Posts by Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

Brits turn off Twitter, although teens and tweens keen on generative AI

Re: Wot!

Hitler was a genocidal nationalist centrist.

It is unserious to expect people to pretend that Hitler is "far right".

Re: Wot!

It was. But antisemites are now disappointed that "from the river to the sea" has been banned from Twitter by Musk. Therefore, after some mental gymnastics, Twitter is far right.

Re: Wot!

And Stalin, Mao, Xi, and Hitler were all far-right too, don't you know?

Re: Wot!

MediaMatters, the left-wing antisemitic organisation that made up this nonsense is being investigated for fraud by two American states, as well as sued by Twitter for defamation when they lied about this nonsense.

But it worked - it gave people who want to believe the left wing narrative an excuse to believe it.

Re: Wot!

If there is any doubt that the commenters on El Reg are now ridiculous, look how many downvotes the post above has.

Is this the audience El Reg started chasing when they went left-wing in 2017?

IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/14/media-matters-president-apologizes-offensive-statements-old-blog/

Media Matters isn't anti-racist. It's a fanatical left-wing racist organisation that is intent on shutting down moderate right wing voices and is using its deceptive and fraudulent tactics against Musk's Twitter to facilitate that aim.

Fortunately for the MM president, I'm sure he'll be welcomed with open arms by the white supremacist gang in his local nick once he has his collar felt.

Re: maybe he is a genius

Have you considered that just because somebody things that smaller government is better than larger government, it doesn't make them evil?

Perhaps try it.

Re: maybe he is a genius

When something is as ubiquitous as Twitter, it becomes the public square.

You can reasonably have a private company owning the de facto public square, but you can't have a situation where the private company in that situation puts their hands over the mouths of anybody who thinks that smaller government is better than bigger government, or that a government must secure its borders.

Just because you want a particular side to win elections doesn't mean that we should free forego public debate on the subject.

Re: maybe he is a genius

It's not about "hateful and violent speech". If you don't actually have any understanding of this, why don't you go and find out?

Re: What did anyone expect?

Why are you upset that Trump is allowed on Twitter when the Taliban are on Twitter?

Silly sausage.

Re: Surprised?

The latest is that Media Matters are being investigated over criminal fraud over this.

But sure, let's keep pretending that free speech for the right as well as the left means "racism".

"People I don't agree with are all Nazis".

Re: Just goes to show

It means you're a racist.

Re: That's rich.

"You will own nothing and be happy"

I'll sum it up for you.

Media Matters ( ran by an antisemite who once praised the KKK ), contrived the situation by collating content and then repeatedly refreshing until they got something "incriminating".

Twitter had the logs and they are going to file a lawsuit against Media Matters this morning.

Re: maybe he is a genius

It's almost as if saving free speech was worth more than money.

Re: Surprised? Really?

What do you have against African Americans like Musk that you have to lie about them?

Pre-Musk, Twitter were literally restricting the speech of right-wing voices and amplifying left-wing voices. They happily lied on behalf of left-wing political parties in order to trick users into voting a particular way, etc, etc, etc.

Musk comes along and cleans it up and the left-wing establishment media, of which El Reg has been in lock-step with since (IIRC) January 2017 goes along with the lie that he's turned it into a home for racists. Obviously.

Well this is disingenuous.

Before Musk bought Twitter, Twitter was a haven of antisemitism.

This article is because El Reg fell in-line with the rest of the left wing media, isn't it? "Trump bad, Hamas good, Musk bad, Israel (...) bad", etc.

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

Re: Assumptions

... But obviously you'd have to spend years un-breaking the energy market before you apply a carbon tax to it.

A government stupidity tax and a carbon tax combined would be too much for people to bear. Perhaps start by only discounting the carbon tax by the difference between the excess we pay because of government meddling and what the price should be. The promise of a stable long term incentive system should be enough for the system to correct itself over the long term.

Re: Assumptions

> They don't drop fuel duty.... they quantify it, still charge it and spend it on sea defences. That's what you said, isn't it?

You abolish fuel duty and then apply a carbon tax to it. If that figure is 8c/litre then fine. If it's 48c/litre then fine.

Yes you'd have to calculate it for everything, but if you want to solve this thing that's how you to it. Green schemes where governments pick winners are just silly headline grabbing distractions.

I guess it would work like VAT, except you only pay the tax on your added carbon, not your added value and for most firms it would probably be done through their fuel bills. Eg: If you have a factory, you don't have any direct emissions, but the electricity you use does.

Re: Why domestic use?

The point of green schemes is for them to be seen by the public.

That's why we don't do the thing that we know will work - drop all subsidies, drop all incentives, drop all green schemes, abolish fuel duty, etc, and set a single flat carbon tax at the social cost of carbon.

Re: Meanwhile over in the Netherlands

Do you think the eco-fanatics that (at least) direct government would allow the building of something designed to burn things?

Re: Assumptions

You can't just keep increasing the tax until you get the outcomes you want because you want people to be able to consume. If CO2 usage doesn't drop then it turns out that all that CO2 emissions were useful after all and we can spend the tax receipts on sea defences.

As far as I can see, the guy who got the Nobel for this says $31/ton.

The tax incentivises the market to find solutions without pricing out consumers from what they deem useful (eg: transport).

For example, if the damage of CO2 is priced in, it might become economically viable to produce synthetic petrol. Or not. Maybe the answer isn't zero emission cars - it's cleaner ones. Maybe LPG+electric hybrid cars are the answer, for example. Maybe it's fuel cells.

But our current solution is to say "lets force everybody to electric cars, we'll power them by, well, we'll worry about that later". Obviously that's silly. That isn't going to do anything about the problem. That's what happens when you leave the idiot politicians in charge.

The latest estimates for the UK to go to net zero is over a trillion pounds. That's clearly unaffordable. So we need to do something else. Set the tax and let the market handle it.

( The politicians won't go for this because, for one, they'll have to *drop* fuel duty ).

That there were fraudsters trying to steal from the government isn't a surprise.

The governments priority at the time, rightly, was speed over value for money. If some money was misspent or stolen then, in the grand scheme of things, that wasn't that important.

There wasn't an abundance of PPE around. At the time, Labour came up with a list of "suppliers" that the government apparently hadn't contacted and published it in order to try to embarrass the government.

The list was beyond satire - including a bespoke dress maker ( ie: not a mass manufacturer of *anything* ). If these companies were available, you'd think Labour's list might have contained them.

Your fellow travellers are out on the streets celebrating a genocide of Jewish people for the crime of being Jewish. And you say that centre-left Tories are the "worst people on the planet".

Christ on a bike.

You're the one bringing parties into it. I wouldn't assume Labour are corrupt either, just because I disagree with their politics.

The "Covid money" was spent in an emergency. Normal processes were bypassed intentionally because we were desperate to get our hands on the globally limited PPE supplies. Remember France seizing orders that were meant to be shipped to Britain?

Yes, money was wasted. That was the price of rushing. The alternative was worse.

Also you are intentionally misunderstanding the "let it rip" comment. The average age of a Covid death was 82. We now know that lots of much younger people have died as a direct result of lockdowns - through delayed cancer diagnoses, etc. More life years have been lost by lockdowns than were saved by it.

Letting it rip was a reasonable suggestion - one that the facts have proven to be the right outcome.

Sweden - much maligned at the time - has the lowest culmulative excess death rate in the OECD.

Re: Have you ever met anyone from the private sector?

If the private sector is inefficient then it doesn't matter to us at all.

If the free market tries to implement this and it fails, we don't care. Some private investor loses his money. Not our problem. If the incompetents in government do it then they are losing our money - and it doesn't even matter to them because it's not their money.

Re: Intel

If you want to sell heat, there are more cost efficient methods than "heat up water by running an old inefficient CPU".

If the market is going to be so skewed that this is viable, then it will make more sense to just burn coal and heat the water with that.

Re: Assumptions

Or do what the economists say. Drop all subsidies, all green schemes, all interventions. Set the price of carbon emissions *at the social cost of those emissions* and let the free market sort it out.

If it's worth DC's selling their excess heat, they'll do it. If not, it isn't economically viable even with a carbon tax priced in.

Re: Assumptions

Where have I been for the last 13 years?

I've been watching the state expand ever outward like the thread on Mr Creosote's shirt buttons.

Even the "austerity" years merely slowed the advance.

Re: Assumptions

Nowhere in Scandanavia is socialist. They are Social Democracies, which is a centre-left ideology.

I was going to criticise the rest of your post, but to be honest, mixing up socialism and social democracy is plenty.

Re: Assumptions

Grow up

Re: Assumptions

The reason I say that we have a left wing government is that it is doing nonsense like this.

If Labour were the party in power, these interventions would appear perfectly in keeping. That it isn't a surprise in this Conservative government is very telling.

I don't believe there is *that* much corruption in government of any stripe in this country. Not including the SNP of course. Plenty of incompetence. Too much job swaps from regulator to regulated, but little to no financial crimes.

That's a silly interpretation. Just because you dislike the blue rosette of this branch of the Uniparty doesn't mean that it is corrupt.

What's happened here is that "something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done".

Government should not be picking winners. And this is a case of government picking winners.

We know this isn't financially viable because the private sector isn't already doing it.

Re: Assumptions

It's a bad idea. You can tell it's a bad idea because government is having to pay for it. If it was viable, there would be profit in it and the free market would have done it already.

We are cursed with perpetual left-wing government.

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

Is it balls. It's childish nonsense.

Pentagon seeks government gossips to dish dirt on UFOs

My point, which you seem to have missed, is that not only Americans see things in the night sky and say "aliens", which was the OP's ridiculous claim.

Not that I'm a believer, but there have been sightings around the globe.

Winston Churchill was a huge believer in "foo fighters" based on the many reports he received from RAF* pilots.

The Russian and Chinese governments also had (have?) their own UFO investigators.

* Was it called the RAF then? or the Army Flying Corps or something?

King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

Re: Perhaps Ofcom will take inspiration from the Home Office

The opposition are just as bad if not worse.

Didn't Labour recently threaten to make "misgendering" a criminal offence with jail time?

Re: Safe

It's not criticism of the government they are avoiding, it's criticism of the permanent establishment.

If the government of the day goes against net zero or any of the establishment's policies, you'll be free to criticise the government for that.

If you call for Jihad in the streets or suggest people should throw battery acid at Nigel Farage then you're absolutely fine.

Suggesting that Kahn's "stop the proles from travelling" cameras are a bad thing will get you on an alt-far-extreme-mega-right watchlist.

If only we had a conservative party to rail against this.

EU threatens X with DSA penalties over spread of Israel-Hamas disinformation

Re: Disinformation is rife

It's been confirmed by the Israeli government. So yes, babies were beheaded.

The GP called it "Hunters laptop".

Maybe point your pedantry at them.

Re: Free Speech

The hatred is because Twitter used to suppress conservative viewpoints and happily repeat left wing lies ( eg: the Hunter Biden laptop being "Russian disinformation" ).

When Musk bought Twitter he got rid of the bias. Now the left wing activists are angry that voices other than theirs are being heard.

Re: Only X ?

Twitter is the only one that said that they will no longer lie to their users when governments ask them to.

Hunters Laptop has been proven to be true.

Did you not know that?

But it was fine when the pre-Musk Twitter intentionally spread disinformation such as suppressing the (now known to be legitimate) Hunter Biden laptop story, etc, etc.

Hacktivist attacks erupt in Middle East following Hamas assault on Israel

Re: All For The Clicks

"foam fleckled zionist apologist"

I assume you are talking about me. You see the senseless and wanton rape and murder of innocent civilians, including forty babies - some of whom had their heads cut off - has got me a little agitated.

I want the people who did it to be boiled alive. And you are there supporting them (a proscribed terror organisation) and their right to commit war crimes.

So obviously I'm not remotely interested in debating with you. I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire.

Re: Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict

Do the world a favour. Take yourself to Palestine.