Ntrails

Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!

That it is! It will require an actual change to the societal contract to resolve as best I can tell - and it remains unclear to me what direction the change will take.

In the UK, funding for libraries [] has been increasingly cut in the name of austerity.

Focusing on one thing here, for convenience. The problem remains that costs are up far in excess of budgets - austerity be damned! We are forced to prioritise, cutting the generally useful but "non-essential". (There is often a legal duty to the essential things)

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/how-have-english-councils-fu...

Is a great breakdown. To illustrate my argument see Table 1. Real-terms spending per person by service area, various years (2024–25 prices)

Within total service spending, per-person spending on children’s social care services [] increased by 11% in real terms. Spending on adult social care [] was also relatively protected, falling by only 2%. This meant much larger cuts to other services: more than 40% in the case of housing, culture and leisure, and highways and transport, and nearly 60% cuts to planning and development.

We cut what _could_ be cut, and that's a prioritisation call.

edit: now in https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/fixing...

Great rabbit hole for my Wednesday morning! :D

A couple of dictionary checks suggest some set of:

- Ruler who is unrestrained by law or constitution

- A usurper of sovereignty

- Ruler who uses power oppressively or unjustly

Obviously b) is not applicable as per GP. He has also been constrained by the supreme court and others multiple times in this term, which suggests a) is a stretch. c) probably a fair accusation, though I'm not sure I would agree.

At the risk of being dumb, wouldn't an easier solution be physical? ie have a usb stick with two actual "disks" and a an appropriately obscured physical switch to define what plugging it in actually does?

Again, this isn't going to beat someone who knows you've got something to hide, they can physically deconstruct/analyse the drive, but at least it's not going to be found by automatic scanning/software etc?

Whenver I think my job is bad I remember that time and I'm glad for what I have.

I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!

I think my lowest point was vacuum packing smoked salmon. It wasn't dissimilar in some ways (repeat simple task endlessly), but the real crux was the absolute inability to evade the smell. It came home with you and lingered hard. The greasy aroma of kitchen fryers had nothing on this.

Me and a friend had a minecraft server we'd built up over the years (hosted on my free azure msdn license credits). I lost the license along with my job and we migrated to a traditional host. Within a day or two someone had port scan'd us, logged on, and trashed the shit out of our spawn/base. Like, was fine, we reloaded from backup etc.

Now we know to set the whitelist up but I see in the server logs people regularly try to get on with appropriately "wEwIlldESTroYyOOurSvr" tags etc

Previously it was capped at 500€. So your request could cost you thousands of euros.

To be clear, it is currently costing the taxpayer said thousands of Euros. Time spent by government workers on FoI requests is meaningful and not free. That does not make them a bad idea, but we should be clear that passing costs on to the requester isn't precisely nefarious?

You say "entering the city" but it literally applies to people who live there. My old car would have cost me every use even if all I did was move it to respect a temporary parking restriction. It isn't about dislike, it is financial hardship largely affecting those of more limited means (hint, old cars).

I am fine with ulez, but it is really important to be clear that people do suffer for it. Not out of towners. Real Londoners - especially with the extension to the outer boroughs.

How is ulez unpopular?

As a rule most people with a ~10 year old car which runs fine at low cost are going to be frustrated at an extra tax on their vehicle. (It is not like the manufacture of a new electric car is green.)

Ordinary People always were going to have to suffer to migrate off fossil fuels. Expecting them to like it is somewhat hopeful!

I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.

This is backwards, companies do not choose where employees live. Employees do. That they choose to live with long and unpleasant commutes (typically in exchange for more space, cheaper housing etc) is in general terms on them not the company. I'll allow that the rowback of wfh from a previously fully remote job is on the company - but certainly outside of that I have little agreement.

I think a closer estimate is probably total annual operational costs divided by total shouts, (£18 MM / 2,000) or about £9,000 per shout.

That's a more useful estimate than merely the flight costs, agree - though the fixed operation costs don't change much in an 1800 vs a 2100 callout scenario.

Still an order of magnitude less than the commercial US operators.

It's wild!

Let's hope our regulations hit these "social networks" hard enough so that never dare deploy this kind of technology.

You'd do as well to hope that people wake up and stop opening the damned sites

an average helicopter bill was smth around $200K if I remember correctly, with spikes up to $500K.

Those numbers made me blanch somewhat! Having been in a helicopter (aka Air Ambulance) in the UK, all of which operate as charities iirc, I was curious about their costs.

The average cost of a helicopter mission is £4,748* and the average cost of a critical care car or rapid response vehicle mission is £2,054*[1].

https://www.airambulancesuk.org/about-us/facts/

eesh

I'd probably rather it just tell me the answer and give the option to continue :)

They still make and support games :)

I've never had a steam update take more than 30secs.

Game updates can take a lot longer if you need them (ie multiplayer) to play. idk

Most commonly ime the application domain may only be some small fraction of the database which is designed/optimised for a much broader dataset.

Investment gains are not work

Say, for example, my job is allocating capital across the S&P 500. My work is picking the stocks, the fruits of my labour are excess returns.

Are those excess returns not work? What are they?

Compared to the 40 ft led screen blaring images out to everyone 24h a day in central London I will take the newspaper any day. Drives me nuts

It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.

That anyone is pretending otherwise is mind boggling to me.

A goose was protecting its young as some (crows/ravens/idk) hopped around close on the ground. Mama hissed and flapped a little. Crows back off a bit.

Meanwhile another crow flies in, picks up a gosling by the neck (i swear there wasn't much difference in size, unreal to see) and flies off with it.

I could see the whole thing coming, was remarkable.

Psychology is the study of the psyche of white male psychology students

Huh? Maybe my uni was an outlier / it is a UK thing, but there were ~99 female and 1 male psych students in my year. This was not considered unusual.

Man, at the rate I can generate pancakes I fear four children would murder me and just drink the batter raw. Though maybe I'd buy a second pan in advance xD

Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.

As GP states, heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work.

The one thing we know works is restricting access to birth control - I'd bet good money that ups the birth rate in no time. Leave as an exercise for the reader whether it is a good idea xD

For talking heads/opinion you have, I would say, two choices:

    - Retired people with historic experience.  The longer since they were actively involved in the sector, the less useful they will be of course.  There is also going to be something of a demographics bias here.
    - Currently employed people, and given their primary skillset is "Defense industry expertise" I'm going to posit that they always have a commercial role in the defense industry.  Maybe there's some subset with a non-commercial role or a purely political role... but both of those have their own implications too

It's mostly the result of hiring too many stupid product managers and engineers that don't give a shit.

If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix it.

Except, they hired all these people and expect them to do Stuff. What are they supposed to do?

I just own a standard catering one and it always bemuses me how people suffer with the shit sold in supermarkets

Might not be as strong or fast [..] knows how to do it smartly.

Friend of mine worked in Prisons for a while, and has a way of telling the difference between people with a lot of muscle and people who know how leverage their musculature to high effect.

This is basically required for clueless (and even not so clueless) users.

I can actually confess that this hit me. Almost nothing on my phone has permission to use my camera, including my web browser (why???). I assume this was done in a fit of pique upon discovering that the setting even existed.

Roll on (god knows how many years later) and I cannot get into the gym with the link I was emailed to have my browser read a QR because my browser is just a grey screen. It was only when the member of staff suggested permissions that I realised what was going on.

I'm the problem, it's me

PE remains a source of complete fascination for me. The game is clearly rigged to produce bad outcomes at a societal level (eg no company loaded up with debt to finance buybacks/dividends and just eps ended up in a better long term financial position) - but we're completely incapable of doing anyhting about it.