Posts by W.S.Gosset

Apple's latest keyboard travels back in time to when they weren't crap

Apple Extended Keyboard II

Another hear!hear! here.

You can also buy their recreation freshly made using the same kit:

Matias's TactilePro

& a Quiet version

Very happy user, unreserved recommendation.

Hey, you've earned it: Huawei chucks workers a £219m bonus for tackling US blacklist

Previous Bonus/$Participation initiatives

USA v. Huawei

p19-20: Huawei China announces its formal policy of a Bonus Program (monthly and annual) "to reward employees who stole confidential information from competitors":

"Under the policy, HUAWEI CHINA established a formal schedule for rewarding employees for stealing information from competitors based upon the confidential value of the information obtained."

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

Sopwith Camel user interface

> three lefts making a right

A tad off-topic, but the opposite of this was true for the Sopwith Camel: three rights made a left.

Whilst on observation patrol, (many) pilots turning left 90deg would instead turn 270deg right. Took the same amount of time and they improved their horizon/surrounds scanning markedly.

Re: Fat Fingers

On the upside...

A colleague made a related dd error during cutover to a new drbd cluster, copying block device mount points rather than file system mount points. The resulting growingly peculiar behaviour culminating in carnage, led to me twigging that drbd is just a tee and hence me cracking the entire installation&datacentres out of its 1x2 constraint into Nx2 infinitosity.

The IT version of accidentally dropping mouldy bread crumbs into a petrie dish...

Re: SCO Unix

That reminds me of the Unix/shell section in ye (verie) olde classic "How to shoot yourself in the foot using any programming language" :

% ls

foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o

% rm * .o

rm: .o: No such file or directory

% ls

%

Dough! Jobs microsite for UK's data watchdog set hundreds of cookies without visitors' consent

2 cookies? rather than 204?

Ghostery reports 0 trackers, and Firefox reports only 2 cookies set by Hays.

Caveats:

1/ Javascript is switched off (my default, via add-on "JavaScript Toggle On and Off")

2/ I did not do a Before&After count of Total # of Cookies, so it may have set 3rdparty cookies

Why worry about cost of banning certain Chinese comms providers? Fire Huawei, says analyst

> based on statistics and facts

Ah. I'm sorry, YJotta, this means you are hard Alt-Right.

Re: Huh ?

You just called all autistic/aspergic people dumb.

Controversies aren't Boeing away for aircraft maker amid claims of faulty oxygen systems and wobbling wings

Re: Boeing, Boeing....... Gone?

> too big to fail

Since we're talking aircraft, perhaps "too big to fall"?

Re: "implemented corrective actions"

> workforce was 'hollowed out', it consisted of a mixture of entry level hires and older people close to retirement, many working under contract.

Quite.

This is a striking pattern across most industries across the Western "hemisphere". Farming, for example, mostly comprises kids on temp-or-gonowhere jobs plus middle-aged farmers, with no new farmers coming up.

I put it down to a combination of :

1/ linearly growing tech/machine capabilities removing further and further need for Journeymen workers (wherein the bulk of the larger learning is done), and

2/ exponentially growing toxic HR/admin seeking to reduce actual man management down to a single budget line plus someone external to blame (via SLA).

Open wide, very wide: Xerox considers buying HP. Yes, the HP that is more than three times its market cap

Actually, it's just one.

Re: Only in the business world

> An $8bn company starts talking about buying a $27bn company. Reality stares back and says "Nope". [...]

> The whole affair is nonsense.

That was my initial reaction too. But I grabbed quick snapshot of HP's debt + D/E history, D/E is currently around 1 and perhaps lower if ElReg's noted imminent changes are not embedded in that number, which puts the post-takeover D/E between 4 & 5. (ie, the company is ~80-85% debt, the shareholders only have 15-20% of the company.)

Which from a real-world risk perspective is sphincter-puckering, but in the surreal world of top-end privileged-sector US companies is not all that uncommon.

As an example, HP itself had a D/E ratio over 7 in the last decade (~90% debt)

.

Also note that HP apparently already has reasonably solid confidence of raising the finance without even needing to resort to bond issue.

Chrome OS: Yo dawg, I heard you like desktops so we put a workspace in your workspace

Re: GEM ? 1980s ?

> I also used to create a RAMDrive and run programs in there for maximum speed

Yeah, I gotta say, the fastest user-responsiveness I've ever had was the early 90s: an old-even-then MacPlus with RamDisk (init/cdev which auto'ly loaded System into RAM and switched to it on-the-fly (something MacOS had builtin: just hold down Option key and doubleclick on the new System to run)) on System 6.0.4. (6.0.8?)

Chuck your apps into the ramdisk (2secs work in Mac OS, literally just chuck them in) and it ran slicker than anything I've ever used since.

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Software bloat beats Hardware eyewateringness.

Re: GEM ? 1980s ?

> The fixed windows was the result of Apple taking them to court, as GEM was basically an Apple System Finder clone. This hobbled the functionality a little, made it a little less Mac-like.

Same syndrome with early MSWindows.

Apple launched same legal action against Microsoft to prevent copying their GUI (now: "UX"). Early demos of the big Windows upgrade (2->3) got leaked, hence the action.

Win 3.0 was painful when released: nonoverlapping windows etc. Very obviously not Mac, your honour.

MS lawyers bulldozed and won.

Win 3.1 released almost immediately...

Mac OS, Mac OS X

> I don't know about macOS

Mac OS <> Mac OS X. MacOSX is just another *nix.

I was using virtual desktops in MacOS in the late '80s.

Not built-in: you'd pay $5 shareware, throw another init/cdev in your System Folder to hack your kernel further,* restart and you're done.

* Interestingly, the whole old "Mac OS is unstable!" meme came from everyone modding their system to buggery because it was fun and trivial to do (very few people even realised that was what they were doing). A lot of features people take for granted now came from those 3rd party mods, eg live spellcheck, autocorrect.

Raw unmodded Mac OS I never saw crash in 15yrs, nor even heard of an instance of despite being one of the main tech.guys on London mac user group and Oxford Uni mac user group for a long time.

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Re: That's Chromebook right out of my buying list then

> manual windows

...which are also a serious safety feature. Just yesterday a girl told us a story of how someone hit her and mangled her car, jamming the doors, and its engine started burning, "but I'd already had the windows wound down so I was able to get out."

No electrics = can't get out of a modern car in an accident.

This news article about the full public release of OpenAI's 'dangerous' GPT-2 model was part written by GPT-2

Re: Eh

Jokes aside, the original and correct quotation is:

If you really want people to take your quote seriously,

tell them Winston Churchill said it first.

-- Benjamin Franklin

Google's Fuchsia OS Flutters into view: We're just trying out some new concepts, claims exec

Re: Accurate Ads

"... Priceless"

Crikey, that's FAST: China clocks 84 pulsars in 2 years using world's largest radio telescope

Re: Acronym

Many moons ago, a chap I knew at uni was with engineering in the Victorian railways and did a big presentation on the then-proposed high-speed link between Melbourne & Sydney. As a laugh, his team presented it under, and suggested, the title Fast Alternative Rail Transport.

Unfortunately, the senior managers (A) didn't get it, (B) loved the name.

... He had to take them aside later and gently point out what its acronym was.

Trump: Huawei ban will be lifted!
US Commerce Dept.: Yeah, about that…

Re: im confused

The ban was on selling them stuff with real IP (vs theft) and on using their stuff in an American jurisdiction (vs wider theft + security risks). All Trump said this week was that he's agreed to allow sales of real but immaterial IP. Which opens the immediate + commodity trade sluices but maintains the core protection.

As to "why?", check out section 47 on page 19-20 here [PDF] for an indication, or note prior ElReg commentards who've observed that, eg, Huawei kit they did deepdives on ran on blatantly stolen code:

On July 10, 2013 ... HUA WEI CHINA launched a formal policy instituting a bonus program to reward employees who stole confidential information from competitors.

Under the policy, HUA WEI CHINA established a formal schedule for rewarding employees for stealing information from competitors based upon the confidential value of the information obtained.

Employees were directed to post confidential information obtained from other companies on an internal Huawei website, or, in the case of especially sensitive information, to send an encrypted email to a special email mailbox.

A "competition management group" was tasked with reviewing the submissions and awarding monthly bonuses to the employees who provided the most valuable stolen information. Biannual awards also were made available to the top three regions that provided the most valuable information. The policy emphasized that no employees would be punished for taking actions in accordance with the policy

Was this quake AI a little too artificial? Nature-published research accused of boosting accuracy by mixing training, testing data

> puts the trust in peer-review in jeopardy

I'm afraid that went out the window quite a while back. The revelations over the last decade+ of how badly it's being hijacked procedurally (and often also socially) mean that it is no longer any real indicator of solidity/quality/reasonableness, merely of conformance to (local) paradigm. Google "grievance studies hoax" for an indication of how little it means.

You really do have to crawl each methodology yourself.

And that's just what *I* have seen. I think back to the old-hands rolling their eyes re peer review 3 decades ago, and really the gamesmanship must have been starting a lot earlier.

Re: Nature losing its crown?

Heh, that reminds me. At the recent inter-Nation conflab re All Things Major, Australia was formally asked to assure all nations that it was correctly incorporating gender science in, and in fact guiding, its climate change research and actions.

very common

She may or may not be relieved to know this is an extremely common sort of problem with research.

To paraphrase Bismarck: Research papers are like Sausages, 99% of them you can't swallow after you've seen how they were made.

.

A hobby of mine is pulling the original-research any time any loud announcement is made which has the implication of people "needing to change". Eg, meat vs bowel cancer, destroy your energy infrastructure, plastic bags kill turtles, etc. So far, every single "research" paper(s) has fallen to pieces on close inspection. Disturbingly often, in fact, their own results flatly contradict what their Conclusion/Summary says they are! You don't even need to crawl the methodology; merely observe the 2 radically different messages in the one paper.

One exception: the old ozone-layer stuff. That was solidly performed, including itself pointing out where it was weak.

Re: Thou shalt not question thine computer model ...Especially in 'Climb it Seance'

(1) well, actually, it is, in the sense that the fundamental flaw ("the model is heavily overfitting to the training data") has a direct correlative in greenhouse global warming's modelling.

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(for anyone interested (zzzz...) :

The forcing factor is the most important factor in AGW's core model, but is only an arbitrary nexus with a factor attached (then latterly-applied rationale for what it "must" mean), where that factor is quite literally the number necessary for this arbitrary factor to bring the model's numbers in line with its "training" dataset, "to recover the input numbers".

In econometrics/statistics/modelling, this is called "tautology". Tautology by itself essentially destroys the validity of any model.

One characteristic of a tautology-affected (aka "over-fitted") model is its inability to forecast, its poor power/accuracy outside of its "training" dataset. And this is demonstrated by the climate model's appalling forecast results.

Amusingly, there was a conference a few years ago specifically to debate changing the forcing factor -- by fiat, not measurement! Well, if it was real, you couldn't even propose doing so without laughing. "We should change pi! It would make my results so much better if you changed pi!"

)

Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing

Re: Any laws being broken?

Hey memester:

The atmosphere's carbon dioxide proportion crashed from 330ppm to 260ppm from 1900 to 1960.

The bulk of that period was subject to a global warming (up) cycle just as strong as, but longer than, the subsequent upcycle from 1975-2000 which forms the basis of your own received-hysteria.

Interestingly, as the carbon dioxide proportion started to increase again, the earth stayed in the grip of the down cycle (roughly 30-40yrs, typically) that formed the basis of a previous generation's received-hysteria about the new ice age etc.

Long-term data demonstrates at a glance to an experienced quant, and after running time-series calcs for a slower quant, that while in the long-term carbon dioxide and global average temperatures are closely associated, carbon dioxide lags heat. To be clear: heat causes carbon dioxide, not the other way round.

This is verified by the whole-meme falsifying we accidentally underwent during the '75-'00 upcycle, when for the first time we had atmospheric temps. They went up at a third of the rate of surface temps.

For the greenhouse effect to be driving surface temps, it HAS to be the other way round. By definition. That's what the greenhouse effect IS: an insulating atmosphere heating up the surface.

Boom -- instant falsification of the proposition that the greenhouse effect is controlling global climate etc.

As Popper points out, it's not science if it's not falsifiable. And if it's then falsified in fact, it's quite simply not real.

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Also, the entire modelling effort can be blown out of the water by 2 simple observations (the most important model factor is tautological ; the figure used for the heat absorption of carbon dioxide is wrong (and by more than an order of magnitude)).

But it's a bit pointless going through it:

The entire meme is moot.

It has been proven false by data (not models).

Re: Pardon me sir.....

> Oh, yes, burning wood is "carbon neutral".

And makes up about 80% of the EU's Renewable/Carbon-friendly energy production.

"Oddly", that doesn't get a lot of publicity.

Front-end dev cops to billing NSA $220,000 for hours he didn't work

Name change

He should change his name from Smego to Gollu.

Then keep well clear of Mordo.

YouTube mystery ban on hacking videos has content creators puzzled

Re: Let me get this straight...

Of course. Outright theft of their IP. Clear-cut legal case; I don't see why people are protesting.

Engineer found guilty of smuggling military-grade chips from the US to China

"pled"

[red pen] "pleaded"

Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

Re: ICL Personal Computers

slightly OT:

a brilliant collection of old ICL stories (in 2 parts):

http://www.bitsandbytes.shedlandz.co.uk/hc_books.htm

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Charles Dickens's grandson was a legend manager...

Managerial judgment : (Graham Morris)

Cedric Dickens was my manager, and I think it would be fair to say that I was in considerable awe of him. So in view of all the department's commitments it took some courage before I could go into his office to ask if I could possibly take the following Friday off. He looked at me with admirable mildness and simply said : "Well, you're a much better judge of that than I am."

RAMBleed picks up Rowhammer, smashes DRAM until it leaks apps' crypto-keys, passwords, other secrets

Re: TRR

> a current server

That's a powerpoint, isn't it? Or a generator.

... I'll ... icon

Wondering where that upcoming meeting with 'Cheap Viagra' came from? Spammers beat Gmail filters by abusing Google Calendar, Forms, Photos, Analytics...

Re: "Spammers are abusing the preferential treatment Google affords its own apps"

> Or it would be, if the damn hadn't been built with a hole in it in the first place.

Damn -- missing cnut

NASA's first all-woman spacewalk outside ISS cancelled – due to lack of spacesuits that fit

Re: Batteries

I've seen some really old cars (20s?) which had the fuel-filling pipe in the middle of the dashboard. Presumably to make it more convenient to fill up while driving along.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Re: Can you blame us? @DuncanLarge

I was referring to EEC (OP's ref. to Norway+ (my bad for forgetting to add the plus in my reply))

> Anyway, as a brexiter, would you like the UK to make a deal with the EU like Norway's?

Christ no. Yes, good EEC membership, but at cost of total EU legislation-mirroring, actual $$ contribution/fee, etc. Not hugely different from EU membership.

Re: Good news!

Yeah. Also, reported over here in Oz, is that all the agricultural etc exporters looking forward to a big boom from Brexit as they replace the EU at a discount, won't have quite such a bonus as they were hoping for.

The UK has adjusted its NoDeal tariffs with at least the Commonwealth (all WTO? can't remember) to balance Cheap Food! vs Protect the Domestic Farmers/etc. So they've dropped tariffs quite sharply vs the EU on things like Beef and Chicken (all poultry). By 40-50%.

But not by 100%.

So there'll be a big inrush of nonEU food post brexit, and at a substantial discount to EU food. And all via already-existing WTO/hard-border channels so no change in bureaucratic/border delays.

But you guys, plus our guys, won't get a YOOJ benefit. Just a good one.

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BAD NEWS! Your lamb will be the same price. No change in sheep tariffs.

BUY LAMB CHOPS NOW BEFORE THE EUPOCALYPSE!!!!

Re: Too Late.

If you (the reader) object now to Soros' economic capability, and what he's choosing to do with it politically, consider that it was ~wholly created by the EU bureaucrats writing a law they intended only to trap EU members into the next stage, which resulted in the UK handing Soros a mahoosive subsidy/donation.

Re: Too Late.

> Without an agreed opt-out like the UK and Denmark, euro membership is an obligatory part of EU membership.

I agree except a slight wrinkle re the UK's current exception: it wasn't an agreed opt-out, it was a forced fail-out pre-Euro.

IIRC that obligatoriness only came into effect when the actual Euro did, and the UK lost its pre-Euro/ERM eligibility as a result of Soros realising the sheer wildness of the real-life disconnect and taking an opposite position with sufficiently deep pockets to ride out the anti moves of the UK to stay in.

The UK Treasurer took a lot of stick at the time for literally handing billions to Soros by the failed defence. A defence that was guaranteed to fail. He sucked it up at the time but went on the record a few years ago spitting the dummy, pointing out that he had NO discretion in the matter, that the money he poured into the guaranteed-to-fail "defence" was actually mandatory, required by EU law. His whole contribution was to sign the papers until they exceeded the ERM's requirements. And if he personally refused, all that would happen is that the signing requirement would proceed down a chain of failovers until finally every member of the government refused. At which point (assuming no one actually signed), mahoosive penalties applied.

IIRC nearly half the money went in the day before the crash-out.

Mandated by EU law.

Re: Too Late.

The Euro is a disaster for most of the EU, by definition (as pointed out by any number of markets observers at the outset). Essentially eliminates the only timely government influence on the local economy (I'm speaking here in a nation sense). ie, Monetary Policy out the window. A great bonus for those economies on the upside of the register (really only Germany), seriously damaging for those on the downside (eg, Ireland, Italy).

Interestingly, the Euro agreement was when the EU bureaucrats were first really feeling their oats, and drafted it in such a way that there is NO exit provision, same as how they insisted the Theresa May brexit "deal" be drafted (it was already bathetic even without that, mind you).

If you've ever wondered WHY ON EARTH the ECB etc has fought/subsidised so desperately to "save" Greece, this is why. The (actually necessary for recovery) Grexit would necessarily exit hte Euro, at which point the actual illegality of actual physical/real-world reality/necessity would start to force into public awareness even for The Believers/Trusters that what they'd been told was going on, actually wasn't, that quite another agenda by a surprisingly large group of parasites was under the table, rather than what was on the table.

Re: Populism

Well put / nicely observed

Re: Populism .... an Initiative requiring Integrity

0_0

*blinks at bot's startling change of pattern/algorithm*

*which seems to have gone from v.wideflung association to sharp second-level context-aware cynicism.*

> Liam Fox

Ah well fair enough -- he always came across as an idiot, throwing shiny-sounding words around but clueless.

> Ah, an immigrant. Why don't you fuck off back home then?

I did. After 20 years. Still doesn't mean I like seeing good people and a good culture shoot themselves in the brain while screaming that they're not doing it and it's all THESE EVIL PEOPLE's fault then throwing around strawmen and toytown myths as PROOF.

> Given the statistical ability of most quants I know

True dat. Gob-smacking meme-followers, most of them. You want a surreal experience? Watch at any conference the french quants kinda race through parrot-learned proofs AT each other, sitting side by side but half-facing and pretentiously scrawling on their pads in what I used to call a wannabe quant-off.

Good test of any quant: point them at the core/only globalwarming model, give them an hour or two, and if they're not spluttering in disbelief/shock/rage and shouting "the forcing factor is TAUTOLOGICAL!!! This entire thing is BORKEN!!!" they're idiots with a badge, not quants.

> the ONS Pink Book says

Like I said, the ONS is one of many sources and no longer weighted materially with regard to anything meme-related. The meme dominates the numbers now. Try going by what the EU itself reports, for example. Which matches what other branches of the UK govt reported for many years until it became politically (or rather: civil service-ally) unacceptable. (But still available in the pure-accounting areas sans "economists".) Which all matched precisely any number of deep-dives by fulltime third-party analysts and economists who actually have to stand by their numbers, with their career actually on the line with a 4 week notice period rather than at worst a 12-24mth payout.

It's been years since I did my own deepdives so I can't any more simply point you at something categoric since I didn't bother keeping particular notes/files at the time, because my own matched everyone else's plus the published numbers plus --then-- the ONS's. But a quick duckduckgo just threw up the same numbers from eu&uk govt sources so I suggest you give it a try.

Re: Can you blame us?

Well, I've gone through 5 passports for work-travel including 2 "fat ones", for a long time there was working in 3 countries a week across Europe (in my No Deal state!!! OMGWTF), and have turned-around and built-up businesses across Europe, America, Asia, and the UK. All in a NoDeal status.

I'm also a born NoDeal boy who couldn't even pop over from London to France without a separate stamped visa.

I've learnt to my cost that nearly every fed-to-children Australian stereotype re the world is wrong, so within a month of arriving in Europe and a few WTFisms just threw them away and absorbed what was actually happening rather than what people (especially the locals) shouted. This took a lot of time and work and, frankly, I don't think you COULD do it properly unless you'd actually WORKED and FAST across borders and at a very high intensity/little margin for error. (I think my France perspective turnaround was the sharpest; but also the violent inversion of what Germans will tell you is the relative "efficiency" of genius/efficient North Germans vs risible/useless South Germans vs bathetic (shudder) Austrians is another wtf (it's the other way round, in case you're wondering), as is the peculiar inversion of French vs German Swiss (vs French and Germans) in terms of getting anything done). I'm also a trained quant and researcher at the interface of economics and finance with pointy-end experience in finance and corporate turnaround (subject of/quoted in international investment banking journals, eg Risk, Futures & Options World, Global Corporate Treasurer, etc) who necessarily and compulsorily had his arse pinned to the wall on predictions vs reality, very publicly. So far: no mistakes.

I've also spent time at the pointy-end of various flavours of IT. Apparently the 7th person in the world to manage 4-way DRBD replication, for example (and reverse-engineered a much nicer way of writing the configfiles than is documented) ; and spent 2 weeks writing a P&L engine in a custom language I'd only ever seen the week before (+RDBMS) (then another teeth-grinding 6mths on the data-adaptors), which ran for a decade until the framework was retired without a single bug the entire time, but running according to my clients nearly 10% of Europe's M3 ; and...

The UK Remainers insist that everything I've seen and done will be impossible for NoDeal UK people or businesses, because they'd be treated like me, an Australian, or like some of my employers, American. Both NoDeal WTO, you might notice.

I've also learnt that newspapers are only useful for getting heads-ups of things that might be worth digging into properly.

You?

Re: Can you blame us?

Do feel free to read back what I wrote.

Slowly. Take deep breaths.

.

You merely underlined what I pointed out...

(but failed to mention the EU's sting in the tail: no brexit, merely loss of EU-input)

Re: Can you blame us? @DuncanLarge

Well, you're missing the point, but at least you're aware that EEC-participation ("Norway") HAS been repeatedly proposed by the UK.

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>My sense is that likely none of the current EFTA members would welcome a narcissitic, fantasy dominated, politicaly fractures and totally self-centered country into their organization.

Nonsense. France is the second/third-largest economic participant and profoundly the largest political participant in the EU.

Invoking Article 50 "now" includes Article 50's provisions. Which include the time lag sufficient to allow preparation without drama. 2 years.

UK Parliament and Civil Service instead fought to stop any public sector preparation. They succeeded -- brilliantly, in fact. [Second-order effect: stultifying private sector preparation, since they need Certainty regarding Sovereign activity] A particular micro-/tactical- triumph was to remove all non-civilservants from the brexit discussions. Offshore observers were first gobsmacked, then tearing their hair out at the stupidity.

Do not try to pin the consequences of deliberate spoiling tactics by a tiny subset of self-interested parasites, on the relative wisdom of the action chosen. It might raise cheers from the echo chamber, but it's not real.

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I have seen now precisely ONE commentard raise an antibrexit point which has some validity. See the chap just before you. Although even he is only in the vague neighbourhood, rather than being aware of the actual situation: supply chains are to the key point as parsley is to pesto: adds tastiness but not critical -- but he is (the first!) in the right ballpark. Nor has he acknowledged that the current situation could only ever exist due to the UK's fundamental ur-cultural differences with the continental EU (with the partial exception of Austria). Which, given the rock-steady 600,000/yr immigration to the UK from the poverty states of the EU, combined with the 400,000/yr Brits exiting, could realistically only have a ~20yr lifespan anyway before material cultural/economic homogenisation: evaporation of that advantage.

That advantage, by the way, has been shown by much research to accrue to only the immigrants and to the ultra-rich.

There is also one other antibrexit point. Fundamentally related but a different industrial sector. Again: the driver is regulatory arbitrage of artificially-distorted (and hence fragile, and indeed being actively worked against by the EU) cost-base, which is itself driven by cultural differences. Differently, changes in this sector will be (are currently) visible sharply almost immediately (12mths) rather than over a generation. But counter that: the UK advantage there is SO large, that apart from some faffery intrachange, that sector will still at worst collapse back to what it was pre93: world-dominating.

Both should have been the sole focus of hte post Article50 declaration's "Deal!" negotiations, because if handled even halfway sensibly would have had UK in precisely hte same position post-brexit as pre-brexit.

Instead, the civil service took a deliberately "whatever you say" approach, including deliberately deciding to confine their "negotiations" to a deliberately antagonistic "moral stance" presented by the EU.

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Whatever happens next, it's got nothing to do with the intent of brexit. It was deliberately smashed from Day 1. By a tiny subset of self-interested parasites.

But please don't conflate tactical sabotage with the strategic sensibleness of the original position.

> "They need us more than we need them".

Errmm... continental europe has a larger $exposure to the UK than vice versa.

Not sure where you got the "easiest trade deal etc." but that's toy-town. If the EU (bureaucrats) was rational, yeah sure. But they're not -- they're parasites, have been since day 1. I hit the UK in '96, and even by then I had my eyes out on stalks at what was going inside the EU. And also, at the blithe startling ignorance within the UK of the reality.

Granted, I was working all over the EU so got to see it up close and personal.

But still... you'd think Brits would AT SOME STAGE pay attention to what the EU is in fact rather than in fiction.

And no idea what the ONS might have blurted at some stage, but I was operating at a level where the ONS was merely one data source, and not a hugely good one, and if you've descended to the level of individual civil servants offering opinion pieces on political matters, rather than restricting themselves to numbers, you're in trouble. And I'm sorry, but the numbers are black&white (and I'm a quant/markets boy from way back and only work on real, verifiable sources) and if some junior twonker in the ONS came out with that, well, the EU's own published numbers flatly contradict him. As do the UK Treasury's own published numbers a la payments to the EU. As do the ONS's. "Whoops", etc.

I am intrigued by the (so far) 1 thumbdown.

Someone doesn't like arithmetic?

Russian sailors maroon themselves in Bristol Channel after drunken dinghy ride goes awry

Re: Disappointed

>milli-Wales

That's a deci-dauphin, isn't it?

Re: Mate of mine

Technically, ALL deaths are of heart failure...

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_{;) copyright Robert Heinlein about 1960, IIRC}

Re: 4am?

> managed to find a boozer still open at that time of the morning

This had me too flailing backwards, mouth agape and eyes out on stalks, arms windmilling for balance even as I reached for the strictly-for-medicininal-purposes as I struggled to cope with the shock.

Something open? At 3:45am? In BRITAIN????

Good luck finding something open even in the middle of London at that time.

I... I... *glug*

I salute the heretofore unwitted magnificence of the Russian merchant sailor.