is to require all stock in Amazons warehouse *like they do already* per the existing Fulfilled by Amazon contract, which does heavy compliance checking. Who do you think pays for that compliance checking when a supplier applies to be FBA? Amazon? No. The Supplier has to pay to dig their own grave. It can easily cost you tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands to become an Amazon FBA supplier, and six months or more.

But when you think about it, an Amazon where everything is FBA with only a few suppliers per item…..it’s really so close to “Sale or Return Shop”, which is a fully validated business model known to work, why would Amazon waste time trying anything “internetty”. Just be online Tesco with massive logistics and infinite buying power to mash down its suppliers. 100%, that’s what they will do.

Re: Amazon should be on there

If “safety and standards compliance” is important to you, being absolutely serious, you need to buy *from* Amazon, not *on* Amazon.

First choice “Amazon essentials”. They don’t sell anything non-standards safe, on Amazon brand. They’re shit hot on that.

Second choice, 3rd party seller “Fulfilled by Amazon”. Then, Amazon have physically got it in their warehouse. In turn, that means they’ve actually *verified* all the standards and compliance data that the 3rd party has provided. Amazons checklist runs to hundreds of pages. Again, they’re pretty strong on that - as strong as high-street stores. Otherwise, assume it’s dodgy 3rd party seller - the goods aren’t verified by Amazon, they physically can’t be, they don’t have them in their warehouse.

As long as you bother understanding what is verified by who, Amazon are rather *strong* on their safety/compliance. Truth is,many people DGAF about safety and compliance, they just buy the cheapest even when Amazon clearly sell a higher quality higher safety item literally right next to it on the webpage, and then complain afterwards, so Amazon cater to them too.

Platform vs Shop

A Platform has 3rd party sellers, a Shop does not.

Tesco, Carrefour, John Lewis, Boots are examples of how a modern Large Shop operates (both larger than Amazon U.K.), as an alternate operating model. None of them actually own they goods they sell. They all do “Sale or Return” from the wholesale supplier POV which means: if the potatoes or trousers don’t sell, they are left to rot and supplier don’t get paid; the Large Shop completely determines where and how your goods are displayed, and so whether they sell; the wholesaler doesn’t even have a guaranteed price - if Shop runs a 50% off promotion, the wholesaler gets a 50% price cut after the fact. This is why suppliers *hate* the Retail Shop model, and far prefer the Platform model, which is why they went onto Amazon in the first place.

The alternative to Amazon VLOP, isn’t that the EU gets to screw over Amazon. Amazon’s response will quite simply be - stop 3rd party sellers and become a Shop. They have warehouses, suppliers will be forced to simply do Sale or Return instead. The only difference is that customer will in future go on Amazon website and buy their Nike Air “from Amazon” rather than “from ZADGHT on Amazon”. Amazon will fulfil the order directly from the goods that their suppliers have given on Sale or Return, selecting dynamically at the lowest price. This will eat into supplier margin far worse than the cost of ads today. This is bad for suppliers. Some 3rd party sellers bring their own warehousing to the deal, so it’s not a totally free ride for Amazon. But back in the real world, Amazon just has cheaper logistics anyway.

Threads versus Twitter: Shouldn't we be happy the wheels are falling off antisocial social media?

Re: Let me be clear

TLDR; The Onion might phrase this as:

Linux phreakers propose Usenet to replace Twitter - “It’s the Future, we don’t see a problem with that”

Re: Let me be clear

“Talk to” sounds superficially great but is irrelevant, it’s “Listen from” that’s the problem, few angles:

Moderation: threads.net is bad, because $homophobic? Ok, but if I’m a teen I need to be able to scroll through DaBaby links tagged by my mates. $antisemitic content……yeah, not my bag, but I’m still want to scroll Ye. Basically, I’m just going to be on “the popular app” (yeah, network but dafuq I care) and that’s going to be the one that doesn’t block stuff. Shorter: The fediverse described is just Usenet which *still exists*, it never died, just nobody uses it any more. I’m far from saying “moderation is bad”, rather I think the opposite “the Wild West shitshow can’t be the main drag for very long”. But there is always going to be a main drag, aka town hall, everything else is…..well, ElReg forum. Not the main drag.

Discovery: How do you do discovery? Without this, all you’ve invented is the Whatsapp group. The “best” discovery wins, always, even if I can subscribe from any network. Because I don’t find stuff I like from one network, and then listen from another. Discovery is Push, centralised, and inherently not standardisable.

Synching: Is fediverse something where somebody publishes on one network, but others can read from any network? Well, fine, but there’s some obvious technical problems with that in practice - say I’m subscribed to 3 or 4 reader networks (see above why the users quickly install their friends 4 networks). How does one network know when I’ve read the tweet on another network? I don’t want to read the same stuff presented 4 times on 4 feeds. How does one network synch subscribes and unsubscribes on the others? And crucially Blocks? There is of course a set of solutions, it becomes SMTP and ISP spam blocking and folders and attention-focused threads and…..oh look you’ve re-invented email from the 90s through to 2023, but via all the stages it’s taken. I already have that.

Again, the problem is that email SMTP has already been in

Re: Internet Interoperability Without Central Censorship

Or… post on Insta some nice pictures of the B&B you run; or great hairstyles you’ve done on your customers who are trendy 20-something females and nobody outside that demographic gets their time wasted; or scented candles / sparkly lippie you make in your “studio”; or happy dogs at your dog-grooming service (seen only by dog-owners); or your healthy line of custom-made vegan lunches treats delivered for home-workers, ads shown only to vegans and micro-geo-targeted on your 10-mile delivery area so that nobody outside it gets their time wasted (and your ad spend wasted); or a guttering and awning firm that micro-geo-targets customers based on scraping the weather reports of downpours and heat-domes in a 20 mile radius, showing videos of your products performing (ice creams and umbrellas, an evergreen business model, updated).

Honestly, my way sounds both more fun and much more profitable use of time than yours.

Re: Internet Interoperability Without Central Censorship

“business whose web address is a facebook page just looks unprofessional.”

To my age group, and to “dinosaur orgs” that might seem true. However, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that FB and Insta are town hall marketplaces*.

The annual revenue of Meta might be “only” $90bn a year, but advertisers aren’t paying them for nothing. A minimum of $300bn+ total revenue, and maybe twice that, is being achieved by the micro-businesses you are deriding here.

The vast majority of Insta fashion brands have no website, or just boilerplate to satisfy the accountant, because their customers simply don’t “use the web” in the way you think of it. There are thousands of those in the $10M-$100M+ category. Insta is dominated by brands you have no possibility of being aware of, without Insta, because you aren’t their target customer.

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

Will it?

I can’t see it leading to more efficient engines. That’s all about the CFM RISE open-rotor, for 2030 or so. And that will in all likelihood be the final ever major commercial airliner jet engine development, in the West anyway. These only come around every 20 years or so, and there just isn’t time for another, before the electric transition by 2050.

I don’t know whether there will be electric airliners after that date, I’m not convinced the tech flies. But I’m fairly sure there won’t be avgas airliners by then, so we might just have none at all. And nobody invests $20bn in an engineering development that is unsaleable within a decade. See: there hasn’t been *any petrol engine development to improve efficiency since 2018*. Because Electric 2030.

Brits negotiating draft deal to rejoin EU's $100B blockbuster science programme

Re: Citation please ?

No idea, really. I was class of ‘74.

For starters, Ofqual was only established in 2010. And there wasn’t even a National Curriculum until trendy-boy Baker got his interfering snout in ‘88, followed by Ofsted in ‘92. Before then, individual exam boards did whatever the hell they liked. And so did independent schools; government had no oversight at all of independents, only state schools. For all I know, only O&C board did A*, or maybe they all did, or maybe they stopped and re-started. I apologise for their inability to predict the internet 25 years later, to be recorded into Wikipedia for your convenience…..but at least they did print me a nice certificate.

Re: Citation please ?

I can be either right or wrong.

But the argument “Brexit is for un-educated people” really just doesn’t work, does it?

The argument “Brexit is for stupid people” only works if you are arguing that reaching the top grades and PhD is entirely possible even with below average intelligence. Which comes rather close to using the phrases “Main Stream Media” and “Experts, what do they know”.

Re: Citation please ?

A* at A-level did *not* come out in 2010. You had to be in the top ten of the country to get them. There was a little ceremony.

Re: Citation please ?

I’m a classic second-generation immigrant. Where I come from, my parents valued the education they never had, above all other things. They espoused hard work, studying until midnight six days a week from the age of 5. The bare minimum you are expected to achieve is doctor or lawyer. If you aren’t aiming for the top of those professions, with articles in the newspaper, you’re a disappointment.

It’s mostly parental background. My patents are really the first thing I achieved that was truly my own. Is it healthy? Probably not.

Re: Citation please ?

“Brexit voters were mostly right of centre voters”.

How could this even be true, at a basic sanity check? Brexit vote was 52%. The Tories have just 37% of the vote-share, they win in the U.K. because the Left vote is fragmented. Tories are split only 60/40 for Brexit, providing 23% towards that 52%…..where does the remaining *29%* (ie the majority) come from? Not the Lib Dems or SNP, that’s for sure. Labour plus SDLP plus Plaid Cymru is the answer.

Yes, *those* Plaid Cymru supporters, whose party claims virulently Remain….and yet Wales polled 52% Leave, with the Brexit vote being massively dominant outside “the Cardiff bubble”. Go to Blaenau-Gwent, former mining town (62% Leave) and tell them that they’re right-of-center Tories. Good luck. If you’re lucky, they’ll burn your car, if you’re not, they’ll burn *you*.

Ethnic origin vote-share: similar story, the details are all there if you understand the territory. The statista data is a Poll, not referendum, and looks really dodgy, a total of 12,369 respondents. Eg, 0.7% of U.K. population is of Chinese descent. If the poll was representative, that would be asking 86 people of whom 60 voted Remain….that’s a “brave” extrapolation. If you want to know the *actual* numbers, know the demography of some constituencies in London, Birmingham and Manchester, compare referendum result against neighbouring.

Re: Never forget that the original had the emphasis on "my"

And *you* should remember that we on the Brexit side wanted a second *clarifying* referendum. And a Remainer went to court to successfully prevent it.

The clarifying referendum we wanted would have been “what is your preferred Brexit solution”, we could have had Norway-style, Hard Brexit, etc, could have been four or five options on there, Single Transferable Vote. There’s absolutely no constitutional reason why not, none at all. We could have had Remain on that ballot. So long as it was STV, Brexit would have won even more comfortably, but likely softer than we ended up with.

But Gina Miller went to High Court to injunct with a bunch of gerrymandering that any referendum could have only two options on it (why?) and that one of those options must be Remain. So, a re-run of the previous referendum….after which, what, best of three? She thought she was being clever, instead of which it turned out she wasn’t as clever as she thought she was because then there wasn’t a second referendum. And then Remainers had the gall to complain about not getting the thing they themselves had destroyed by gerrymandering.

Re: Never forget that the original had the emphasis on "my"

Tax accounting in the EU, and the “avoidance of VAT” which was all supposed to be fixed…..Yes, let’s talk about that, and the cesspit which is the Rotterdam VAT avoidance industry based on “Article 23”.

https://vat-frh.com/ “Achieve a 0% VAT solution in most cases”

https://www.bgscustoms.eu/fiscal-representation “ By appointing a fiscal representative, instead of 21% Dutch VAT, a 0% Dutch VAT rate may be applied on the purchase and sale of those goods when certain conditions are met.”

Ever wondered why Rotterdam is such a massive port? Special dispensation VAT avoidance is the answer. The reality is that only the minority of imports to the EU actually pay VAT. Basically only the naive pay VAT on EU imports. Most Chinese importers just route via Rotterdam, “defer” VAT, and then accidentally fail to track it and pay VAT at the destination country. Honestly, who is going to track a $100 package individually within Schengen, once it’s got through to customs.

Re: Never forget that the original had the emphasis on "my"

“Think of the automotive market”

This is the point. Automotive, aerospace, banking markets are the *only* economic voice being heard by the EU. It’s the large corporates, who have the size and money to do the lobbying. The small companies get utterly screwed, by rules that have been subtly skewed to favour bids by their SuperMax competitors.

I know this well, because I spent the majority of my career in large corporates, and over a decade tightly integrated into the Lobby/Bid infrastructure. I was rather good at my job, my well-known aerospace corporate made multi-billions out of the EU rules *that I literally drafted and handed to the Commissioner*, to exclude our competition. I sat in an office with corporate Council, thrashing out many of the rules that you now support as “EU regulation”. I still have the early drafts on my laptop. We used our rule-making clout to drive dozens of SMEs out of business, with the loss of thousands jobs, to save a couple of hundred in my own company. As I say, I was good at my job. Now I’m on the other side, I own and manage an SME in a different sector.

The large corporates make up the vast majority of the voice, column-inches, and commentators on this forum. But SMEs form three-quarters of the economy. Listening to the cost/benefit for

Volkswagen, Airbus, and SocGen, is *not* a good measure of the true impact of EU rule-making.

Re: Citation please ?

This is why Brexiteers fear and loathe the Remainers so passionately: “some Asian people voted to leave”

You mean some *British citizens*. You vile racist. 80% of non-white British citizens voted to Leave. And you want our views to be over-ridden by immigrants who weren’t born in the U.K. (hmmmm) and have *explicitly chosen not to become British citizens*. Nobody stopped those EU immigrants becoming British citIzens. They could have applied and gained it like everyone else. And then they’d have a vote. And the *only* reason you have for prioritising their interests over immigrants from India, Bangladesh, Iran, Somalia, Nigeria, who *did* apply for British citizenship is that they are *white*.

You are a vile, loathsome racist.

“The white working class voted for brexit because they hated foreigners.”

No they didn’t. The working class voted Brexit because they hate everything the EU Commission stands for and see it for it is: the same fascists that many of our parents and grandparents escaped from, around the world. The patronising whine of the administrator who doles out the banality of evil, for a consideration. And turns a blind eye to the beatings and lynchings. The French citizens of the Paris Banlieu know it. Whether our parents escaped from Khomeini or Hitler, Idi Amin or Bokassa, Petain or the true Rivers of Blood of Partition. Here we are. And we see you. We know what you are.

It’s interesting how you shout two contradictory views and see no tension. You admit Brexit is a working class vote. The class of the *Left*. Of *Labour*. Indeed, Brexit vote was much stronger on the *Left* than the Right. And yet you continue with the outright lie that Brexit is from the *Right*, that it’s Boris Johnson and Rees Mogg. It’s not, and never has been. The only sense in which Remain is “Left Wing” is that it’s Lib Dems. Upper Middle Class twats who *nobody votes for*. That’s what Remain is.

“Many had left school at 14 or 15”

Hmmm….back when it meant something, I got 6 A* at A-level, 4 S-level grade 1, starred First (top ten in my year), and a PhD from Cambridge. I have fourteen patents to my name. What are your qualifications like?